Group therapy Modi's G20 call to arms can't halt retreat of globalisation

India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, will have the unenviable task of forging agreement between the world’s biggest developed and developing countries when G20 leaders gather in Delhi for their annual summit on  9 September

- Larry Elliott

The scale of the challenge will be reflected in two significant no-shows. Vladimir Putin will not be leaving Moscow and nor will Xi Jinping be flying in from Beijing. The theme of the meeting is One Earth, One Family, One Future , but in truth the G20 is riven by conflict and struggling to remain relevant.

It wasn’t always this way. The group dates back to the late 1990s but came of age a decade later during the global financial crisis, when rich and poor countries worked together to mitigate the impact of the slump that followed the near-collapse of the global banking system.

Conceptually, the G20 made sense because it recognised that the tectonic plates of the world economy had shifted. It no longer made sense for the rich members of the G7 – the US, Japan, Germany, France, Canada, Italy and the UK – to try to solve problems on their own when China, India and Brazil were emerging as serious forces.