Saudi Arabia G20: What exactly is the G20 and why does it matter?

This weekend will see the G20 Leaders’ Summit held in Saudi Arabia, the culmination of months of work by diplomats.

The world’s most powerful states will be involved, but unlike in previous years, the leaders of these countries won’t actually physically be in Saudi for this year’s G20 meeting because of the hazards of the coronavirus pandemic. They will, instead, beam in remotely with digital technology.

Ahead of the meeting, it’s worth recapping what the G20 meeting is and why this one matters.

What is the G20?

It’s essentially a multilateral forum compromising 19 of the world’s largest economies and the European Union.  

As well as the G7 democracies of the US, the UK, France, Germany, Canada, Italy and Japan, the G20 includes developing world giants such as China, India, Brazil and Indonesia.  

The other members are Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Australia, Argentina, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The European Union is also represented.

The presidency changes hands among members each year and this year it has fallen to Saudi Arabia, which becomes the first Arab nation to host the summit.

Its decisions are made by consensus, and implementation of its communiques depends entirely on the political will of the individual states.

What are its origins?

The G20, as we know it, was founded in a hurry during the global financial crisis of 2008/09 when it became apparent that the G7 forum did not include sufficient numbers of the most important economic decision-makers to address the global scale of the emergency at speed.  

The countries of the together G20 comprise 85 per cent of the global economy and three quarters of global trade, making it a much more economically influential organisation than the G7, provided, of course, its members agree to act in a unified manner.

What does it do?

The G20’s first achievement was to conclude a co-ordinated fiscal stimulus effort in 2009 at a meeting in London, when the UK had the presidency and Gordon Brown was prime minister.  

The G20 agreed to simultaneously inject some $4trn into their economies. They also forswore erecting new trade barriers and pledged reforms of the international financial system.

It has had a heavy emphasis in economic co-ordination in the decade since.

Yet it covers geopolitics too. The G20 debated a ceasefire in Syria at the 2017 summit in Germany.

And on the sidelines of the 2016 G20 summit in China, Barack Obama and Xi Jinping announced their countries’ ratification of the 2015 Paris Climate Change Accords.

What is on the agenda this year?

The official themes put down by the Saudi presidency are empowering women, climate change and technology.

But the pandemic is likely to dominate.  

The Saudis set up an extraordinary virtual meeting of G20 leaders in March, where they pledged to exchange epidemiological and clinical data and to work together to increase funding for vaccine research.

The leaders also promised to support the World Health Organisation, but the Trump administration broke that promise the very next month when it withdrew funding from the WHO.

What’s the outcome likely to be?

There may be pledges of support and debt relief for developing nations hit hard by the crisis but, in truth, analysts are not expecting an ambitious communique.

No one, for instance, expects a grand global plan to distribute the successful vaccines to those most in need.

Nevertheless, a smooth summit, which avoids recriminations, might be an achievement in itself.  

In recent years, Donald Trump has refused to support previously standard language in communiques about rejecting protectionism and promoting international cooperation on tackling climate change.

If those formulations return this year it could signal a return to a world of multilateral normality after the disruption of the Trump years.

What does it mean for Saudi Arabia?

The Saudi regime had hoped that hosting the G20 would help with the country’s rehabilitation on the world stage after the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 provoked furious condemnation and made the country into something of an international pariah.

G20 meetings are normally glitzy photo opportunities, and moments of prestige for the host country.

They are also opportunities for private head-to-head meetings between world leaders, something that Saudi’s Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman would likely have relished.  

For those reasons, then, it will be a disappointment for the Saudi regime that the event will be virtual.  

However, it may also be a benefit for Riyadh in some ways as well.  

Human rights groups such as Amnesty have highlighted the kingdom’s detention and alleged torture of womens’ rights activists - including Loujain al-Hathloul, Nassima al-Sada, Samar Badawi, Nouf Abdulaziz and Maya’a al-Zahrani – and asked how this can be squared with the regime putting female empowerment on the G20 agenda.  

Yet calls for a boycott of this year’s meeting from activists and some legislators in the EU and the US have had little traction, probably because the event is digital.

“It allows many leaders to attend and say it's just a virtual summit that we are using from our own home countries in order to come up with [an] initiative or to support one agenda or another,” says Abdullah Alaoudh of the pro-Arab democracy organisation DAWN which was founded by Jamal Khashoggi.

“It made it easier for a lot of people to attend under this pretence”.