When the G7 was first convened in 1976 it made sense for those countries to gather. In a world divided between democratic capitalism and authoritarian socialism, as well as between industrialised countries in the West and an almost universally poor ‘developing world’, the US, Japan, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Canada were the wealthy nations who could best solve problems. After the age of imperialism, a summit of the powerful seemed to symbolise a more enlightened way of doing things.
More than four decades later, a meeting of the same seven countries is an anachronism. What right have Italy and Canada (respectively the world’s eighth and tenth largest economies) to be at the top table when China (second), India (seventh) and Brazil (ninth) are excluded? Simply by its make-up, the G7 is beginning to look like a doomed effort to preserve the hegemony of white power. Its behaviour during the past week at Biarritz has cemented this impression. Under President Macron’s influence it has acquired an imperialistic air. It has itself become the thing which it sought to replace.
Not for the first time, the environment has been used as a pretext for western politicians to lord it over their counterparts elsewhere in the world. An outbreak of forest fires in Brazil has been exaggerated in order to create the impression of an emergency which justifies intervention. Yet as Matt Ridley and Charles Moore explain elsewhere in these pages, there is nothing novel about forest fires in the Amazon. Dramatic though the pictures might look, wildfires are a natural phenomenon which have been occurring ever since forests have been on the Earth. They can, of course, also be caused by human activities, yet there is no sign that they are increasing globally.
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