The upcoming G20 Summit in London will serve mainly as a confidence-building stage, says a Belgian expert in political and economic affairs.

"Confidence-building is extremely important," Jonathan Holslag, head of research at the Brussels Institute of Contemporary China Studies and an expert at the EU-China Academic Network, told Xinhua in an exclusive interview on Wednesday.

What's more important behind the "big and visible G20 meeting is diplomacy," Holslag said, citing the upcoming EU-China summit.

"For instance, in May we are going to have a very important meeting in the Czech Republic, the EU-China summit," he said, "that will be organized with a high-level economic dialogue."

Holslag said he thinks the May meetings, especially the EU-China summit, will be more productive than the G20 gathering. Those meetings "can make a strong signal towards the rest of the world that protectionism is not desirable," he said.

"There is indeed a certain tendency towards a more democratic approach to the global economic challenges," he said when asked for comparing the G20 with the traditional G7 or G8 summit.

Holslag said he was concerned that "this whole G20 framework" was not going to end with the result "that both the West and the developing countries expect."

"The difference and interests are so big and also the stakes of traditional powers, European powers and the United States, in the set institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank are so big that I don't see it feasible that a big package to a large consensus be made in the near future," he said.

Talking about the role of emerging countries on the world stage, he said these countries "indeed have more and more diplomatic leverage and also much more willing to use it."

"If you have a look at their posture and their behavior within the frame work of the UN and WTO, you'll see that they are more proactive and more willing to table new proposals," he said.

Leaders from 20 developed and developing countries will gather in London on April 2 to hammer out ways to contain the impact of the global financial crisis and overhaul existing international financial institutions to avoid future re-occurrences of such problems.

(Xinhua News Agency March 15, 2009)