Group of Seven (& a Half)

Crucial times in history are the best testing grounds for true leaders. If a man dares to stand up and make strategic, even though unpopular, decisions during a crucial time, and if those decisions are upheld and executed accordingly by other people, that man can claim himself to be a true leader.

Nowadays we are living in a very crucial time in the history of mankind. It has been five years since the end of the Cold War. And there has been no clear indication that the world is putting itself in any better order.

President Clinton claims that his 18-month-old government has created a strong economic recovery. Opinion polls, however, have seen no rise in his credibility rating, as the whole world watches the U.S. dollar tumble to its lowest rate against the Japanese yen. And although Japan's economy has been doing rather poorly this last couple of years, hand in hand with that country's series of political scandals, its currency keeps going up in value.

Western Europe is absorbed in a seemingly futile effort of making sense of its economic and political cohesion. At the same time the region finds it hard to reach a consensus on how to bring Russia and Eastern Europe into the free market. A move which it is hoped will provide a kind of guarantee for peace and security for the entire region.

A meeting of world leaders in such a situation is indeed timely. At least the very least to provide some sense of direction as to where the world is moving. It was, therefore, assumed that the just ended summit meeting of the heads of seven of the world's most powerful countries could provide the badly needed leadership.

As it has turned out, however, the meeting of the seven heads of governments, called G-7, in Naples over the past weekend, proved that none of them can be truly defined as world leaders. Each of them is politically weak, as seen from the perspectives of their respective countries. And together they don't and up to a strong leadership because they lack the necessary substance. Together they don't provide the expected vision of a better world.

A joint communique, announced on Saturday after the 20th economic summit meeting, tried to give a picture of economic recovery in that group of developed countries. But the vagueness of the communique fell far short of instilling the confidence so badly needed by the world's free market.

Even when the Group of Seven was expanded on Sunday to become the Group of Seven-and-a-Half, with the joining of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, the results did not take on the hoped for sheen.

These leaders' failure to gain respect from the world community was overshadowed by the news of the death of North Korean President Kim Il-sung and the results of World Cup games in the United States. Yet the failure is a clear one.

This is not the first time that the G-7 summit has not come up to world expectations. In fact this elitist club has not produced anything substantial for the benefit of the global free market economy for at least the last five years.

There are quite a number of reasons why such an exclusive club has been unable to perform. The least that can be pointed out is that the world has changed in such a way that no one club can exclusively manage to harness their members' enormous joint capabilities.

The governments of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, can no longer control even their own financial markets after the fall of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s.

More than that, however, they have been consistently ignoring the fact that, for the last two decades, several new economic powerhouses have been springing up outside their borders. These emerging powers deserve some acknowledgement because they can contribute a lot to the shaping of the world's future. By definition, G-7, even in its expanded form, G-8, probably will never be able to accommodate this line of thinking.

With that in mind, it could be said that nobody will be very surprised if that elitist club never exhibits the ability to cope with the growing problems of managing this world.