Global Solidarity has Never Been More Necessary

Thoughts on the G7 Summit in Evian

As the G7 leaders and invited guests gather this week in Evian, it is worth recalling an earlier conference held in the same town 88 years ago. It is not a direct comparison by any means.  But it is a way of recollecting our collective failures as well as our current challenges. One of the panellists on the Canadian podcast, “Red Passport”, discusses this point as well.

The Evian Conference was held in July of 1938 at the instigation of U. S. President Franklin Roosevelt.  He wanted it to be near Geneva, the seat of the League of Nations, but not in Geneva because the U.S. had rejected joining the League two decades before. Thirty-two countries and 24 observer groups attended, and it had only one agenda item: Jewish migration.

Nazi Germany's racist discrimination against its Jewish population was intensifying.  The Nuremberg laws stripping Jews of their citizenship and criminalizing intermarriage were followed by employment bans in public institutions, seizure of property, and racist boycotts.

The Nazi takeover of Austria, called the Anschluss, was completed in the spring of 1938, immediately intensifying the pressure on the country's Jewish population. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the knot was tightening.

Jewish migration was at a trickle, because of the resistance of so many countries to accepting them.  As Prime Minister Carney reminded us in his speech at Holy Blossom Temple earlier this month, the CS St. Louis, the ship that travelled the globe in vain search for sanctuary, symbolized the number of ports, gates, and hearts that were closed to the grim reality of anti-Semitic repression.

Legal Jewish immigration to Palestine was limited by the British, who only agreed to come to Evian if Palestine was kept off the agenda.

After nine days, the Evian Conference of 1938 was a major failure. Only the Dominican Republic was willing to increase its quota of Jewish refugees. Everyone else, including Canada, made it clear that high unemployment and “lack of absorptive capacity” made it politically impossible to change restrictive policies.  These arguments have, tragically, their echos today.

The Nazis and their antisemitic allies in Europe and elsewhere rejoiced in the catastrophe that was the 1938 Evian Conference. Hitler's typically cruel and cynical response was, essentially, “Don’t blame us for wanting to force out the Jews — you don’t want them either.”

The Evian conference of 1938 was — as U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale said in a speech to the 1979 United nations Conference on Indochinese Refugees in Geneva — "a test of civilization". Civilization failed. Hitler had his answer, and the world's Jews tragically had theirs.

The Munich Agreement followed two months later. Czechoslovakia was dismembered, its own Jews targeted, and in November, the violence of Kristallnacht in Germany still did not ignite the conscience of the world.  The planning for the so-called “Final Solution” began in 1940, and the Holocaust that took 6 million lives was the result.

This time in Evian, President Emmanuel Macron has said he wants to revive the “original vocation” of the G7. This will be difficult, to put it politely, given the rupture that has been so well described by Prime Minister Carney.  There is no direct comparison between 1938 and 2026, except for this: collective security collapsed in the 1930’s, and the current crisis in multilateralism has yet to find a resolution. There is also a global refugee crisis that is being met with indifference and hostility in many countries.

The G7 has gone from roughly two thirds of the world economy in the mid 70’s to under half today, while China alone has gone from about a fortieth of global GDP at the same time to nearly one fifth today.  Humility and not bravado would seem to called for in the current circumstance.

In 1938, the chosen antidote to aggression was appeasement. Or, to paraphrase Winston Churchill — then First Lord of the Admiralty — in his BBC Radio address of January 20, 1940, the act of feeding the crocodile in the hopes it will eat you last.

The challenge to the G7 is to understand fully the nature of the current crisis: the ongoing wrecking of multilateralism by Donald Trump, a growing inequality which is undermining trust in both national and international institutions (such as the G7), and the AI revolution which thus far is gathering steam without either governance or accountability.

We shall see if any of these are mentioned in the communique on Wednesday June 17.

Canada’s position is incomparably stronger than it was in 1938.  Prime Minister Carney is at least articulating the central reality that surround us:  a rupture in the global order that has created unprecedented uncertainty, and the possibility of an alternative path both nationally and internationally that can create security where none really exists.  He wants liberal democracies to lead in fighting for this new agenda.

But there is a risk that the G7 agenda, as it is currently framed, will fail to meet the moment of the global economic challenge.  The G7 preparatory track produced, on April 30, the G7 Financing for Development: Framework for Promoting Health Sovereignty Financing and Self-Reliance, a New G7 Approach to Economic Corridors, and a Declaration of Ministers of Development and Ministers of Finance on Domestic Resource Mobilization. Read those titles as Orwell would. “Health sovereignty financing and self-reliance” and “domestic resource mobilization” sound too much like the donor walking away while telling the recipient that funding their own survival is a form of dignity. The word doing the concealing is “self-reliance.”

The Trump administration took a wrecking ball to foreign assistance and the G7 is at great risk  of joining the messages to the world  that “you’re on your own two feet” and “you’re not welcome here”.  It is certainly true that much has changed in the global economy since Lester Pearson’s groundbreaking “Partners in Development”.  The rise of China and India and other rapidly growing economies did, in fact, require a dramatic political commitment to increased domestic savings and investment.  There is a need for reform and change.

Partnership is still required, both for humanitarian assistance and the need for capital investment in the poorest countries. So far the response from the G7, despite evidence of growing need, has been to retreat.

The global refugee and migration crisis today is not confined to one race, religion, or continent - it is now truly global and requires engagement, and not abandonment.  We are paying a price in human life and well being that is undeniably linked to the decision to take a chain saw to the ties that have knit the world together over the past 80 years.

We abandon solidarity at our peril. That is where the comparison with 1938 holds up. Lessons to be learned.