What Now All Pretence Has Gone? The G20 and Protectionism after Baden-Baden

At the conclusion of their March 2017 meeting in Baden-Baden, G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bankers issued a communiqué that included the following statement on trade: “We are working to strengthen the contribution of trade to our economies.”1 Even by the standards of international diplomacy, this sentence shows a distinct poverty of imagination. Worse, at the insistence of American officials, the communiqué dropped reference to resisting protectionism.
If the high priests of orthodoxy, for in most nations that is what finance ministries and central banks represent, cannot bring themselves to condemn protectionism, then all pretence of restraint has gone. For sure, many of us have been sceptical about G20 promises to maintain open borders but, as The Economist recently noted in this context, “hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue” (The Economist 2017). The message from Baden-Baden was clear: maintaining open borders has been demoted as a G20 policy priority.