- Sputnik International
World
Get the latest news from around the world, live coverage, off-beat stories, features and analysis.

Too late to question Russia's membership in G8

Subscribe

PARIS (by columnist Angela Charlton for RIA Novosti) – Should Russia be a member of the Group of Eight?

Everyone seems to be posing this question lately. Yet the time for questioning Russia is long past. It’s now a full member of the elite club of rich nations, with a commendable agenda for when it assumes the G8 leadership after this week’s summit in Scotland. All that the other members can do now is ask themselves: Why did we let Russia join in the first place?

Russia’s fitness for membership in the group has come under fire every summer for the past decade, whenever its leaders hold their annual meeting to discuss their responsibility for world prosperity. This year Russia’s role is under deeper scrutiny than usual, since it will take over the group’s rotating leadership for the first time.

Year after year in the 1990s, the then-Group of Seven included Russia in more and more of its activities. This generous gesture to Boris Yeltsin was intended to encourage pro-market, democratic policies in turbulent, post-Soviet Russia – but few expected it to lead to full Russian membership, at least not anytime soon. By the 1997 summit in Denver, Yeltsin was stealing the show from the more cautious, less colorful G7 leaders, and departing with the words: “It’s now the G8.” Before the rest of the group realized what was happening, Yeltsin was proven right.

And now, as much as some U.S. lawmakers and European rights activists would like to believe otherwise, there’s no turning back. The G8’s other members are too wary of rocking the boat – and risking their own expulsion – to sanction Russia, even if Russian membership discredits the whole group. The G8’s own undemocratic structure means no one will be voting this week over whether to kick Russia out.

Vladimir Putin has taken a more understated, conciliatory stance within the G8 than Yeltsin, subtly strengthening Russia’s role in the group over the past five years. Putin has ridden out criticism of the Chechnya war, his restrictions on democracy, and the selective crackdown on Russia’s robber barons.

Meanwhile, the economic differences between Russia and the other members – the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan – get smaller every year. That makes Russians especially skeptical of threats to oust it from the G8.

Russians point out that Italy has remained corrupt and politically turbulent despite its membership in the group. France’s economy is less capitalist than post-Communist Russia’s, and more resistant to systemic change. Canadians are relatively rich but poorer than the Irish (who aren’t in the G8), and Canada’s overall economy is marginal compared to that of democratic India or Brazil. Until the G8 countries are ready to rethink the group’s purpose and design equitable rules for membership, Russia’s slot is safe.

Russia is still much poorer per capita than the other members. But Russia’s economy is growing faster and more steadily than stagnant Europe, Russia has a liberal tax system that other G8 finance ministers envy, and – as Kremlin policymakers never tire of pointing out – Russia has lots and lots of oil. That’s usually enough to quiet Putin’s critics, especially with oil prices soaring and Mideast violence worrying the rest of the G8.

Putin goes into this week’s meetings on strong footing. He cemented his alliances with France and Germany in meetings Sunday with Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, despite anti-Putin sentiment among the French and German masses. And Putin smoothed over differences with Britain last month by supporting G8 chairman Tony Blair’s two main platforms of fighting global warming and forgiving debt to African countries.

Meanwhile, Putin’s main proposal for his year in charge of the G8 is one that few members can argue with: coordinated aid for former Soviet states to ensure stability in the resource-rich region. The proposal is both generous and self-serving. It would allow Russia to appease pro-western governments in the region, and maintain geopolitical clout among its neighbors, without angering Russian nationalists or anti-Russian politicians in the West.

Even Putin’s critics in the United States and Europe grudgingly welcome his recognition of the “post-Soviet space” as an international cause, and not just Russia’s business. This will make it hard for other G8 members to upbraid Putin for his resistance to recent revolutionary movements in Ukraine, Georgia and Central Asia.

The world’s leaders have waited too long to punish Putin for anything. Putin and Russia now have the confidence and oil riches they need to get by without the G8. Russia’s expulsion from the G8 would not make Putin embrace opposition parties – and it might even make him embrace countries at odds with G8 philosophies. Russia’s presence in the G8 is awkward, but its absence could very well be worse.

Newsfeed
0
To participate in the discussion
log in or register
loader
Chats
Заголовок открываемого материала