The twenty-first century has brought a proliferation of pressing global problems that break out far more suddenly and surprisingly, spread more swiftly and extensively, and interact in more complex and uncertain ways than ever before. On the eve of the century there was a financial crisis in Asia that began in 1997 and consumed countries in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East over the following years. The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, began a new era of global mega-terrorism, which quickly spread to many other countries and led to a war in Afghanistan that endured for over a decade. The collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in New York on September 15, 2008, catalysed an American-turned-global financial crisis that immediately created the world's worst recession since the one in the 1930s that had brought such great destruction in its wake. This new recession was followed by a European financial crisis that erupted in 2010.These new crises and their accompanying challenges have demanded and received a forceful, innovative, global governance response. The established Group of Seven (G7) major market democracies added Russia as a full member in 1998 to become the Group of Eight (G8) and reached out to embrace as participants the leading African countries in 2001, the emerging powers of China, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa by 2005, and then Korea and Indonesia to address climate change by 2008. In November 2008, the Group of 20 (G20) systemically significant countries, formed in 1999 at the level of finance ministers and central bank governors, leapt to the leaders' level to become a vibrant summit club. And in 2008 another plurilateral summit institution (PSI), assembling the big emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and, later, South Africa (BRICS), arrived on the scene
