From trust deficit to trust management, the G20 New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration brings ideas, ideologies and individuals on a single platform. Given the state of geopolitics 2023, this is a big achievement and a model for successful multilateralism.
The G20 joint declaration is the face of how India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has united varying ideas, conflicting ideologies, and egotistic individuals, and brought them on to a single geopolitical platform. Beneath that face and led by External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar, G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant, and their team of diplomats, lie the bureaucracies of 19 countries and the European Union (EU) that have come together and negotiated the declaration. In the process, they have redefined multilateralism—despite a recalcitrant China, an aggressive West, and a defensive Russia. Finally, the accession of the African Union into the G20 has made the most important grouping of nations stronger. In 2023, this quad of political achievements is beyond expectations.
Given the context, the India Presidency of G20 scores 10/10.
The absence of Russian President Vladimir Putin from the G20 meetings was taken in stride as he manages the Ukraine crisis at home.
Hardly hours before PM Modi announced reaching consensus on the declaration, the global think tank community tracking geopolitics was certain that there would be no space for a joint declaration in New Delhi, that India’s Presidency of the G20 would be one without a certificate of agreement. The absence of Russian President Vladimir Putin from the G20 meetings was taken in stride as he manages the Ukraine crisis at home. But Chinese President (and Chairman of everything in the Country) Xi Jinping delivering a no-show was being read as the last straw to break the discussions. Mission Consensus was being read as Mission Impossible.
We were wrong. And happily so. Happy because the 34-page Communiqué sows the seeds of hope in a new and emerging geopolitics that had been atrophying under what Prime Minister Narendra Modi terms ‘trust deficit’. “After COVID-19, a huge crisis of lack of trust has come in the world,” he said in an 8 September 2023 speech. “Conflict has deepened this trust deficit. Just as we can overcome COVID, we can also overcome this crisis of mutual trust. Today, as the President of the G20, India invites the entire world to come together and, first and foremost, transform this Global Trust Deficit into global trust and confidence.” What would have deteriorated into an emaciated statement of political rhetoric has, on the contrary, turned into an aspiration.
Today, as the President of the G20, India invites the entire world to come together and, first and foremost, transform this Global Trust Deficit into global trust and confidence.”
The biggest war in the declaration was around words—how to talk about the war in Ukraine and yet stay neutral. The peace around this battle of blames and narratives of bloodshed was to condemn wars; talk about human suffering; discuss the impact of war on food, energy and supply chains; remind members to uphold the principles of international law and territorial integrity; and mention Ukraine four times and Russia twice. In eight clean paragraphs, military warmongers were wiped out by verbal peacemakers, creating a peace without war. This is the Indian way.
In the declaration, the biggest idea, created and nurtured by India, was to make the G20 more inclusive and expand it to include the African Union as a permanent member. With this, the representative voices of 1.4 billion people, situated in 54 countries, with an economic size of US$2.7 trillion have been mainstreamed. Once the world’s second-largest continent engages with the rest of the world on an equal footing, the world’s geoeconomics will definitely be enriched. The rebound towards military authoritarianism in Gabon and Niger (in 2023), Burkina Faso (2022), Sudan and Guinea (2021), and Mali (2021) notwithstanding, a deeper trade, investment and business engagement with the rest of the world will tame such tendencies. Of course, on the other side, China will continue to inspire authoritarian misadventures. Irrespective, the G20 is now G21.
The biggest idea, created and nurtured by India, was to make the G20 more inclusive and expand it to include the African Union as a permanent member.
The New Delhi declaration stands on a 10-point agenda—the economy, sustainable development, green development, the future multilateral institutions, technology and digital public infrastructure, international taxation, gender equality and empowerment, finance, terrorism and money laundering, and creating a more inclusive world.
The one new conversation is around getting consensus around building a “safe, secure, trusted, accountable and inclusive” digital public infrastructure (DPI) through a three-part action plan. First, the declaration welcomes the creation of a framework for DPI. Second, it welcomes India’s plan “to build and maintain a Global Digital Public Infrastructure Repository, a virtual repository of DPI, voluntarily shared by G20 members and beyond.” This, again, is inclusive and expansive. After delivering free COVID-19 vaccines to a hundred countries, this could be India’s second large-scale global public good, and a step towards meeting its leadership responsibilities as it moves towards becoming the world’s third-largest economy within this decade.
As one of the worst sufferers of terrorism, inflicted on it as state policy by Pakistan and supported by China, the declaration does well to “condemn terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, including those on the basis of xenophobia, racism and other forms of intolerance, or in the name of religion or belief, recognising the commitment of all religions to peace. It constitutes one of the most serious threats to international peace and security.” As part of a related action plan, the declaration powers the Financial Action Task Force through the global implementation of revised standards to make it more difficult for criminals to hide.
The one new conversation is around getting consensus around building a “safe, secure, trusted, accountable and inclusive” digital public infrastructure (DPI) through a three-part action plan.
All told, the manifestation of the New Delhi declaration, excavated from the debris of inter-country tension, provides a geopolitical reboot towards reclaiming the reason why the G20—now G21—was created in the first place—to unite the world economically keeping sovereign spaces intact. This overarching objective, forgotten in the United States-China, India-China, Russia-Ukraine, EU-Russia tensions, is back on the high table of international negotiations. It has given a new meaning to multilateralism, which had drifted into becoming a platform for moral platitudes at the level of the group and core bilateral dialogues on the outside—the fringe had become mainstream. That has changed.
As the G21 Presidency shifts to Brazil, all eyes will be on President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to build on and take the success of Modi’s Mission Impossible forward.
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Gautam Chikermane is Vice President at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. His areas of research are grand strategy, economics, and foreign policy. He speaks to ...
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