G20

• 1. Introduction

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  The G20 brings together 19 sovereign nations, the European Union, and the African Union - a collection of governments whose member states alone account for roughly 85% of everything the world produces in a year. That is a staggering concentration of economic weight. Yet this forum operates without a permanent headquarters, without a standing staff, and without any formal power to enforce its own decisions. How does one of the most influential gatherings on the planet function without any of the usual machinery of an institution? And how did it come to exist at all? The answers begin in the rubble of a series of financial catastrophes that swept through the 1990s, and with two men - a Canadian finance minister and an American treasury secretary - who decided that the world's existing frameworks were simply not built for the age they were living in.

• 2. Born from Crisis

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  Paul Martin, then Canada's finance minister, and Larry Summers, then US Treasury Secretary, watched the late 1990s unfold with mounting alarm. The Mexican peso crisis had already shaken emerging markets. Then came the 1997 Asian financial crisis, followed by the 1998 Russian financial crisis. In the autumn of 1998, the prominent American hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management collapsed, bringing the contagion to US shores. Martin and Summers concluded that the G7, the G8, and the Bretton Woods system were structurally incapable of providing financial stability in a world of rapid globalization. They conceived of a new, broader permanent forum that would bring major developing economies in as equal partners.

  The G20 was foreshadowed at the Cologne summit of the G7 in June 1999 and formally established at a G7 Finance Ministers' meeting on the 26th of September 1999. Its inaugural meeting ran from the 15th to the 16th of December 1999 in Berlin. German finance minister Hans Eichel hosted that first gathering, and Paul Martin took the chair as the G20's first chairman. A 2004 report by Colin I. Bradford and Johannes F. Linn of the Brookings Institution later argued that Eichel, as concurrent chair of the G7, was the primary driving force behind the founding. Bradford himself would subsequently describe Martin as "the crucial architect of the formation of the G20 at finance minister level" - and as the one who later proposed elevating the forum to a leaders-level summit.

  The membership list was not the product of a formal application process. Eichel's deputy Caio Koch-Weser and Summers's deputy Timothy Geithner simply went down a list of countries and made calls. As the political economist Robert Wade recounted it: "Geithner and Koch-Weser went down the list of countries saying, Canada in, Portugal out, South Africa in, Nigeria and Egypt out, and so on; they sent their list to the other G7 finance ministries; and the invitations to the first meeting went out." That improvised selection process produced a membership that has remained fixed ever since, with one notable exception: the African Union, which joined as the 21st member at the 2023 summit in New Delhi.

• 3. Structure Without Staff

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  The G20 has no permanent secretariat. That is not an oversight; it is a design choice that shapes everything about how the forum operates. Each year, a different member country assumes the presidency, running from the 1st of December through the 30th of November. The incoming president builds a temporary secretariat from scratch to coordinate the group's work and organize its meetings. When the year ends, that secretariat dissolves.

  To keep this rotating system from producing chaotic discontinuity, the G20 uses a structure called the troika: the current presidency works alongside the immediately preceding host and the next one in line. The three together manage the handoff of institutional knowledge and keep longer-term projects alive across transitions. South Korea introduced the current rotation system in 2010, when it held the chair. Countries are assigned to one of five regional groupings, and the presidency rotates among groupings so that a geographically balanced range of nations takes the helm over time.

  The absence of a permanent secretariat has left the G20 dependent on outside institutions. The OECD has taken on some of the functions a standing staff would normally perform. In 2010, French president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed creating a permanent secretariat modeled on the United Nations, suggesting Seoul and Paris as possible home cities. Brazil and China supported the idea. Italy and Japan objected. South Korea offered a middle path - a "cyber secretariat" - and the proposal stalled, leaving the rotating temporary model in place to the present day.

• 4. The 2008 Turning Point

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  On the 11th of October 2008, US President George W. Bush told reporters after a meeting of G8 finance ministers that the upcoming G20 meeting would be critical for finding solutions to the worsening global financial crisis. Within weeks, G20 leaders gathered in Washington, DC for the group's first-ever heads-of-government summit. At that November 2008 meeting, the leaders pledged to contribute trillions of dollars to international financial organizations, including the World Bank and the IMF, primarily to rebuild the global financial system.

  The debut Washington summit launched a new rhythm. G20 leaders met twice a year through 2010 - in London and Pittsburgh in 2009, and in Toronto and Seoul in 2010. Starting in 2011, when France held the chair, they settled into an annual cycle. In 2009 at their Pittsburgh summit, the leaders formally declared the G20 "the primary venue for international economic and financial cooperation." That self-declaration marked a significant step: the group was no longer a finance-minister forum managing a crisis but a standing leaders-level institution with a stated claim to global economic governance.

  The 2010 Toronto summit illustrated the political temperature that these gatherings can generate. Mass protests erupted in the city, and the resulting crackdown led to what became the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. Security costs and their extent have remained a recurring source of controversy in host cities across subsequent summits.

• 5. A Sprawling Agenda

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  Wolfgang Schäuble, German Federal Minister of Finance, argued that the issues facing G20 countries were fundamentally interconnected - that financial questions could not be separated from questions of development, security, and migration. "Globalization has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty," he said, "but there is also a growing rise in frustration in some quarters … development, national security and migration are all interlinked." After 2015, when the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement, the G20 agenda formally expanded to include migration, digitization, employment, healthcare, the economic empowerment of women, and climate change.

  The G20 countries account for almost 75% of global carbon emissions. In 2009, the members collectively promised to phase out inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels. Between 2015 and 2021, however, G20 members subsidized fossil fuel companies by more than $3.3 trillion. Several states increased those subsidies during that period, including Australia by 48.2%, the United States by 36.7%, and Indonesia by 26.6%. China alone generates more than half of all coal-generated electricity in the world.

  The G20 has also led the Debt Service Suspension Initiative, through which official bilateral creditors suspended debt repayments owed by 73 of the world's poorest debtor countries. At the 2023 summit in New Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the group's evolving agenda as shifting toward a human-centric development approach aligned with the concerns of the Global South - including climate change, debt restructuring through the G20's Common Framework, and regulation of global cryptocurrencies. The 2023 summit was also the first to operate under the theme Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, a Sanskrit phrase meaning "One Earth, One Family, One Future."

• 6. Legitimacy Under Pressure

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  Barack Obama once described the fundamental dilemma of any forum like the G20 with unusual candor: "Everybody wants the smallest possible group that includes them. So, if they're the 21st largest nation in the world, they want the G-21, and think it's highly unfair if they have been cut out." A 2011 report for the Danish Institute for International Studies pressed the point harder, arguing that the G20's exclusivity was a genuine problem - particularly its underrepresentation of African countries - and that inviting non-members as observers amounted to a "concession at the margins" that did not make the organization meaningfully representative.

  Norway's prime minister Jonas Gahr Store called the G20 "one of the greatest setbacks since World War II" in a 2010 interview with Der Spiegel. His argument was that 173 UN member states have no voice in G20 deliberations. Norway is a significant developed economy and the seventh-largest contributor to UN international development programs, yet it holds no seat and no indirect representation through the EU. Store compared the G20 to a self-appointed concert of powers and invoked the Congress of Vienna as a historical warning: "We no longer live in the 19th century, a time when the major powers met and redrew the map of the world." Norway has since moderated that position in practice, attending summits as a guest - including the 2024 summit in Rio de Janeiro as a Brazilian invitee and the 2025 summit in Johannesburg as a South African invitee.

  Spain presents a different kind of anomaly. It is the world's twelfth-largest economy by nominal GDP and has attended every G20 summit since 2008 as a permanent guest. Some analysts describe it as a de facto member. As of 2025, Spain has not formally applied for membership. Poland has pursued the opposite strategy: G20 membership has been an explicit party priority for the Law and Justice party since 2015, and in March 2017 Deputy Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki became the first Polish representative to attend a G20 finance ministers' meeting, in Baden-Baden. In September 2025, Polish President Karol Nawrocki announced that Donald Trump had invited him to the 2026 summit in Miami - a development his office described as the beginning of Poland's accession process.

• 7. Russia, Boycotts, and Fracture

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  Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, US President Joe Biden called for Russia's removal from the G20. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the group should "re-evaluate" Russia's participation. China argued that expulsion would be counterproductive. Indonesia, which held the presidency that year, and Russia ultimately announced that Vladimir Putin would not attend the Bali summit in person, though he might join virtually. At the summit itself, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared by video and repeatedly addressed the assembled leaders as the "G19," pointedly signaling his view that Russia no longer belonged. By the time of the 2024 summit, an International Criminal Court arrest warrant had been issued against Putin, and he was absent.

  The 2025 summit in Johannesburg, the first G20 ever held on the African continent, produced a different kind of disruption. Donald Trump declared that South Africa "should not even be" in the G20 and boycotted the summit, accusing the South African government of "white genocide." Argentine President Javier Milei joined the boycott. The leaders of China, Mexico, and Russia were also absent. The combined absences raised pointed questions about the forum's authority at precisely the moment it was being hosted by a region long excluded from the world's most powerful economic gatherings.

  The 2026 summit is scheduled for Miami, in the United States - the same country whose current president most recently chose to stay away, and the same country whose treasury secretary, alongside a Canadian finance minister, sketched out the membership list on paper more than two decades ago.