After sharing the high table at five G-8 Summits in a row, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will not be going for this year?s summit at Huntsville in Muskoka, Canada. Reason: the agonising experiment of a closer dialogue with G-5, the grouping through which countries like India, China, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico were called to G-8 meets, has been given a quiet burial.
According to reliable sources, sherpas from these five countries decided to ?disband? the G-5 at a meeting in Mexico earlier this year after Canada, this year?s host, conveyed that it did not plan to hold the G-8 and G-5 meeting at Huntsville. Ottawa had its own reasons, pointing out that it was already hosting a G-20 meet in Toronto right after the G-8, where all these countries would anyhow be present.
Given that G-20 has been designated as the world?s premier economic forum at the Pittsburgh Summit, there was an element of futility in pressing ahead with the G-5 experiment. As a result, Singh, like other premiers of the G-5, will no longer share the table at the G-8. Rather, they will fly to Toronto for the G-20 later this month, where the G-8 leaders will join them after their exclusive deliberations at Huntsville.
The G-8+G-5 was very much a European initiative with US support. It all started with former French President Jacques Chirac inviting these countries to the 2003 meet at Evian-les-Bains for a ?broader dialogue? with the five powerful emerging economies of the world.
The group was thereafter labeled as the Outreach 5. Then in 2007, Germany as the host country, initiated what came to be known as the Heiligendamm process. The understanding was that this process would ultimately result in the G-8 expanding to a G-13 and these five countries be included as members of the elite group.
Successive summits in Japan and Italy carried forward the idea with the Italian leadership literally labeling the grouping as G-4 after the L?Aquila summit last year, adding Egypt to the list of probables. But the global economic crisis tilted the power scales in a definitive manner, which powered G-20 into prominence. Washington too agreed that G-20 was a more apt forum when it came to discussing far-reaching economic issues. And at the Pittsburgh summit last September, this view was given a collective stamp of approval.