Why the G8 is the Past, the G5 the Future and How Activists Need to Refocus

Members of the G5 (Mexico, Brazil, China, India and South Africa ) are making their differences with the G8 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the US) clearer at their summit in Italy than ever before. However, they are doing so only according to the agenda they were handed. In this light, protesters may be mistaking longstanding enemies for potential friends, a risk strategic activists should be less eager to take in seeking to make a greater impact.
 
A relatively minor force at such summits for five years now, the G5 is starting to steal the G8's thunder, if in some cases to environmentalists' dismay. With even bona fide G8 members such as France and Germany calling for a more inclusive and representative world economic summit, it may not be so long before the two Gs become one, and then some. How can activists shape this seeming inevitability coagulation, or at least prepare for it?
 
Reviving the formation of multilateral trade agreements to replace the gross asymmetries of bilateral trade between more and less developed countries (the crux of the stalled Doha talks) is probably where all this is heading. If so, protesters today may be pissing on the wrong tree, missing an opportunity to align themselves with major economic and political powers who already share many of their interests, and could possibly have their ears open to others.
 
Doing so would surely be no less effective than screaming on a freedom high in the G8's ears, deaf to all but their own narrow interests. The current G8 is not the past in the sense that it has or will soon disappear, but rather in that it's predominance will continue to wane as that of the G5 waxes. The recent, formal formation of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) to counter the more and more amorphous Western bloc can be taken as a sign of events to come, and indicative of the new roles activists can and should take on.
 
Instead of protesting to no avail against the G8, activists of all denominations should be trying to get the G5 on their side. Because if they do, the G8 will sooner or later follow. It's time to stop being purely anti- and start being more pro-. Che Guevara shirts and confrontations with police may become a thing of the past too, if and when they are replaced with more effective business and law suits with a mind for the future rather than nostalgia for 1968.
 
The G8 and G5 are and will continue to be key current events creating the future, especially if their respective power positions are changing, let alone being reversed. Whether or not selective activism against or for them is (or, more precisely, becomes) effective depends entirely on how, and how well, activists refocus their efforts.