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1233Nous avons sélectionné quelques extraits d’articles sur le G20 de Séoul. On y trouve divers aspects de cette réunion, selon des points de vue différents.
• La solitude d’Obama au sommet de G20, c’est la solitude de l’Amérique, c’est l’Amérique en train de perdre le statut de puissance et d’influence décisives qu’elle avait jusqu’alors. Le titre du Los Angeles Times (le 13 novembre 2010) fait à cet égard, froid dans le dos : «U.S. left in the cold at G-20 summit»…
«The United States apparently will have to go it alone in dealing with its fragile economy and near-double digit unemployment after the Group of 20 summit ended Friday with no commitment to immediate action to reduce trade and currency tensions.
»A U.S. proposal to set numerical limits on trade surpluses and deficits was rejected. Leaders of the world's 20 biggest economies pledged only to develop “indicative guidelines” to assess imbalances in the first half of 2011. They also refused to endorse a U.S. effort to force China to raise the value of its currency. “Any sense of global solidarity looks to have been yesterday's story,” said Tim Condon, chief economist at ING Financial Markets in Singapore.
»In their final declaration, leaders did pledge to work together and to refrain from protectionism and competitive devaluation of currencies. But the lack of speedy, specific actions on how to do so left the Obama administration — along with American workers, families and businesses — to shoulder the challenge and pain of trying to solve the nation's economic problems on its own.
»“Obama is now in a position where he must be prepared to act unilaterally to reduce the trade deficit and to shore up U.S. industrial and technological competitiveness or risk losing not only the presidency in two years, but also the American dream,” said Clyde Prestowitz, a former Reagan administration trade negotiator and now president of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington.
• Les Britanniques, qui étaient à Séoul comme une nation blessée et portant le poids énorme des effets de leur engagement absolu dans le système en cours d’effondrement, ont évoqué le spectre de la Grande Dépression par la voix de Cameron. Sans doute espèrent-ils ainsi le conjurer, mais surtout en gardant les mêmes recettes qui ont mené à la crise de 2008. (Dans The Independent du 12 novembre 2010.)
«The Prime Minister said that one of the key factors behind the 2008 financial crisis – the build-up of massive trade imbalances between the high-consuming West and the productive economies of east Asia – had not gone away and might even, according to the IMF, be getting worse.
»He accepted that the G20 was not in a “heroic phase” of the kind seen at earlier summits in London and Pittsburgh, when fear of the economic abyss made co-operation on a huge range of issues possible. But he said it was up to the heads of major economic powers gathered in the South Korean capital to “show that this world, these politicians, these leaders, have learned the lessons of the 1930s – we're going to keep the system open rather than see it progressively close”.»
• Le Daily Telegraph du 12 novembre 2010 tire bien entendu le principal enseignement du sommet. La Chine a dominé le sommet. La Chine, désormais, c’est là où se trouve la puissance…
«The leaders of the G20 group of rich and developing nations met in Seoul this week for what might reasonably be described as their first post-crisis summit. But it also had the feeling of the first post-Western summit. China, the world’s second richest nation and its rising power, believes that the financial crisis was actually a “North Atlantic crisis”. Now that the worst of it is over, Beijing sees little reason to swallow the medicine for someone else’s sickness. The summit therefore broke up – none too amicably – without really addressing the trade imbalances that were one of the root causes of the crisis, or America’s worry that Beijing is gaining an unfair advantage by artificially keeping its currency weak. Instead, China flexed its muscles and got what it wanted: a watered-down statement that will not force it to change course. If President Obama hoped that the G20 would burnish his image as a world statesman after the disaster of the midterm elections, those hopes were disappointed.
»It is inescapable that we are witnessing a historic shift of economic power from West to East… […]
»Of course, there is no Confucian law which dictates that a meticulously controlled economy will grow for ever. China’s ferocious investment and devalued exports will only take the country so far: it must also find a way to grow internally by stimulating domestic demand. That is a tricky proposition, for there are plenty of sources of instability on the horizon. The “North Atlantic crisis” did not produce significant unrest – but if the Chinese economy falters in the middle of the largest-scale process of urbanisation in history, then the unspoken deal which has seen its population trade freedom for growth could unravel. For China’s leaders, holding on to power means continuing to deliver prosperity to their population. The role of the West in this process must be to persuade the Chinese government, and the Chinese people, that growth will best be delivered not by assertive nationalism and chauvinist mercantilism, but by co-operation and liberalisation (in both senses of the word). If successful, this would be the greatest foreign-policy achievement since the end of the Cold War.
The shock waves from China’s emergence as a great power are beginning to reverberate. The abiding question is what kind of power it will be.»
• Dans CounterPunch, ce 14 novembre 2010, Patrick Madden donne une intéressante analyse générale du sommet, comme de la situation économique générale. Il suggère de façon pertinente qu'il ne faut pas attendre que la Chine, nouvelle puissance en titre, suive aveuglément la voie du système en place.
«…The truth is that the global imbalances and the relative values of international currencies are not the cause of the economic crisis. They are, rather, symptoms of a system in crisis, the result of a mode of production which attempts to drive down the cost of labor to the absolute minimum that society itself can sustain, while at the same time churning out goods that have to be sold on the market in order for a profit to be realized. Cheap and easily exploitable foreign labor is the reason that manufacturing jobs have been hemorrhaging from the US for the last three decades, and it is the reason that they will not be coming back. The manufacturing capacity of China, Germany, and Japan is more than enough to overproduce for a global system that only engages in production in the first place if profits can reasonably be expected. But a world economic system that fails to generate jobs and sufficient wages for people can hardly sustain itself by trying to sell the goods and services it provides to those same people, and this elementary point seems not to have even entered the minds of Obama and co., let alone those of mainstream economists.
»Don't expect this to be lost on the Chinese, whose elites are at least familiar with critical and historical perspectives on the problems of capitalism… […] So while we cannot look to China to pull the world out of the doldrums, we probably rely on it to take a less magical view of the underlying causes of the global downturn than elites in the West. Perhaps for this we might be just a little hopeful.»
• Enfin, pour terminer, et d’une façon révélatrice comme un appendice ou un post-scriptum, quelques observations polémiques sur Sarkozy, donc sur la France puisqu’il apparaît effectivement que c’est lui qui la représente ; et sur Sarkozy “maître du monde”, puisque président désormais du G20, et également gaulliste pour l'occasion… Sur Marianne2, de Emmanuel Lévy, le 12 novembre 2010.
«Comme d'habitude, la réunion du G20 montre la vanité de l'espérance d'une gouvernance mondiale. Notre Président fait mine de devenir le nouvel architecte d'un nouvel ordre monétaire mondial. Il n'a fait qu'épargner l'Allemagne et la Chine, qui préparent pourtant de douloureux lendemains au monde entier.
»
»Cet objectif, pour important qu’il soit, Nicolas Sarkozy croit donc en avoir reçu mandat lors de la passation de pouvoir entre la France et la Corée du Sud, présidence sortante du G20. Une lecture un peu hâtive du communiqué final des vingt pays les plus riches du monde. En effet, le texte reprend, quasiment mot pour mot, le communiqué publié à l'issue de la réunion des ministres des Finances du G20, fin octobre dernier.
»Mais bon, la posture, gaullienne, est avantageuse... Et on a récemment vu Nicolas Sarkozy à Colombey les deux Eglises pour le quarantième anniversaire de Mon-Général, cherchant un improbable héritage.»
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