In Davos, Signs of Shift in Global Power

For years, the power brokers who gathered in the Swiss Alps to mull over the state of the world worried collectively about an outdated system of global governance.

From the United Nations Security Council and the International Monetary Fund to the Group of 8, the arguments went, international institutions were unfit to solve global problems because they no longer represented the balance of power in the world.

Then the recent recession finally forced a change. The Group of 8, representing the largest Western countries and Russia, has shifted power to the larger Group of 20, which includes the major developing countries as well. The makeup of participants in Davos has shifted along with it.

This year, even if most panels are still dominated by executives from established Western countries and institutions, China is sending its largest delegation ever to Davos for the World Economic Forum. India and Brazil are well represented as well.

While the embrace of the G-20 as a global board goes some way toward addressing the issue of legitimacy, it has laid bare a trickier problem: forging a consensus among a larger number of significant players on the international scene with different priorities and interests.

Consensus, some here said on Wednesday, might be too ambitious a goal. Instead of multilateralism, Graham Allison, a professor at Harvard University, suggested what he called “many-lateralism”: when a sizable group of countries agree, they should move forward, letting the laggards adjust later.

Such a strategy has worked even when the laggards were superpowers. An international agreement to ban land mines was boycotted by the United States and some other countries. But in the 13 years since it was signed, the United States military has not used land mines, nor has it manufactured or exported any. In effect, said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, it ended up complying with the ban.

Some even say that United States opposition to the International Criminal Court, also set up without Washington’s participation, has been softening, with signs that the Obama administration is cooperating with the court on issues like Darfur.

“Consensus rules are a recipe for paralysis,” said Mr. Roth, who is in Davos this week. “The lesson is that you build the institutional norms with a flexible process and with a critical mass rather than allowing the laggards to set the agenda.”

Others, like John Chipman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, proposed that the Group of 20 be given more powers of enforcement in the international security as well as financial regulation, since the Security Council has difficulty forging agreements.

“The G-20 has the legitimacy,” Mr. Chipman said.

Few leaders would agree more than President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who in September 2008 was the first to propose a summit meeting to deal with the financial crisis. Out of that grew the enhanced role for the Group of 20.

“The G-20 is a harbinger of global governance in the 21st century,” Mr. Sarkozy said in his keynote address here on Wednesday.

“Without the G-20, confidence would not have been re-established,” Mr. Sarkozy said. “Without the G-20, the spirit of ‘each man for himself’ would have prevailed.”