ABSTRACT
‘Nothing could be more fatal than the habit (the at present fatal and pernicious habit) of personal contact between the statesmen of the world.’ This classic critique of summitry by the British diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson was aptly recalled by David Watt on the eve of the 1977 gathering in Downing Street of the leaders of the seven major industrial democracies. 1 At first glance, the record left by the ensuing seven summits (London, Bonn, Tokyo, Venice, Ottawa, Versailles and Williamsburg), as well as the two earlier ones (Rambouillet and Puerto Rico), might appear to sustain this negative judgement. Economically, the ‘discomfort index’ of inflation and unemployment in the summit countries had risen inexorably during this period, and the international climate between the Europeans and the Americans, and between both and the Japanese, has chilled almost as markedly. To be sure, no estimate of the effects of summitry can be fully persuasive, based as it must be on counterfactual comparison – who knows what things would have been like without the summits? Yet the public record apparently does little to dispel the sceptics’ view that summitry creates problems rather than solving them. What, then, explains this fashion for regular meetings among heads of government?
