Exclusive Club Under Stress

Abstract

This chapter traces how the seemingly united front against the G7 by rising powers and civil society actors broke apart in the early 2010s. While rising power criticism of the G7 waned after the first G20 summits, civil society organizations (CSOs) maintained their critical stance and extended it to the G20. The chapter argues that, from the beginning, contestation by the two sets of actors had focused on different issues. Opposition by rising powers was driven mainly by their own exclusion from the governance club. In contrast, many civil society actors rejected not only the exclusiveness of the G7 on a much more fundamental level but also the idea of liberal macroeconomic coordination as such (policy content). To demonstrate this, the chapter develops a framework for analysis, based on the introductory chapter to this volume. It, then, describes the G7 and its post-Cold War development and analyses the key institutional bones of contention for the BRICS states and for important non-state actors. The analysis shows that rising power governments always had been much closer to business actors and G7 members than to CSOs in their vision for macroeconomic governance. The upgrading of the G20 brought the divergence of positions between the BRICS and CSOs clearly to light as it satisfied the BRICS’ desire for inclusion and left CSOs alone with their more fundamental critique of liberal governance through small groups of powerful states.