Comparisons between the world represented in London in May 1910, and in April 2009 are stark – and encouraging, writes TONY KINSELLA
SPARE A thought for London’s harassed protocol specialists as the world’s leaders assembled. Pecking orders and dress codes had to be determined, while they sought to marshal people more used to issuing than taking orders.
The high and the mighty were all there, many in full regalia. Emperors, kings and crown princes by the dozen from the ruling dynasties of Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, the Chinese Empire, Greece, Bulgaria, Portugal, Italy, Serbia, Egypt, Siam, and even Zanzibar.
This was in late May 1910 for the state funeral of Edward VII. The jerky black and white footage of the funeral cortege offers a unique record in a new medium of an old world order about to immolate itself in a horrendous and pointless war.
By 1920 the Austro-Hungarian, Chinese, German, Ottoman and Russian empires were history. Ireland was aflame with a war of independence that heralded the demise of the British version.
The 1910 world order was imperial, white and Christian, with other races and creeds viewed as inherently inferior. Edward VII had cautioned in 1875 that a man should not be “treated as a brute” simply because he had “a black face and a different religion”. It was, however, an admonition his world was structurally incapable of applying.
China had been invaded, exploited, beaten and humiliated by all the expansive powers, Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the US. Its millennial empire was tottering and would collapse in 1912. Korea was effectively a Japanese colony, and Indonesia a Dutch one, while India was the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown. If India would relatively peacefully achieve her independence in 1948, Indonesia would have to wait until 1950 to bloodily wrench hers from a rapacious post-war Dutch attempt to restore colonial rule. Saudi Arabia was struggling to emerge from the Ottoman empire. South Africa was recuperating from the horrors of the Boer Wars, including the invention of the concentration camps which would cast such a sombre shadow over the coming century.
The comparisons between the world represented in London back in May 1910, and in April 2009 are stark, informative – and encouraging. At last Thursday’s G20 summit, the footage was in colour, the only monarch present was King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, there wasn’t a single uniform, much less a plumed helmet, in sight – and those were only the cosmetic differences.
Twenty-two independent nations, most of them democracies, the United Nations secretary general, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation assembled to address our planetary recession while laying the basis for a more just and more sustainable global economy.
The countries represented collectively account for around 90 per cent of global GDP, 80 per cent of world trade and 64 per cent of the world’s population. Ireland can be said to have been represented in London by the Czech president-in-office of the EU – a state that didn’t exist in 1910 representing another that had also yet to be born.
Today’s world is neither predominantly white nor Christian and in the G20 we are, for the first time, building a governance structure that reflects our global diversity.
The G20 is just 10 years old having been formed as a loose forum for exchanges between finance ministers. It has no staff, headquarters, or budget of its own, and depends on consensus to take its decisions.
What passed for our financial system has failed and partially collapsed. At its heart lay the private delusions of what may (even) have been well-intentioned individuals, but delusions which inevitably led them to deceive first themselves, then everybody else.
Designing, much less building, a replacement system was never going to happen in a one-day summit. Will Hutton summed up the G20’s achievements in the Guardian as being “decisively different – the most substantive of its type since 1944” while breaking with “the Washington consensus, free market ideology and financial turbo capitalism”.
Hedge funds are to be regulated for the first time, and the process of severely limiting the tax havens where many of them hide has also been given a long overdue boost. The Financial Stability Forum, a framework of central bankers, is to have the power to act as a global regulator controlling, amongst other things, the pay and bonuses of financial service executives and traders.
In the words of the final communique: “The era of banking secrecy is over.” The capacity to create mega virtual profits and their decidedly non-virtual bonuses, and the ability of large corporations to largely avoid paying tax, will both be buried with that defunct secrecy.
Multilateral funding is being tripled, and the world’s major economies are now reading, if not yet singing, from a common sheet. German chancellor Angela Merkel, a woman not renowned for exaggerated language, probably understated it when she called the outcome an “almost historic compromise”.
When the Kenyan-American Barack Obama, who partly grew up in Indonesia, brokers a deal between Nicolas Sarkozy (the son of a Hungarian migrant) and Hu Jintao on tax havens and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, our world system can be said to, at last, be coming of age. The protocol specialists can sleep easier.
So can we all.