ABSTRACT
On 8–10 July 2009, the leaders of the world’s most powerful market democracies assembled at the recently selected, earthquake-scarred site of L’Aquila in central Italy for their 35th annual G8 summit (Kirton 2009c; Kirton and Koch 2009). Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was at his seventh summit, as the only G8 leader to host it for a third time. He welcomed U.S. president Barack Obama and Japanese prime minister Taro Aso to their first summit, British prime minister Gordon Brown and Russian president Dimitri Medvedev to their second, French president Nicolas Sarkozy to his third, German chancellor Angela Merkel and Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper to their fourth, and European Commission president José Manuel Barroso to his fifth.
