The G7 summit, which will take place in Evian on June 15 and 17, comes at a pivotal moment in international relations. Beyond the diplomatic certainties inherited from the end of the Cold War and the recurring calls for “the unity of democracies” in the light of 80 years of fragile multilateralism, a reality emerges, that of a world which has been shaped by the West since 1945 which is inexorably fragmenting…
Since its creation in 1975, the G7 (previously the G5 then G8) has embodied the economic, financial, technological and strategic center of gravity of the planet. The United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Canada – states to which the EU has been a member since 1977 – concentrated most of the world’s wealth, industrial innovation and diplomatic influence. Their decisions structured international trade, multilateral institutions and major geopolitical balances. This era is gradually coming to an end. The G7 remains a powerful bloc, but it is no longer as dominant as it once was. In 2003, the seven fastest growing economies accounted for 41.5% of global GDP. Twenty years later, in 2023, only 29.9%!
The rise of the BRICS in its enlarged version (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa + Egypt + Ethiopia + UAE + Iran + Indonesia), the growing weight of the G20 and the affirmation of the “Global South” are disrupting the international order. The world is being rebuilt around the reaffirmation of national sovereignty, balance of power and competition for critical materials and strategic choices, on a transcontinental and trans-oceanic scale.
The recent meeting of G7 finance ministers in Paris clearly illustrates this rapid change. Officially, the discussions focused on inflation, tensions in the Near and Middle East and their impacts since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 and the outbreak of war against Iran, which began on February 28, trade imbalances, food security and even supply chains, particularly for critical raw materials. However, behind these subjects lies a deeper concern, that of the relative downgrading of Western powers in a multipolar world, which has become less anti-Western than more exclusively Western, as the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, likes to point out.
Conflicts despite interdependence
For thirty years, the West believed that globalization would universalize its norms, its values and that its economic model would “liberalize” a trade that has become globalized. This conviction is no longer unanimously shared. The 21st century demonstrates that interdependence does not prevent conflicts, it can even become a weapon. Energy, industrial and technological dependencies are thus at the heart of power strategies.
The great powers of the G7 approach this future summit in France with their own fragilities
The war in Ukraine has brutally revealed European vulnerability to fossil fuels, particularly natural gas. The Sino-American rivalry also exposes Western dependence on semiconductors, critical minerals and digital infrastructure and submarine cables, through which 99% of our data passes. Generative artificial intelligence, data, data centers, outer space, cybernetic capabilities and even rare earths are becoming the new territories of sovereignty in this new cognitive battlefield.
The great powers of the G7 are therefore approaching this future summit in France with their own fragilities. The United States is still the dominant power, but a country fractured and riddled with strategic doubt. Washington is capable of intervening anywhere in the world, but concentrates most of its efforts on its competition, even its assumed rivalry, with China. Germany is discovering the limits of a model based on cheap Russian energy, exports to Beijing and American military protection. Japan, for its part, has fully integrated the return of geopolitical tragedy and is accelerating its rearmament in the face of tensions in the Indo-Pacific.
The United Kingdom is still seeking its post-Brexit role between global ambition and industrial weakening. As for Italy and Canada, they remind us that migration, energy, demographic issues and access to critical raw materials are now becoming central issues of sovereignty. Finally, France seeks to preserve its strategic singularity in Europe thanks to its desire for strategic autonomy and quest for military independence or at least a more assertive desire for less interdependence with the United States, its nuclear deterrence and its diplomatic influence, but it has still not renovated an economic and social model that is increasingly contested in the face of the new realities of the world.
The upheaval of the Global South
The real upheaval comes especially from the Global South. India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Indonesia now refuse to automatically align with Western priorities. These emerging powers no longer wish to be simple zones of influence dependent on and at the mercy of external interference; they are increasingly defending their own interests in a world that has become more transactional.
The war in Ukraine revealed this strategic divide. Where Europeans see a battle for international law, many Southern countries certainly condemn this invasion by Russia, without applying sanctions. This is the reality of this post-Western world!
The stakes of the G7 are strategic, political and even civilizational
However, the “West” remains significant on many issues that shape the international order. Like the reform of the international financial architecture, in the light of the Paris Summit in June 2023, which led to a new Global Financial Compact based on the 4P pact (Prosperity, People, Planet); or again, through the mobilization of 118 countries around the Franco-Mexican initiative aimed at repealing the UN veto, in the event of a mass atrocity.
The challenge of the G7 is therefore no longer just economic. It is strategic, political and even civilizational. For decades, Western democracies believed that trade would be enough to guarantee peace and that globalization could lead to political convergence.
Would the dark civilizational shocks predicted by Samuel Huntington in 1996 have triumphed over positivism and the triumph of globalization of a world free of conflicts, prophesied by his colleague at Stanford University, Francis Fukuyama, in his work The end of the story and the last manin 1992?
How to preserve prosperity?
China today offers technologically efficient authoritarian capitalism. Russia claims a sovereignist model based on power. A part of the Global South now refuses moral injunctions coming from Europe or North America. The world is therefore becoming multipolar again, more conflictual and very competitive.
The G7 challenge is indeed existential: how to preserve the prosperity, security and influence of liberal democracies in an environment where the balance of power is once again becoming central? How can we defend economic openness without falling into protectionism? How to contain Chinese ambitions without causing a global economic divide? How can we rebuild a credible relationship with the “Global South” based on mutually beneficial interests? How, finally, can we exist on our own, between irrational Russian and erratic American hubris?
It is in this spirit that the French Evian initiative of opening the G7 to partner countries from the Global South is in line. This development reflects the desire to move the G7 from a closed Western directorate towards a space more connected to the realities of the multipolar world. By associating emerging powers, France seeks to restore to the G7 a capacity for global influence, based no longer solely on past economic domination, but on the construction of strategic compromises with the world’s new centers of gravity.
France also remains one of the rare European countries to have a complete strategic culture with nuclear deterrence since 1960, the pervasiveness of its universalist legal norms and rules, since the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council since its creation in 1946, an efficient industrial and technological defense base (BITD) – which makes it the second largest exporter behind the United States – as well as as a globalized global maritime presence, over its 11.5 million km² of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ).
Does France still want to act on History or simply no longer do anything other than comment on it?
This strategic singularity allows it to carry a European vision of sovereignty, articulated around reindustrialization, the security of critical supplies (to the point of considering a permanent secretariat on rare earths), investment in defense and the control of digital infrastructures. Finally, it must promote the reinvestment of development aid, in order to contribute to the stability of economic and political trajectories ahead of crises.
We have gotten into the habit of remembering that when we are not around the table, we are most often on the menu. In Evian, the real issue will therefore not only be the coordination of Western democracies. It is a question of whether the West and France still want to act on History or simply no longer do anything other than comment on it.
*Emmanuel Dupuy is national secretary of the Centrists, responsible for defense issues, and president of the Institute Foresight and Security in Europe (IPSE). Pierre Maurin is also national secretary of the Centrists, responsible for economic issues, and associate researcher at IPSE.
