ABSTRACT
The July 1993 summit in Tōkyō of the leading industrial democracies (the ‘G-7’) was another of the now routine media performances by a select international cast of politicians intended for global consumption. Yet despite a full schedule of meetings, receptions, banquets and public declarations, something seemed missing. The G-7 leaders were ‘seven characters in search of an author’: the well-made play they intended us to view via the proscenium stage that is the television set was a disappointing drama missing both antagonist and protagonist. Without a villainous Soviet empire, or a rapacious Arab cartel, there can nowadays be no dramatic resolution, no tragedy or comedy. Presidents and prime ministers struck poses before high-tech footlights nonetheless thoroughly high-bourgeois, worthy of Ibsen but without the luck of his scripts – ready for a modernist plot that, like Godot, did not come.
