Africa has Entered the Chat

The African Union has been invited to join the G20, but how will it use its new seat at the table?

Comoros president Azali Assoumani, elected Chairperson of the African Union at the 36th Summit in  February of 2023.

At the onset of this year’s summit in New Delhi, members of the G20 agreed to invite the African Union (AU) to become the 21st member of the international organization representing the world’s largest economies. This makes them the second regional group alongside the European Union (EU). 

The decision came after the US President Biden signaled support for the idea last year and Indian President Modi made a strong case for it in the lead up to the event. This news also comes off the back of the major announcement from the BRICS group, an international organization that opposes Western dominance, that they would expand to 6 new countries, including Ethiopia, host of the AU’s headquarters.

Modi welcomed AU Chairperson Azali Assoumani to his seat at the Summit, reportedly saying he was “elated”. Meanwhile, Nigerian President Tinubu also attended and met with world leaders like Chancellor Scholz of Germany and President Yoon of South Korea. 

Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema summarized the reaction across the continent well when he tweeted: 

“Africa’s permanent membership of the G20, means it has been recognised as a key player on the world economic landscape. African countries must now leverage this position to accelerate development of their economies & their young populations.”

No matter how you look at it, this is an historic step for Africans in getting greater representation on the world stage, and the Global South more broadly, who are systemically underrepresented in global decision-making despite being the most sensitive to its impacts. Tired of being portrayed as the victim of international crises, African leaders have been arguing that a seat in the G20 would enable them to be part of crafting solutions instead of having to rely on a Great Power like the US or China.

The G20 was created in 1999 in reaction to the Asian Financial Crisis because the G7 was proving insufficient in two ways: First, too many developing countries were demanding the group expand, making it difficult to work with outside partners and, more to the bottom line, they also realized the growth of new industrial giants, particularly China, would mean they wouldn’t control approximately half of the shares of global production for long (they only make up about 30% today), so they knew it would be increasingly necessary to have a bigger forum if economically influential countries were going to effectively coordinate on crises. 

In addition to including the 7 pro-US countries in the G7, the new group added the next 13 largest economies in the world, including strong US-allies like Turkey, Australia, and South Korea, but also more oppositional countries like Russia, China, and India. 

Still, a country’s membership in the G20 was nominally tied with its economy being among the top twenty largest in the world, a metric hard for outside countries to achieve when they don’t have a say in the rulemaking of the global economic system. So far, only European countries like Switzerland and the Netherlands have broken this threshold without being admitted to the G20, mostly due to the abundance of European representation already in it. Taiwan’s GDP currently ranks 19th in the world, but hasn’t been admitted due to its limited recognition as a country.

The special exception set in their decision to include one member who wasn’t a country, but a regional institution, the European Union, was not necessarily a surprise. The decades-long integration of the EU had been so successful that their collective free trade area was greater than the US, and as a bonus, very aligned with it. Therefore, it seemed natural to invite its Commissioner, the de facto executive of the EU, to the G20’s table. 

The African Union’s entrance, however, was more of a surprise. The 55 member bloc is not nearly as cohesive as the EU and their collective GDP would only rank 7th in the world, should they even be considered a single economy. This is not to say the region’s growth hasn’t been remarkable in the last decade. The GDP of the AU as a whole is growing at a rate of 4% per year, with rapidly developing countries like Rwanda and Cote D’Ivoire leading the pack with an annual growth of 8.2% and 6.7% respectively. They just launched a continent-wide Free Trade Area in 2018 and economists suspect this will help spur growth in the manufacturing sectors, an important goal for achieving economic resilience.

Unfortunately, African countries are still distracted with the most pressing issues facing their own domestic populations to focus on finding that greater continental vision and embarking on greater integration. For instance, many countries in East Africa are focused on a regional drought and food crisis and countries like Mozambique and the Republic of the Congo are so overwhelmingly debt ridden that their interests are inevitably diverted to the financial sector. Furthermore, six AU members have been suspended in the last two years due to their ruling governments being deposed by military coups, most recently Niger and Gabon. While the AU is taking unprecedented steps towards sanctioning and delegitimizing these new regimes, the organization has proven slow when it comes to building a coherent response among its leaders. 

Nevertheless, their ascension to the G20 represents a potential future of a coordinated foreign policy for the African continent. Going forward, if a small country like Malawi wanted to influence the global debate on topics like the rules of international trade, it may first call its delegates to the AU before, say, the World Trade Organization or the UN. As Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, a former prime minister of Niger, and Daouda Sembene, a former executive director of the International Monetary Fund, argued, Africa “will need to speak with one voice if it hopes to influence G20 decision-making.” To this end, they proposed that Chairperson of the AU Commission be the permanent envoy to the G20 and that they develop a “clear agenda for reforming the global financial architecture.“

Indeed, African countries will need to form a united front against their wealthy creditors if they are to successfully leverage their new position at the table to obtain the reparations they’ve been demanding, which are key for them to escape the trap of debilitating debt and start investing in modernizing their economies. In this vein, at the first Africa Climate Summit last week, the delegates delivered a call for fairer treatment by financial institutions, the delivery of $100 billion a year in climate financing, and the “abolishment of all fossil fuel subsidies,” but achieving these goals will require Africa to make the most of their presence at G20 and any other forum they can.

Towards a Regional World Order?

The decision to invite the African Union to join the G20 was a special one because it appears to be more the result of its grievances with the dominant Western bloc, rather than its economic alignment with the West. This indicates a fundamental shift in the membership criteria of the organization, changing it from a privilege to a right, and marks a huge opportunity for Global South countries to reshape the international order.