ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how issues related to international crime, initially drug trafficking and the money laundering associated with it, came to feature on the agenda of the G7/8. In the literature on the G7/8, very few scholars have provided a well-documented account of its history, an exception being Nicholas Bayne. As recounted by Nicholas Bayne, the first G7 agreement of a non-economic nature was reached in 1978 in Bonn, on the initiative of Helmut Schmidt, and concerned the issue of hostage-taking, this against a background in which numerous incidents of hostage-taking and aircraft hijacking, particularly by the Red Army Faction (RAF) in Germany, had taken place during the 1970s. The G7/8's decision to take up international crime as a new post-Cold War challenge formed part of this shift which would cause a further proliferation of agenda items that were much less concerned with macroeconomic issues.
