What G20 is and how it works

What was announced in 1999

The finance ministers of the G7 announced the group in September 1999, and the finance ministers and central bank governors of the countries they had named met for the first time in Berlin on 15 and 16 December 1999. Nothing was ratified. The member records in this catalogue date the joining to 25, 26 and 29 September 1999 for a handful of members and carry no date at all for the rest, which is a fair measure of what there was to join. There is no charter, no instrument of accession, no depositary, and no day on which anything entered into force.

A seat rather than a signature

Membership is a place at a table and an invitation that keeps arriving. The European Union has sat in the group from the beginning, and the African Union since the New Delhi declaration of 9 September 2023 welcomed it as a permanent member. Both are groupings rather than states, which is why this page files 19 country records under a name that says twenty.

Spain has attended since the Washington summit of November 2008 and is described by its own foreign ministry as a permanent guest invitee. The status is not defined in any founding text, because there is no founding text.

What a communiqué does

The London summit of 2 April 2009 put a figure on what the members would raise between them, an additional $1.1 trillion programme of support, and established the Financial Stability Board in place of the Financial Stability Forum, with the members of this group in it. At Pittsburgh on 24 and 25 September 2009 the leaders designated the group the premier forum for international economic cooperation, and committed to a shift in International Monetary Fund quota share of at least 5% from over-represented to under-represented countries. The Common Framework for Debt Treatments beyond the DSSI was agreed on 13 November 2020 and every declaration since has restated it.

None of that is law. A line in a communiqué takes effect through a member's own legislature, or through a body that does have a treaty behind it: the International Monetary Fund, the Financial Stability Board, the World Trade Organization, the OECD. The group writes the sentence and something else has to carry it.

Where the members disagree

The Bali declaration of 16 November 2022 is the plainest record of what consensus costs a text. Paragraph 3 says "Most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine", and then, in a sentence of its own, "There were other views and different assessments of the situation and sanctions". Paragraph 4 records that the group is not the forum to resolve security issues, while acknowledging that security issues can have consequences for the global economy. Both readings stand in the same paragraph, signed by everyone, and the catalogue records the text without adjudicating it.

The chair, and the troika

The chair changes hands each December, and the country holding it runs the meetings, sets the agenda and pays for the hall. The members are sorted into five groups of at most four, and the presidency passes between groups rather than down a list, so two consecutive hosts come from different parts of the roster. The holder works with the troika, the member that held the chair last and the one that takes it next, which is the nearest thing the group has to an institution outlasting a year. There is no permanent staff and no building.

What the members already share

Every country here belongs to the United Nations and to the World Trade Organization, which is more than the group asks of them, since it asks nothing. Beyond that the memberships cross rather than stack. On the records in this catalogue, seven of them sit in the G7, six in BRICS and eleven in the OECD. No member sits in both the G7 and BRICS, and six sit in neither.

The groups each of them carries are on the country pages, dated where the record has a date. What the group itself records about a member is attendance.