The G7 leaders need to take a lesson in collective responsibility – from our schoolchildren

All happy neoliberal democracies are alike; each unhappy neoliberal democracy is unhappy in its own way. Ever since the 2007 financial crisis began to expose our collective illusions, it has often struck me that Leo Tolstoy’s famous axiom applies much better to nations than it does to families. The bizarre G7 summit in Biarritz is a case in point. Or, rather, a case in pointlessness.

The main aim of the gathering was not to find any common ground that President Trump could later napalm with a tweet. So the only thing that the six patriarchs and one matriarch of the great American, British, French, German, Italian, Canadian and Japanese families could find to agree on was that it’s a bummer that vast tracts of pristine, irreplaceable rainforest are burning in Brazil.

We are talking 40,000 species of plants, 1,000 types of bird, capybaras, pink river dolphins, nine-banded armadillos, hyacinth macaws, versus the interests of a few Big Mac farmers. It shouldn’t be that hard. But it was.

President Macron, ever the gracious host, organised a whip round for £16m – less than half of what it cost France to host the summit. The offer was rejected as “colonialism” by the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, who then made lewd insinuations about Macron’s wife Brigitte on Facebook. Which Macron described as “extraordinarily rude”. Which was presumably the point.

How does a spider monkey compete with that?

In other tiny, doomed gestures: Melania Trump showed signs of life at last, giving Justin Trudeau the sort of imploring, kiss-me-hard-before-you-go look any of us might give a passably attractive person (or inanimate coffee pot) if we were married to Donald Trump; Angela Merkel dreamed she were already mushroom picking in the Ruhr; our pretend prime minister, Boris Johnson, made up some pretend facts about pork pies that filled me with such August ennui, I can’t even rouse myself to make the obvious pork pie/lie gag.

Meanwhile, President Abe of Japan took a desultory bite of pastry and wondered why he bothered leaving Tokyo: “Other G7 countries are interested in issues related to themselves, which are different from ours,” he sighed. No shit, Shinzō.

Still, you couldn’t have found a more apt setting for all this summertime sadness than the faded grandeur of Biarritz. In the hands of Thomas Mann or Anton Chekhov it would make a wonderful, depressing short story. Each leader brooding in their own deckchair, preoccupied with their own thoughts, occasionally lobbing bits of prattle back and forth, drowned out by the Atlantic’s roar.

The poignancy would, of course, lie in the fact that, notwithstanding a few local issues (we can forgive Abe for being preoccupied with North Korean missiles), the Weltschmertz is collective. All of our countries are suffering from similar problems: internal inequalities, diminished respective standing within the globalised world, climate breakdown, the chaos sewn by misinformation, an addiction to cheap Chinese consumer products, a failure to learn the lessons from the financial crash, a failure to restructure economies, and so on. It’s just that, for the moment, each country is dealing with these problems in its own inward way. Even Bolsonaro is a Brazilian expression of the problem, Brazil being by some measures the most unequal country in the world.

The comparisons between Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are overdone – not least by Trump himself. (“They call him Britain Trump,” Trump says of Johnson; “He betrays a stupefying ignorance that makes him frankly unfit to hold the office of President of the United States,” says Johnson of Trump, quite eloquent when he gives up the porky pies.) You might identify strategic racism, a denial of personal responsibility, abhorrent behaviour towards women, and an anti-conservative nihilistic streak as their common ground. But, just as Trump represents the apotheosis of American dysfunction, so Johnson represents the apotheosis of British dysfunction – or, more accurately, English dysfunction.

Trump is American materialism, narcissism, corruption and religious hypocrisy personified. Johnson is an indictment of our class system, media, imperial nostalgia and small-island self-indulgence, even as he claims the mantle of the buccaneer. Neither man offers a realistic vision that the divided national family might all rally behind; the best each one does is offer a return to a national comfort zone that will be comfortable only to a few.

So, where next for this unhappy crew? The 46th meeting of the G7, due in 2020, will take place in the US. Trump has promised to host it at one of his golf resorts in Florida – as clear a display of corruption as you could hope to see. He wants Russia’s Vladimir Putin to come along too, a man who is singularly dedicated to disrupting international consensus; he was expelled from the group of nations over Russia’s incursions into Crimea, probably the last time the G7 acted with any moral unity.

Of all the maladies afflicting the G7, a clear collective vision of where we should be heading as a planet looks terminal. The fires in the Amazon are alarming for many reasons, not least because they underline the need for international leadership.

What happens in one country affects the health of the entire planet: we are, if you please, one family, and we need to adjust our consciousness to encompass the entire Earth. The Bolsonaros of this world are too petty and paranoid to get their heads round that, but at least our schoolchildren have no problem grasping it.