ABSTRACT

This chapter draws lessons from the history of the summits and apply them to the 2004 Sea Island Summit and looks at forward into the future. Sea Island in 2004 concluded the first G8 sequence of seven summits, each hosted by a different country. Both the past record and the future prospects confirm the utility of the G8 summit. The G8 summit could dissolve itself with very little trouble and is subject to various pressures to do so, both external and internal. But a world without the G8 would be a more fractious and dangerous place. The G8 recognised that Evian was over-ambitious and in 2004 the Americans promised a much more austere summit. One original aim of the G7/8 summit, right from 1975, was to bring about a transition from American hegemony to a regime of collective management of the international system, with responsibility shared between Europe, North America, and Japan.