ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a comparison of summits in the mid-1970s and the early 1980s respectively, in the attempt to identify the determinants of a summit's successful outcome in relation to the following points: consensus among participants and trust-building; coordination of policies; and endorsement of actual measures. When consulting the thousands of pages of governmental documents dealing with European Council and Group of Seven (G7) summits, the overall impression is that East-West relations were not a key topic of debate in either forum until the major political crises of the early 1980s. Endogenous factors also contributed to the increasing political attention paid at G7 summits and European Council meetings to East-West issues. In the mid-1970s Western leaders started to acknowledge Eastern European countries' worsening economic conditions. Concerns about the changing scenario featured prominently in the Rambouillet summit's conversation on East-West relations.
