The Group of 7/8

Hugo Dobson’s new book, The Group of 7/8, is a highly accessible, up-to-date
introduction to the history, present and future of the G7/8 summits. Part of
Routledge’s leading Global Institutions Series, this book aims to explore the role
that the G8 plays and will play in global governance.
The general consensus amongst researchers is to deny that the G8 is an
institution and should therefore not be included in topics such as global gover-
nance. Dobson describes it as the world’s biggest think-tank on global
governance; unlike any legalized established institution, the Group of 7/8 acts
as a forum where ideas can be floated, discussed, and if successful, delegated
to the relevant body for implementation.
So, how can one begin to understand the G8 and its position in global
governance? Hugo Dobson proceeds to examine this question in terms of the
G8’s relationship to the more formal and truly institutionalized mechanisms of
global governance; like the United Nations (UN), World Bank (WB) and World
Trade Organization (WTO). Divided into six instructive chapters, this book
provides an innovative and informative contribution to understanding the
dynamics of global governance and is especially relevant to promoting this area
of investigation in the future.
To ensure this broad appeal and accessibility, Dobson’s holistic under-
standing of the summit is addressed through thematic points of reference and
key texts are highlighted in an annotated bibliography.
The Group of 7/8:

• addresses the history and development of the summit; organization and

functioning; perspectives of member states; achievements and failures;
criticisms and challenges and future directions
• draws upon extant literature in order to provide the reader with a single,
more concise point-of-entry
• acts as a guide to the broader field of research and provides suggested
further reading.

Written in a clear and structured manner, The Group of 7/8 is a core introduc-
tory guide and an essential purchase for students and professionals alike in the
field of international relations.

Hugo Dobson is a Senior Lecturer at the National Institute of Japanese Studies

and School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield.
The Global Institutions Series
Edited by Thomas G. Weiss
(The CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA) and
Rorden Wilkinson
(University of Manchester, UK)

The Global Institutions series is designed to provide readers with

comprehensive, accessible, and informative guides to the history, struc-
ture, and activities of key international organizations. Every volume
stands on its own as a thorough and insightful treatment of a partic-
ular topic, but the series as a whole contributes to a coherent and
complementary portrait of the phenomenon of global institutions at
the dawn of the millennium.
Books are written by recognized experts, conform to a similar struc-
ture, and cover a range of themes and debates common to the series.
These areas of shared concern include the general purpose and ratio-
nale for organizations, developments over time, membership, structure,
decision-making procedures, and key functions. Moreover, current
debates are placed in historical perspective alongside informed analysis
and critique. Each book also contains an annotated bibliography and
guide to electronic information as well as any annexes appropriate to
the subject matter at hand.
The volumes currently published or under contract include:

The United Nations and Human United Nations Global Conferences

Rights (2005)
A Guide for a New Era
by Julie A. Mertus (American
University)
The UN Secretary-General and
Secretariat (2005)
by Leon Gordenker (Princeton
University)
(2005)
by Michael G. Schechter (Michigan
State University)
The UN General Assembly (2005)
by M.J. Peterson (University of
Massachusetts, Amherst)
Internal Displacement
Conceptualization and Its
Consequences (2006)
by Thomas G. Weiss (the CUNY
Graduate Center) and David A.
Korn
Global Environmental Institutions
(2006)
by Elizabeth R. DeSombre (Wellesley
College)
UN Security Council
Practice and Promise (2006)
by Edward C. Luck (Columbia
University)
The World Intellectual Property
Organization
Resurgence and the Development
Agenda (2007)
by Chris May (University of the West
of England)
The North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (2007)
by Julian Lindley-French (European
Union Centre for Security Studies)
The International Monetary Fund
(2007)
by James Raymond Vreeland (Yale
University)
The Group of 7/8 (2007)
by Hugo Dobson (University of
Sheffield)
The World Economic Forum
A Multi-Stakeholder Approach to
Global Governance (2007)
by Geoffrey Allen Pigman
(Bennington College)
The International Committee of the
Red Cross
A Unique Humanitarian Actor
by David P. Forsythe (University of
Nebraska) and Barbara Ann Rieffer
Flanagan (Central Washington
University)
UN Conference on Trade and
Development
by Ian Taylor (University of St.
Andrews)
A Crisis of Global Institutions?
Multilateralism and International
Security
by Edward Newman (United Nations
University)
The World Bank
From Reconstruction to
Development to Equity
by Katherine Marshall (Georgetown
University)
The African Union
Past and Future Governance
Challenges
by Samuel M. Makinda (Murdoch
University) and Wafula Okumu
(McMaster University)
The Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development
by Richard Woodward (University of
Hull)
Non-Governmental Organizations in
Global Politics
by Peter Willetts (City University,
London)
Multilateralism in the South
An Analysis
by Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner
(City College of New York)
The European Union The World Health Organization
by Clive Archer (Manchester by Kelley Lee (London School of
Metropolitan University) Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)

The International Labour The World Trade Organization

Organization by Bernard Hoekman (World Bank)
by Steve Hughes (University of and Petros Mavroidis (Columbia
Newcastle) University)

The Commonwealth(s) and Global The International Organization for

Governance
by Timothy Shaw (Royal Roads
University)
The Organization for Security and
Co-operation in Europe
by David J. Galbreath (University of
Aberdeen)
UNHCR
The Politics and Practice of Refugee
Protection into the Twenty-first
Century
by Gil Loescher (University of Oxford),
James Milner (University of Oxford),
and Alexander Betts (University of
Oxford)
Standardization and the Global
Economy
Setting Standards
by Craig Murphy (Wellesley College)
and JoAnne Yates (Massachusetts
Institute of Technology)
The International Olympic Committee
by Jean-Loup Chappelet (IDHEAP
Swiss Graduate School of Public
Administration) and Btrenda Kübler-
Mabbott

For further information regarding the series, please contact:

Craig Fowlie, Publisher, Politics & International Studies
Taylor & Francis
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon
Oxon OX14 4RN, UK
+44 (0)207 842 2057 Tel.
+44 (0)207 842 2302 Fax
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www.routledge.com
The Group of 7/8

Hugo Dobson
First published 2007
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2007 Hugo Dobson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-203-02975-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-37018-3 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-415-37014-0 (pbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-37018-9 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-37014-1 (pbk)
Contents

List of Boxes viii

Foreword ix
Preface xii
List of Abbreviations xiv
Introduction xv

1 History and Development 1

2 Organization and Functioning 18

3 Perspectives of Member States 37

4 Achievements and Failures 60

5 Criticisms and Challenges 81

6 Future Directions 94

Notes 102
Select Bibliography and Electronic Resources 112
Index 115
List of Boxes

1.1 Summit Dates and Venues, 1975–2007 3

1.2 Success and Failure of Summits, 1975–2005 16
2.1 Summit Attendance, 1975–2005 20
2.2 Overlap in Attendance, 1975–2005 23
2.3 Summit Working Schedule – Gleneagles Summit, 6–8 July
2005 27
4.1 The G7/8 and Terrorism, 1978–2005 71
Foreword

The current volume is the eleventh in a new and dynamic series on

“global institutions.” The series strives (and, we believe, succeeds) to
provide readers with definitive guides to the most visible aspects of
what we know as “global governance.” Remarkable as it may seem,
there exist relatively few books that offer in-depth treatments of promi-
nent global bodies and processes, much less an entire series of concise
and complementary volumes. Those that do exist are either out of
date, inaccessible to the non-specialist reader, or seek to develop a
specialized understanding of particular aspects of an institution or
process rather than offer an overall account of its functioning.
Similarly, existing books have often been written in highly technical
language or have been crafted “in-house” and are notoriously self-
serving and narrow.
The advent of electronic media has helped by making information,
documents, and resolutions of international organizations more widely
available, but it has also complicated matters. The growing reliance on
the Internet and other electronic methods of finding information
about key international organizations and processes has served, ironi-
cally, to limit the educational materials to which most readers have
ready access – namely, books. Public relations documents, raw data,
and loosely refereed web sites do not make for intelligent analysis.
Official publications compete with a vast amount of electronically
available information, much of which is suspect because of its ideolog-
ical or self-promoting slant. Paradoxically, the growing range of
purportedly independent web sites offering analyses of the activities of
particular organizations have emerged, but one inadvertent conse-
quence has been to frustrate access to basic, authoritative, critical, and
well-researched texts. The market for such has actually been reduced
by the ready availability of varying quality electronic materials.
x Foreword
For those of us who teach, research, and practice in the area, this
access to information has been at best frustrating. We were delighted,
then, when Routledge saw the value of a series that bucks this trend
and provides key reference points to the most significant global institu-
tions. They are betting that serious students and professionals will
want serious analyses. We have assembled a first-rate line-up of
authors to address that market. Our intention, then, is to provide one-
stop shopping for all readers – students (both undergraduate and
postgraduate), interested negotiators, diplomats, practitioners from
nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations, and interested
parties alike – seeking information about the most prominent institu-
tional aspects of global governance.

The G7/8
The G7/8 is a curiosity among global institutions. Its role as a forum
for promoting dialogue among the most powerful states on the most
pressing of global issues gives it a significance that few others can
boast. Yet, the G7/8 is not a formal institution in the sense that it does
not have the trappings normally associated with an intergovernmental
body. It does not operate according to a formal set of rules and proce-
dures; and it is without a formal headquarters and accompanying
secretariat. Instead, it seeks to influence the pattern of world events
informally by encouraging other states and international institutions to
pursue particular courses of action.
For many, the informality of the G7/8 lends it strength. Equally, this
informality has bred a perception that the G7/8 is little more than a
cabal – an unelected and self-appointed gathering constructed to
further a narrow set of economic and political interests.
Unsurprisingly, then, G7/8 summits have become notable not just for
discussions of and interventions in world politics; they have also
become focal points for public demonstrations. The Jubilee 2000 move-
ment (the precursor to the Drop the Debt/Make Poverty History
campaign), for instance, saw fit to raise awareness of the plight of the
world’s poor at its Birmingham summit in 1998 by encircling the gath-
ering with a human chain. G7/8 summits have also periodically
become engulfed in the politics of the moment, illustrated most tragi-
cally by the timing of the July 2005 London terrorist bombings to
coincide with the Gleneagles Summit.
For all its profile, what actually happens during G7/8 summits and
how the institution seeks to wield influence in world affairs is not
widely understood. Indeed, the public profile of the G7/8 combined
 Foreword xi
with the relative lack of knowledge about how it functions creates a
compelling paradox. We were delighted, then, when Hugo Dobson
agreed to write a book for us. Dobson is highly regarded and has
written widely on the G7/8 and global governance more generally. His
pedigree shows. He offers a cogent and concise account that is unri-
valled in the literature. This book provides a comprehensive insight
into the development of the G7/8 from a meeting of the six leading
industrial states in 1975, through the expansion of summits to include,
first, Canada and then Russia, to the challenges that confront the
organization today. Dobson’s account is not, however, just about how
the institution functions and the manner in which it has developed and
changed over time. It also contains portraits of the personalities and
personal interactions of the leaders and officials involved as well as the
impact that they have had on the successes and failures of summits.
Dobson’s book is a first-rate account. We are proud to include it in
our series. It is a must-read; an essential resource for all interested in
global governance and world affairs. We heartily recommend it to you
and welcome any feedback that you may have.
Thomas G. Weiss,
(The CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA)
Rorden Wilkinson,
(University of Manchester, UK)
July 2006
Preface

The writing of this book began during the typically fickle English
summer of 2005 when one of the most high-profile summit meetings
of the Group of Eight (G8) in its thirty-year history took place at the
Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland. Over the space of a week, the G8 was
catapulted into the world’s attention, more so than any other previous
summit meeting. On 2 July 2005, an unprecedented series of concerts
was held across the globe to raise awareness of African aid and debt
issues and place pressure on the meeting of G8 leaders that began four
days later. That same day, a large and peaceful march of over 225,000
demonstrators took place in Edinburgh with largely the same objec-
tives but less celebrity endorsement and media attention. The summit
began on 6 July 2005, the same day as London was announced as the
host city for the 2012 Olympic Games, thereby gazumping Paris.
However, on the following day, a series of suicide bombings killed over
fifty people in London. Prime Minister Tony Blair travelled straight to
London but returned to Scotland in the evening of the same day to
continue hosting the summit and, in keeping with tradition, issued a
series of declarations and pledges on its final day, 8 July 2005.
Historically, G8 summits have been low-key affairs lasting two or three
days and resulting in uninspiring statements and communiqués
“laced . . . with the anaesthetizing gunk of globocratese.”1 However,
this series of events in July 2005 made for an unusually high-profile
summit.
Although the G8 was originally a Group of Six (G6), created in
1975 to be an ad hoc forum that would foster the informal discussion
of macroeconomic problems amongst the leaders of the world’s most
industrialized countries, by 2005 it had expanded to eight members
and had become identified as the most salient vehicle for addressing
issues such as climate change and African debt – issues for which the
summit was never conceived. As a result, summit-watchers at
 Preface xiii
Gleneagles were confronted with the peculiar situation that the object
of their interest, which had for so long been overlooked or marginal-
ized, was suddenly accorded unprecedented attention and was now
deemed to be “sexy.” This summit even provided the backdrop for a
novel by the Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin. At the time of writing,
the G8’s future appears more secure than it ever has been in its history
and the once resonant calls for its disbandment have largely disap-
peared from the mainstream and become limited to a small group of
anti-capitalist, anti-globalization protesters.
In this light, there has never been a more timely occasion for the
publication of a book – short though it may be – of this nature. It
intends to provide the reader with both a one-stop point of reference
whereby s/he can acquire a more nuanced understanding of the G8
summit process than appears in newspaper headlines, and a point of
departure for more detailed reading on specific issues. When I began
exploring the G8 seven years ago, no such book existed. However,
thanks to the efforts of the G8 Research Group at Toronto University
and the ever-expanding G8 and Global Governance series published
through Ashgate, this situation has changed radically and a constantly
evolving canon constituting the field of G8 studies has emerged.2 This
book draws upon these resources and extant literature – in addition to
actual summit documentation – in order to provide the reader with a
single and more concise point-of-entry into this genuinely fascinating
subject. It is hoped that after reading this book and acquiring a
condensed understanding of the G8 summit process and its history,
the reader will begin to explore the more detailed literature mentioned
above and will also be equipped with a lens for making sense of thirty
years of international and domestic politics.
In the writing of this book, there are a number of people to whom I
am indebted. I am extremely grateful to Rorden Wilkinson and Thomas
Weiss for feedback on previous drafts of this book, and in particular
for instigating the Global Institutions series and inviting me to
contribute. In addition, I would like to thank everyone at the G8
Research Center at Toronto University, especially Peter Hajndi, for all
their support and particularly for the use of the image on the cover of
this book. Finally, everyone at Routledge, especially Craig Fowlie,
Nadia Seemungal, and Natalja Mortensen, deserve special mention for
their efficiency and patience.
Hugo Dobson
Sheffield, March 2006
List of Abbreviations

DOT force Digital Opportunities Taskforce

DPRK Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
EC European Community
EEC European Economic Community
EU European Union
G4 Group of Four
G5 Group of Five
G6 Group of Six
G7 Group of Seven
G8 Group of Eight
G20 Group of Twenty
G24 Group of Twenty-Four
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
HIV/AIDS Human Immunodeficiency Virus/ Acquired
Immunodeficiency Syndrome
ICT Information and Communications Technology
IEA International Energy Agency
IMF International Monetary Fund
L20 Group of Twenty Leaders
NGOs Non-Governmental Organizations
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development
UK United Kingdom
UN United Nations
UNGA United Nations General Assembly
UNSC United Nations Security Council
US United States
USTR United States Trade Representative
WEF World Economic Forum
WHO World Health Organization
WMD Weapons of Mass Destruction
WTO World Trade Organization
WWII World War Two
Introduction

The G8, as we know it today, presents a quandary. This book is

included within a series entitled “Global Institutions,” yet there is a
consensus amongst researchers and observers of the summit that the
G8 is not an institution. This is summed up in the amusing and oft-
quoted statement by the late Michael Hodges of the London School of
Economics, “[t]he G8 is not an institution . . . Institutions have clear
organizational centres, the most important characteristics of which in
practice, are often their cafeterias and pension plans.”1 Hodges
provides us with the following characterization:

The G7/8 is a forum, rather than an institution. It is useful as a

closed international club of capitalist governments trying to raise
consciousness, set an agenda, create networks, prod other institu-
tions to do things that they should be doing, and, in some cases, to
help create institutions that are suited to a particular task.2

So, if the G8 is a forum, why is it included in a series of books

attempting to introduce the reader to the chief institutions of global
governance? Similar contradictions and confusion are reflected in its
nomenclature over the years. A group of the “most industrialized coun-
tries” may have been an accurate description of these select countries in
the 1970s, but by the 2000s industrialization was no longer an accurate
measure of development and progress: the members of the G8 had
entered a stage of post-industrialization and there were emerging and
upcoming major industrialized countries that were not included in the
G8. The “richest countries on earth” has also been touted as a possible
name but this definition does not embrace Russia, which is clearly not
in the same league as the other summit members by any index. The
“most powerful countries on earth” raises questions as regards the
nature of power and again ignores many regionally influential countries
xvi Introduction
that are excluded from the G8 summit process. It is a sad truth that
much of the confusion over what the G8 actually is and what we should
call it are the results of a gap in the extant literature that has only
recently been filled. In fact, it could be argued that the G8 was tradi-
tionally probably the least written about and least understood entity in
the study of international relations.3
The G8 was originally the G6 of the most industrialized countries
when it met for the first time at the château of Rambouillet in the Paris
suburbs in November 1975 to discuss common macroeconomic prob-
lems facing the leaders of the six attending countries. Its creators,
French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and German Chancellor
Helmut Schmidt, intended for it to be a one-off, informal gathering of
like-minded politicians. They hoped that the relaxed and frank atmos-
phere of the meetings they had attended when both finance ministers of
their respective countries could be replicated at the highest level. Despite
these intentions, the six met again the following year in San Juan as a
Group of Seven (G7) with the addition of Canada. Since then, the range
of discussion has expanded beyond economic issues to include the issues
of the day, from the collapse of the Soviet Union via international
terrorism to third world debt relief and aid, or climate change.
Membership of the G8 has also changed, though not nearly as drasti-
cally as the focus of its discussions. As mentioned above, Canada joined
in 1976 although its membership had been touted at the first meeting. In
addition, at the 1997 Denver Summit, Russia participated for the first
time at what was dubbed the “Summit of the Eight.” The following year
at the 1998 Birmingham Summit the term “G8” was used for the first
time – this was the culmination of an evolving presence within the G8
since before the end of the Cold War. Today, Russia is a fully integrated
member and hosted its first summit in 2006. More recently (and partly
as a result of Russia’s inclusion), China has often been touted as a
potential member, although this raises a number of controversial issues,
which will be explored in more detail in Chapter 3.
So, although often mentioned in the same breath as the United
Nations (UN), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), the G8 stands out as
an oddity. Unlike these legally established institutions of global gover-
nance, the G8 does not have a charter, constitution or any legal status; it
does not have formalized rules of membership or procedures for
dismissing members; it has no fixed agenda or format; and it has no
means of enforcing its decisions beyond moral weight. So, how can we
begin to understand the G8 and its position in global governance? As
Rorden Wilkinson has argued, “the key to understanding contemporary
 Introduction xvii
global governance is the capacity to identify the range of actors involved
in the act of management, as well as to uncover the variety of ways in
which they are connected to one another.”4 Concurring with this state-
ment and with the objective of promoting this area of investigation, the
following chapters will argue that the most useful and edifying way to
think of the G8 is in terms of its relationships to the more formal and
truly institutionalized mechanisms of global governance. Unlike the
UN, World Bank, IMF and WTO, the G8 plays more of an overarching
role, a forum where ideas can be floated, discussed, and, if successful,
delegated to the relevant body for implementation. The G8 essentially
acts as the world’s biggest think-tank on global governance and seeks to
coordinate the actions of the institutions of global governance. It may
help to think of the G8 as a plate-spinner and the plates it spins as the
institutions and organizations mentioned above and explored in the rest
of this series. In this way it becomes clear why it should be included in
any discussion of global governance.
To this end, the following chapters provide the reader with a
holistic, but by necessity brief, understanding of the summit but also
stand as thematic points of reference in their own right. Chapter 1
furnishes the reader with an understanding of the genesis of the G8
over thirty years, which also serves as a potted history of international
politics. This chapter also brings into relief the widening of the G8’s
agenda to encompass a range of contemporary issues, traces the
expansion of its membership, and unravels the numerous other groups
that adopt the prefix “G.” Chapter 2 adumbrates the way in which the
G8 is organized and functions, and in the process characterizes the
kind of entity it is and its interconnectedness with several institutions
explored elsewhere in this series. Chapter 3 shifts the focus to the indi-
vidual members and their positions and attitudes towards the G8
summit process, as well as looking towards potential new members.
Chapter 4 explores the chief areas addressed by the G8 in terms of
economic, political, social, and security issues, pointing to the
successes it has scored and the failures for which it has been respon-
sible. Chapter 5 highlights criticisms that have been levelled at the G8
and how it has sought to address them. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes
this book by looking at the possible directions and potential problems
that the G8 will have to confront in the future.
1 History and Development

This chapter will sketch, first of all, the pre-history of the G8

through historical precedence and the changes in the international
system of the early 1970s that provided the impetus for the first
summit meeting at Rambouillet in November 1975. Thirty-one
summits have been held (see Box 1.1) and to make sense of this
history the chapter will be structured on the basis of summit cycles.
A summit cycle represents a period of seven years during which time
each country hosts the summit once. This hosting follows the order
of: France, the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK),
Germany, Japan, Italy, and finally Canada, before returning to
France at the beginning of the next cycle. Four summit cycles have
been completed: 1975–81, 1982–88, 1989–95, and 1996–2002. We are
currently in the middle of the fifth summit cycle that began in 2003
and will end in 2010. This cycle will last eight, rather than seven,
years as a result of the addition of Russia. Although an artificial
method of dividing up time and organizing the history of the
summit, this structure clarifies the changing agenda from the chiefly
macroeconomic concerns of the first cycle, via the political and secu-
rity concerns of the second cycle and the handling of the Soviet
Union/Russia during the third and fourth cycles, to the emphasis
placed on Africa and terrorism in the fourth and fifth cycles.
Moreover, as the G7/8 has never operated in accordance with any
formal membership criteria, this historical review will highlight the
changing membership of the summit process from the original six
that met at Rambouillet through the inclusion of Canada from 1976
and the EU from 1977 to the gradual admission of Russia
throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In addition, this historical review
will address institutional depth in the summit process and clarify any
confusion in the nomenclature amongst the “gaggle of Gs.”1
2 History and Development
Pre-history
As explained in the Introduction, the G7/8 is neither an international
organization nor a global institution like the more traditional groupings
explored in this series. However, although it is unlike many other current
mechanisms of global governance, it is not unique and a historical prece-
dence does exist: the Concert of Europe. The Concert of Europe existed
in one form or another from its creation in the last years and immediate
aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars until its final demise with the
outbreak of World War I. Napoleon’s attempted domination of the
European continent “finally convinced the statesmen of Europe, hard
persons to teach, that what was at risk was not merely certain goods in
international politics (peace, security, territorial integrity) but the very life
principle of European politics which made these goods and others
possible . . . [and thus, they] finally and suddenly succeeded in learning
how to conduct international politics differently and better.”2 In short,
the Concert of Europe was the manifestation of this learning process. Its
goal was to bring together representatives of the leading great powers of
the day on an informal and ad hoc basis in order to discuss issues of
common interest as they arose. Never did the Concert constitute anything
as formal as an organization, an institution or a regime. Rather, it was
useful as a forum for discussion amongst the self-elected and recognized
European great powers that would seek to maintain the status quo and
accommodate changes in the balance of power when necessary. It is no
coincidence that the embryonic summit process was originally credited as
being the pet project of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, author of
one of the main studies of nineteenth-century diplomacy, A World
Restored, who “consciously sought to construct the modern equivalent of
the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe.”3
This first summit at Rambouillet found its origins not only in the
Concert of Europe but also in the first informal meeting of the Group
of Four (G4) French, West German, UK, and US finance ministers in
the White House library in March 1973, later joined by Japan to form
the Group of Five (G5), to discuss the state of the international mone-
tary system. The perceived success of this relaxed and frank style of
meeting provided the impetus behind the Rambouillet meeting, in
order “to recreate at the highest level the same sort of direct and
informal exchange.”4 Or, in the words of renowned summit-watcher,
Sir Nicholas Bayne:

The G7 summit was conceived as a personal encounter of the

leaders of the world’s most powerful economies. The founders
Box 1.1 Summit Dates and Venues, 1975–2007

Rambouillet, France 15–17 November 1975

San Juan, Puerto Rico, US 27–28 June 1976
London, UK 7–8 May 1977
Bonn, West Germany 16–17 July 1978
Tokyo, Japan 28–29 June 1979
Venice, Italy 22–23 June 1980
Ottawa, Canada 20–21 July 1981
Versailles, France 4–6 June 1982
Williamsburg, US 28–30 May 1983
London, UK 7–9 June 1984
Bonn, West Germany 2–4 May 1985
Tokyo, Japan 4–6 May 1986
Venice, Italy 8–10 June 1987
Toronto, Canada 19–21 June 1988
Paris, France 14–16 July 1989
Houston, US 9–11 July 1990
London, UK 15–17 July 1991
Munich, Germany 6–8 July 1992
Tokyo, Japan 7–9 July 1993
Naples, Italy 8–10 July 1994
Halifax, Canada 15–17 June 1995
Lyon, France 27–29 June 1996
Denver, US 20–22 June 1997
Birmingham, UK 15–17 May 1998
Cologne, Germany 18–20 June 1999
Okinawa, Japan 21–23 July 2000
Genoa, Italy 20–22 July 2001
Kananaskis, Canada 26–27 June 2002
Evian, France 1–3 June 2003
Sea Island, US 8–10 June 2004
Gleneagles, UK 6–8 July 2005
St Petersburg, Russia 15–17 July 2006
Heiligendamm, Germany 6–8 June 2007

Note: For updated and further details on delegations and summit docu-
mentations, see http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/index.htm
4 History and Development
believed that bringing the heads of government together would
lead them to understand better both the domestic problems of
their peers and the international responsibilities they all shared.
This would enable them to solve, through personal interaction and
original ideas, problems that had baffled their bureaucrats. The
bureaucrats themselves ought to be kept out of the process
entirely.5

Thus, when the six leaders met at Rambouillet for the first time in
November 1975, it may have been a refreshing new approach to
achieving diplomatic solutions at the highest political level, but it was
not a totally alien experience for many of them.

The First Cycle of Summitry, 1975–81

Within this first seven-year cycle, the structure of the international
system shifted from one of détente and emerging interdependence to a
reemergence of Cold War tensions that would intensify during the
second cycle of summitry. The summit was regarded as a novel form
for fostering discussion of and coordination in macroeconomic and
energy policies amongst the leading free-market economies in reaction
to the chaos caused by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and
the sudden rise in oil prices instigated by the Organization of
Petroleum-Exporting Countries. Thus, some of the main agenda items
demanding the summit’s attention were the encouragement of non-
inflationary growth, free trade, and responsible oil consumption.
However, other international events of a more political nature vied for
the summiteers’ attention during this period, including the spate of
disparate terrorist attacks, especially airplane hijackings, which
occurred during the 1970s, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
which heralded the reintensification of East–West tensions that would
become a chief theme of the summit in its second cycle.
The first cycle of the summit also represents a process of institu-
tionalization as the summit evolved from being a path-breaking and ad
hoc meeting of leaders centring on macroeconomic policy coordina-
tion to encompassing a broad range of issues and evolving into a
regular date in the calendar of international affairs. Thus, as will be
seen below, a range of economic issues featured during this period’s
summit discussions, such as the promotion of non-inflationary growth,
the role of the major economies of Japan, the US and West Germany
as engines for this growth, the creation of exchange rate stability, and
the conclusion of multilateral trade negotiations, namely the Tokyo
 History and Development 5
Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
However, it was not long before this original and exclusive focus on
economic issues was shed. Even at an early stage, a distinct political
hue came into relief, as seen in the 1978 Bonn Declaration on
Hijacking and discussion at the 1980 Venice Summit of the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of the US embassy in Teheran
by Iranian fundamentalists. Concomitantly, as the summits became
regularly held meetings, a summit bureaucracy evolved that was char-
acterized by the central role of the leaders’ advisors, the sherpas, in
summit preparations and a range of meetings in the year preceding the
summit to decide the upcoming agenda – a subject that will be
explained in more detail in the following chapter.
When the six leaders met at the French president’s summer residence,
the fourteenth-century château of Rambouillet, thirty miles southwest
of Paris, in November 1975, discussions focussed upon macroeconomic
policies that would promote economic recovery from the oil crisis, espe-
cially interest rates and international trade. However, the link between
economics and politics was immediately drawn at this early stage when
Article 2 of the Rambouillet declaration stated that “We came together
because of shared beliefs and shared responsibilities. We are each
responsible for the government of an open, democratic society, dedi-
cated to individual liberty and social advancement. Our success will
strengthen, indeed is essential to, democratic societies everywhere.”6
This first summit proved to be partly a getting-to-know-you exercise
and partly an opportunity to declare intentions rather than make
commitments. Although there was no concrete plan to meet again the
following year, US President Gerald Ford perceived the potential boost
a successful summit could have to his chances of re-election and a
second summit meeting was held in US-occupied San Juan in June
1976, only seven months after the first summit. Taking place at the
extravagant Dorado beach hotel resort, this summit was (and still is)
widely recognized as lacking in substance and was portrayed in the
press more as a summer holiday for the world’s leaders than in terms of
pressing issues and substantial outcomes. The only achievement was to
admit Canada to form the G7, thereby addressing the imbalance
between North American and European membership.
The third summit was held in London in May 1977 and saw the
word “economic” dropped from the summit’s title in recognition of the
expansion of the summit’s discussions into a range of other areas. In
this light, issues such as the peaceful use of nuclear energy and nuclear
non-proliferation were included in the final communiqué delivered at
the conclusion. However, discussion concentrated on the original main
6 History and Development
themes of sustaining economic recovery through the “locomotive
theory” whereby each participant agreed to meet specific growth
targets, the suppression of inflation, and the promotion of free trade
through the successful conclusion of the Tokyo Round. The President
of the Commission of the European Economic Community (EEC),
Roy Jenkins, joined the seven as a guest from this summit onwards.
The logic behind this was that the smaller European states were not
being represented at the summit table but in practice this led to the
over-representation of Europe. Thereafter, the order of summit-
hosting emerged organically and became the accepted order for the
next three cycles. The following year’s Bonn Summit saw the abandon-
ment of the “locomotive theory” but continued to focus attention on
many of the themes discussed at previous summits and a number of
concrete pledges as regards meeting growth targets, limiting oil
consumption, and addressing trade surpluses and deficits were made.
This summit also stands out for the specific declaration issued on
terrorism and aircraft hijacking whereby “in cases where a country
refuses extradition or prosecution of those who have hijacked an
aircraft and/or do not return such aircraft, the Heads of State and
Government are jointly resolved that their governments shall take
immediate action to cease all flights to that country. At the same time,
their governments will initiate action to halt all incoming flights from
that country or from any country by the airlines of the country
concerned.”7
The 1979 Tokyo Summit was the first to be hosted in Asia and
concentrated almost to the exclusion of other items on oil consumption
and the increase in the price of oil. The summit was a success in that oil
import targets were agreed at the eleventh hour but energy continued to
be the most important topic of discussion at the 1980 Venice Summit.
However, international tensions could not be ignored and a series of
political declarations were made on a number of issues that had refused
to go away, namely the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, refugees,
hostage-taking and airplane hijacking. The 1981 Ottawa Summit
completed the first round of hosting the summit amongst the seven
summit members and repeated the practice of releasing a series of
political declarations on a range of subjects such as East–West tensions,
international terrorism, the resolution of the Arab–Israeli conflict, and
refugees. As regards trade issues, this summit also acted as the hand-
maiden to the first sub- summit-level meeting of the United States
Trade Representative (USTR), European Community (EC) Trade
Commissioner, and Canadian and Japanese trade ministers, known as
the trade ministers’ quadrilateral, or the Quad.
 History and Development 7
Bayne has pointed to the major achievements of this round of
summitry as being monetary reform (1975), trade, growth, and nuclear
power (1977), growth, energy and trade (1978), energy (1979),
Afghanistan and energy (1980), and the creation of the Quad (1981).8
Not only does the 1976 San Juan Summit stand out as a failure within
this cycle with no substantive outcomes, macroeconomic issues – the
raison d’être for the creation of the summit – clearly dominated the
remit of discussions during this period. However, a range of other
issues would come to occupy an increasing amount of the summiteers’
attention in the following cycle.

The Second Cycle of Summitry, 1982–88

The 1980s saw an intensification of East–West tensions that led to the
stationing of missiles in Europe by both sides and only began to thaw
after the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as president of the Soviet
Union in 1985. At the same time, a number of connected and uncon-
nected regional disputes, such as the Argentine invasion of the
Falkland Islands and consequent war with the UK, the situation in the
Middle East, the Iran–Iraq War, and ongoing instability in Cambodia,
demanded the attention of the international community. It was only to
be expected that these political and security tensions would impact
upon the summit’s discussions and shape its agenda. However, the
management of various macroeconomic issues was still firmly on the
agenda. Energy issues and the oil crisis had essentially been resolved
during the previous cycle, but the promotion of trade liberalization
and a starting date for the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade nego-
tiations came to be the summiteers’ main economic concerns.
The second cycle of the summit can be regarded in some ways as a
neo-liberal golden era. There was a similar, although accidental, length
in the tenure and outlook of the leaders – epitomized by US President
Ronald Reagan (1980–88), UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
(1979–90), and Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro (1982–87) –
of the kind adumbrated in the Introduction that was regarded as the
impetus for the first meeting at Rambouillet and crucial to the effective
functioning of groupings like the summit and the Concert of Europe.
However, this period was also described at the time as one in which “a
new cohort of leaders [had] come to power, less internationalist in
outlook and less committed to using summits to solve economic prob-
lems.”9 Or, in other words but in a similar vein, during the 1980s “[t]he
G7 summit ceased to be an economic coordinating mechanism and
became a clubby opportunity for informal talks among world leaders,
8 History and Development
talks that were often useful but strayed away from the original purpose
of the summits.”10 Thus, during this period, the increasing political
nature of the summit became evident as a result of the changing struc-
ture of the international system at a time of renewed bipolar tension.
Although the French hosts aimed to contain discussion to issues
surrounding economic growth and the fact that the lasting result of the
first summit in this second cycle was the creation of a financial surveil-
lance mechanism including the IMF, the 1982 Versailles Summit still
found time to discuss the political and security issues of the day, namely
East–West tensions, the Falklands War, and the Arab–Israeli conflict. In
addition, one new development was that this summit saw the President
of the European Council attend. The following year at Williamsburg
witnessed the clearest departure from the economic agenda to date, with
East–West tensions at their height, and focussed upon the threat of
Soviet medium-range missiles to Europe and Asia. In addition, this
summit also saw Japan, largely as a result of its hawkish Prime Minister
Nakasone Yasuhiro, actively engage in discussions of international secu-
rity and become solidly identified with the Western camp. To this end,
Article 6 of the Williamsburg Declaration stressed that “The security of
our countries is indivisible and must be approached on a global basis.”11
In contrast, the 1984 London Summit was much more low key and
struck a balance between the discussion of more traditional economic
issues (inflationary control and trade liberalization) and pressing polit-
ical and security problems (the Iran–Iraq War and terrorism).
The 1985 Bonn Summit focussed on trade and is widely recognized
as the biggest failure in the summit’s history. Not only did it fail to
produce any results of worth, “it actually made matters worse than
before.”12 Disagreements over the starting date of a new round of
multilateral trade talks were papered over in the Bonn Economic
Declaration, which stated “We strongly endorse the agreement reached
by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) Ministerial Council that a new GATT round should begin as
soon as possible. Most of us think that this should be in 1986 [my
emphasis].”13 Despite disagreement in this area, the G7 was united in a
political declaration to mark the fortieth anniversary of the end of
World War Two (WWII) that called for peace, democracy and pros-
perity, resolution of East–West differences, and the eventual unification
of Germany and Korea.14
The 1986 Tokyo Summit demonstrated the flexibility of a grouping
of this sort as it was able to include discussion of the accident at the
Chernobyl nuclear plant, which had taken place only days before, and
agreed upon the extension of assistance to the Soviet Union.
 History and Development 9
International terrorism was an important theme at this summit from
the opening day, when five rockets were fired at (and missed) the
summit venue in central Tokyo. Anti-terrorism measures including
banning the exports of arms to states suspected of supporting or spon-
soring terrorism and limiting the diplomatic missions sent abroad by
these states were agreed upon, with Libya controversially being singled
out as a state supporting terrorism. The Tokyo Summit also set up the
G7 finance ministers’ meeting as a free-standing group, into which the
G5 was incorporated, meeting three to four times a year. The following
year’s Venice Summit was more balanced in its discussion of macro-
economic policies and political issues (East–West tensions,
disarmament, and terrorism) but was also more modest in its results.
One notable development was the discussion of and declaration related
to Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immunodeficiency
Syndrome (HIV/AIDS). At the 1988 Toronto Summit, which
concluded the final round of the second cycle of summitry, attention
shifted towards debt relief in middle-income and poor countries with a
range of measures announced that would provide a framework for
other institutions of global governance to address the problem.
Bayne’s evaluation of this cycle of summitry points to East–West
trade and surveillance (1982), euromissiles (1983), debt (1984),
terrorism, surveillance and G7 finance ministers (1986), and debt relief
for poor countries (1988).15 Although clearly a less successful cycle of
summitry than the first, with two summits resulting in no significant
achievement, the shift during this period of renewed East–West
tensions towards political and security issues was evident.

The Third Cycle of Summitry, 1989–95

The issues that occupied the attention of the world during this third
cycle were the end of the Cold War, the global surge of democratiza-
tion and how best to provide a soft landing for the countries of
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union after the collapse of
Communism. In addition, and as a result, the process of globalization
came to be the buzzword of the 1990s to describe the inchoate but
emerging post-Cold War international order.
This collapse of the bipolar structure of the international system and
the issue of handling the former Soviet Union commanded the atten-
tion of the summiteers throughout this and the next cycle. Yet, the G7’s
policy towards the Soviet Union/Russia was not simply a one-way
process; in the end, by embracing the state it was seeking to assist, the
very nature of the G7 was drastically altered, and it thereafter evolved
10 History and Development
into the G8. As regards globalization, the summit was as sensitive as
ever to the zeitgeist and mentioned the phenomenon for the first time in
the 1994 Naples Summit communiqué, “[w]e have gathered at a time of
extraordinary change in the world economy. New forms of interna-
tional interaction are having enormous effects on the lives of our
peoples and are leading to the globalization of our economies.”16 New
issues, such as the environment, also came to the attention of the
summit during this cycle, and, in addition, both “civil society” and
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) were cited for the first time
in summit documentation.
The 1989 Paris Summit responded to international events as they
unfolded by focussing upon the collapse of Cold War tensions and the
Tiananmen Square massacre that had occurred one month previously.
European and American summiteers were eager to impose sanctions
upon the Chinese government and use the opportunity of the summit
coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution to
issue a robust statement on human rights. The Japanese government,
in contrast, opposed isolating China and campaigned at this (and the
following) summit to soften the summit’s response to China. The
steady disintegration of East–West tensions also began to shape the
summit’s discussions and this summit can be pinpointed as the starting-
point of Russia’s integration within the G7, as prior to the summit,
Mikhail Gorbachev had sent a letter to the summiteers requesting
Russia’s participation. One important outcome of the Paris Summit
was the creation of the Group of Twenty-Four (G24) countries coop-
erating with international organizations and concerned with
providing assistance to Central and Eastern Europe as they shed
Communism.
The 1990 Houston Summit took up many of the issues raised previ-
ously by focussing upon continuing sanctions against, but the
possibility of engagement with, China. However, it was the provision
of assistance to the Soviet Union that dominated this summit. France
and Germany were particularly keen to provide economic aid.
However, the Japanese government was reluctant for fear of a
domestic backlash whilst a long-running territorial bilateral dispute
between it and the Soviet Union remained unresolved and the
Japanese delegation used this and the following two summits to elicit
the support of the international community for the resolution of this
dispute. The US shared many of Japan’s doubts about Gorbachev’s
reforms and supported its cautious position. The discussion of assis-
tance to the Soviet Union continued to dominate the 1991 London
Summit, which was notable as the first summit to invite a non-G8
 History and Development 11
leader to attend in the shape of the Soviet leader. In fact, this summit
was dubbed the “Gorbachev Summit.”17 However, no aid package
could be agreed upon and before the next summit was held,
Gorbachev had fallen from power and the Soviet Union had disinte-
grated. Other topics of discussion in London included the
strengthening of the UN and the proliferation of Weapons of Mass
Destruction (WMD). With the end of the Cold War, the economic
issues for which the G7 was created were pushed to the edges of
discussion, or, like the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations,
continued to remain unsolved.
The 1992 Munich Summit confirmed the provision of US $24
billion in economic assistance to Russia but failed to provide any stim-
ulus to the conclusion of the Uruguay Round. The G7 leaders met
with the new Russian President Boris Yeltsin after the summit had
formally concluded, representing the next step in Russia’s integration
into the summit. The following year’s Tokyo Summit continued to
focus on the issue of economic assistance for Russia in much the same
fashion as previous summits but was more successful in providing the
necessary stimulation to conclude the Uruguay Round. The Japanese
hosts attempted to facilitate the invitation of another new guest in the
shape of Indonesian President Suharto, but could only secure a pre-
summit meeting with US President Bill Clinton. Tokyo also
represented an attempt to reform the G7 summit process itself, reduce
the workload and return it to its original objective of a forum for frank
and free discussion – reforms that would concretely be realized at the
1998 Birmingham Summit.
The 1994 Naples Summit continued Russia’s integration into the
summit process by inviting Yeltsin to the political discussions as a full
participant. The most important outcome of this summit was the
pledge to conduct a comprehensive review of the international finan-
cial institutions that would report to the next summit. The questions to
be tackled would include: “What framework of institutions will be
required to meet these challenges in the 21st century? How can we
adapt existing institutions and build new institutions to ensure the
future prosperity and security of our people?”18 Once again the
summit demonstrated its flexibility to adopt issues as they emerged by
placing both the news of the death of President of the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) Kim Il-Sung on the second day of
the summit and the country’s withdrawal from the International
Atomic Energy Agency on the summit’s agenda. The 1995 Halifax
Summit concluded this third round of summitry by addressing the
challenge set at Naples of reforming international institutions, such as
12 History and Development
the UN (on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary), the IMF, and
World Bank. In addition, a special statement was released calling for
restraint in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
Bayne regards the significant achievements of this summit cycle as
being assistance for Central Europe, the environment and debt (1989),
trade (1990), assistance for the Soviet Union (1991), trade (1993),
bringing Russia into the political debate (1994), and institutional
review, IMF and UN reform (1995).19 The summit’s agenda was clearly
dominated by the collapse of bipolarity and the integration of the
former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc into the international commu-
nity, as well as the reform of the institutions that constitute that
community.

The Fourth Cycle of Summitry, 1996–2002

During this fourth cycle, international events continued to be framed
within an ongoing process of globalization, concretely manifested in
the East Asian economic and financial crises of 1997–98. However,
other issues, for example international terrorism, were never out of
sight. During this period, anti-US terrorism accelerated from the al-
Qaeda bombing of a US military base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in
June 1996 through to the attacks on New York and Washington D.C.
of 11 September 2001. With the subsequent US-led “war on terror,”
the unilateralism of the administration of US President George W.
Bush would become characteristic of the international behaviour of
the leading summit member.
The fourth cycle in the summit process represents continuity in the
management of Russia and its eventual assimilation as a full summit
member. However, at the same time, the summit leaders went through
a period of introspection that questioned the aims and praxis of the
summit process with the objective of implementing reform, which ulti-
mately led to a rediscovery of its original intent. As mentioned above,
various calls had been made for a return to a simplified summit.
During the fourth cycle, efforts were made to implement change so
that after the profligacy of the 2000 Okinawa Summit and the tragedy
of the 2001 Genoa Summit, the 2002 Kananaskis Summit brought the
summit process full circle by returning it to its roots as an intimate
forum for the frank exchange of opinions. However, this is not to
suggest simply a return to the ad hoc, informal, economic summit of
Rambouillet. Rather, new initiatives were introduced to make the
summit process more open and transparent. Most salient amongst
these initiatives was the policy of “outreach” – the invitation of a
 History and Development 13
range of leaders of developing countries and NGOs to participate in
the summit process.
Before the 1996 Lyon Summit took place, a special summit called
for by Boris Yeltsin took place in Moscow from 19 to 20 April on
nuclear safety. The meeting agreed upon a global ban on nuclear
testing through the promotion of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-
Ban Treaty and measures to ensure the safety of nuclear power plants
and the safe disposal of radioactive waste. The Lyon Summit followed
two months later and continued the momentum towards the reform of
international institutions by inviting the heads of the UN, IMF, World
Bank, and WTO. It also pushed debt relief further up the summit’s
agenda – a trajectory it would continue to follow at future summits.
With Yeltsin’s participation in much of the economic discussion, the
1997 Denver Summit was also known as the “Summit of the Eight”
but the term “G8” was not used due to lingering Japanese opposition.
Assistance for Africa was placed high on the agenda but resulted in
little in the way of concrete pledges.
The 1998 Birmingham Summit was the first summit to be officially
called the G8 and continued the trend of hosting the summit away
from the host country’s capital. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair realized
his predecessor John Major’s goals of stripping down the summit to a
more basic and informal meeting by arranging leaders-only meetings
and a great deal of the leaders’ time was taken with a discussion of
international crime. Birmingham was targeted by Jubilee 2000, a UK
church-based NGO, with the goal of placing African debt relief on the
agenda – an issue Blair was eager to address. The Jubilee 2000
campaign shifted its focus to the Cologne Summit in 1999, encouraged
by the election of the more sympathetic German Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder. The summit itself, continuing the trend of separating the
leaders’ and ministers’ meetings, centred around discussion of African
debt relief and the continuing promotion of the Highly Indebted Poor
Countries programme but failed to realize the complete cancellation of
African debt that Jubilee 2000 was demanding. However, this discus-
sion was not to the exclusion of other pressing issues, such as conflict
resolution in Kosovo and Indian nuclear testing.
The 2000 Okinawa Summit was the first Japanese summit to be held
outside of Tokyo and continued the new leaders-only format instigated
at Birmingham. The continuing Jubilee 2000 campaign targeted the
summit once again, and although the Japanese government invited
numerous African leaders to a pre-summit meeting with the G8 leaders,
the concrete results were disappointing after the anticipation of the
previous year’s summit. The Japanese government placed the emphasis
14 History and Development
very much on the role of Information and Communications Technology
(ICT) and summit discussions resulted in the creation of a Digital
Opportunities Taskforce (DOT force) that aimed at bridging the digital
divide between rich and poor countries.
The 2001 Genoa Summit was marred by violent demonstrations, a
heavy-handed police crackdown and the death of one Italian protester.
As regards summit discussions, Africa continued to occupy the summi-
teers’ minds and the Italian hosts continued the process of outreach by
hosting a dinner for African leaders and the heads of international
institutions. A “Marshall Plan for Africa” (in Blair’s words) was
announced to relieve poverty, address the threat of AIDS, and
promote democracy. The emphasis at Genoa on Africa, ICT, AIDS,
and other infectious diseases was consistent with previous discussions
at Okinawa. The 2002 Kananaskis Summit concluded this fourth
round of summitry and was the first summit to be held after the
terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. In response, the leaders
retreated to the mountains of Alberta, Canada and unsurprisingly anti-
terrorism measures and the threat of WMD were high on the agenda.
Russia was formally integrated into the G8 and accorded the right to
host the 2006 summit (Germany kindly making way in the hosting
order). Africa continued to remain on the agenda as it had done
throughout this cycle and an Africa Action Plan was announced.
Bayne’s assessment of this summit cycle highlights debt and devel-
opment (1996), Russian participation (1997), the creation of the G8
and crime (1998), debt, Kosovo and finance (1999), outreach and IT
(2000), infectious diseases and Africa (2001), and Africa and the
disposal of WMD (2002).20 This cycle demonstrates both internal
reform through the integration of Russia and outreach to non-G8
members but also the roots of the current concern with Africa and a
significant shift into new areas.

The Fifth Cycle of Summitry, 2003–

The first three summits in the fifth cycle of summitry – Evian in 2003,
Sea Island in 2004, and Gleneagles in 2005 – saw a continuation of the
remarkable consistency in personnel that began at the 2001 Genoa
Summit, with Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin being the only
newcomer to the summit table during this period (see Box 2.2). Topics
for discussion also demonstrated a degree of consistency by centring
upon African aid and debt relief, terrorism, and environmental issues.
The 2003 Evian Summit began this new cycle of a genuine G8 with
Russia fully integrated. However, it also continued the process of
 History and Development 15
outreach to non-G8 members and included China as part of a
dialogue meeting for the first time. Media attention was placed on the
divisions that had emerged between Continental Europe and the
Anglo-American allies over the War in Iraq of earlier that same year.
Although water was cited as a top priority in the run-up to the
summit, there was little in terms of outcomes. The summit provided
more of an opportunity for bridge-building than discord. The Bush
administration’s ambivalence towards multilateralism was a cause for
concern in the run-up to the 2004 Sea Island Summit. Although little
effort was made to bring civil society groups into the summit process,
Bush used the G8 to continue the process of outreach and take the
initiative in placing the Middle East and the promotion of democracy
and economic reform on the agenda. Expectations that a deal on
African debt relief could be reached were never higher than during the
run-up to the 2005 Gleneagles Summit, although, as is clear from the
above, this was an issue that the G8 and Blair in particular had been
contending with since the previous round of summitry. The result was
an agreement amongst the leaders to cancel the debts of the poorest
countries and provide US $50 billion of extra aid by 2010. The summit
(and the pressure that had been exerted on the G8 by the Make
Poverty History campaign) was overshadowed by a series of terrorist
attacks on London on the second day of the summit. However, if the
goal was to disrupt the summit then these suicide bombings failed as
the leaders declared their unity and for the first time the G8 leaders
backed up their summit pledges by physically and publicly putting
their signature to them.
One interesting feature of this cycle, which will be discussed in
Chapter 2 in more detail, is the factoring of Russia into the summit
cycle so that it hosted its first summit in St Petersburg in July 2006.
Speculation was rife in the run-up to the summit as to which issues
Russia, as host, would place on the agenda. However, in the end, the
three issues of energy, infectious diseases, and education were identi-
fied as the core issues. Energy made sense considering Russia’s national
interests and the increase in energy prices in the first half of 2006.
Infectious diseases were of concern as a result of the spread of avian
influenza and found a precedence in their discussion at the 2000
Okinawa Summit. Education was something of a surprise but harked
back to the 2002 Kananaskis Summit. However, the discussion of
terrorism appeared to be unavoidable in light not only of previous
summits and contemporary concerns but, also, Russia’s own domestic
insurgencies. What is more, the pressure built up in the run-up to the
2005 Gleneagles Summit for the G8 to resolve Africa’s problems was
16 History and Development
unlikely to go away and has consistently appeared on the G8 agenda
during this and the previous cycle.21 Although not addressed explicitly
at St Petersburg, it is likely that the Germans will return to this issue at
the 2007 summit.
Sir Nicholas Bayne highlights the achievements during this cycle as
being outreach and reconciliation (2003), the Middle East (2004), and
then Africa, engagement with civil society and non-G8 members, and
climate change (2005).22
Although this review of the G8’s history has been, by necessity,
brief, some clear successes and miserable failures are evident. One way
of summarizing this history and making immediate sense of its patchy
record is through the grades that have been awarded to each summit
since by Bayne (see Box 1.2). Although hardly scientific, these grades
are decided on the basis of the agreements reached at each summit that
foster cooperation and concrete post-summit policy changes in specific
issue-areas. No judgement is made on the success or failure, rights or
wrongs of the policy; rather, the fact that international coordination of
varying degrees was fostered is the deciding factor. The grades also
represent the evaluation of one of the longest-serving and best-
informed of summit-watchers.
In addition, this chapter has demonstrated a number of themes that
define the G8: an original emphasis on resolving specific macro-

Box 1.2 Success and Failure of Summits, 1975–2005

France US UK Germany Japan Italy Canada

Cycle 1, A- D B- A B+ C+ C
1975–81

Cycle 2, C B C- E B+ D C-
1982–88

Cycle 3, B+ D B- D C+ C B+
1989–95

Cycle 4, B C- B+ B+ B B B+
1996–2002

Cycle 5, C+ C+
2003–5

Source: Bayne 2005: 18; 214.

 History and Development 17
economic issues that was soon complemented by the discussion of a
wide range of other issues; the goal of creating an informal grouping
of leaders that was most evident and successful during the first, fourth,
and fifth cycles; a forum for initial discussion that then creates or dele-
gates to other institutions more suited for policy implementation; the
importance of its communiqués, statements, and declarations as the
mouthpiece of the summit. These themes, and others, will be taken up
in more detail in the chapters that follow.
2 Organization and Functioning

This chapter will introduce the key players in the summit process –
prime ministers/presidents, a range of ministers (foreign, finance, trade,
education, and so on), and the key role of each individual leader’s assis-
tant, the sherpa, supported by sous-sherpas, and political directors –
before then proceeding to outline the calendar of annual summit prepa-
rations, the evolution of their agenda, and post-summit follow-ups.
Thereafter, the gamut of summit documentation (communiqué,
chairman’s statement and summary, ministerial documentation, and
special statements) will be explored as the primary sources of informa-
tion on the G7/8 and its chief mouthpiece. In addition, the promises
included therein and the level of compliance amongst G7/8 members
will be highlighted. Finally, the G7/8’s interaction with and relationship
to other mechanisms of global governance – the UN, the World Bank,
the IMF, the WTO, and regional organizations such as the EU – will be
established. In light of the potted history of the summit in the previous
chapter, this chapter underscores the point made in the Introduction that
the G7/8 is neither an international organization nor a formal institu-
tion. Thus, it differs considerably from the other mechanisms of global
governance covered in this series and can be more easily understood as a
Concert. In particular, a modern-day application of the centuries-old
idea explored in the previous chapter: the Concert of Europe.

Summit Participants
The most important and high-profile participants in the summit
process are obviously the leaders of the G8 countries. The original idea
behind the summit was to bring together the individual leaders without
their associated bureaucracies to meet in an informal atmosphere so
that a consensus of like-minded politicians could emerge. However,
this ideal of a “fireside chat” was never likely to materialize and from
 Organization and Functioning 19
the very first summit the leaders came accompanied by their foreign
and finance ministers until the practice was discontinued at the 1998
Birmingham Summit.
If the goal of the summit was to create a sense of intimacy amongst
the leaders of the leading economies, then a certain degree of consis-
tency in attendance at the summit would appear to be a necessity.
During the period 1975 to 2005, as is demonstrated in Box 2.1, the
leading summit participant was Helmut Kohl, who attended sixteen
consecutive summits from the 1983 Williamsburg to the 1998
Birmingham Summit. French President François Mitterrand and UK
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher also represent long-time summit
participants (and in the case of Thatcher, she is one of only two
women to participate in the summit meetings of G8 leaders during this
period). Obviously the length of attendance at the summit is a reflec-
tion of the political system of the country in question. At the opposite
end of the spectrum lie Italy and Japan. Italy’s most consistent partici-
pant has been Silvio Berlusconi (six summits) and Japan’s has been
Nakasone Yasuhiro and Koizumi Junichirō (both five summits). Italian
and Japanese participation demonstrate respectively the high degree of
change and flux in the political system (thirteen Italian prime ministers
have attended since 1975) and the relative unimportance of the posi-
tion of prime minister (fourteen Japanese prime ministers have been in
attendance). Somewhere in the middle are US presidents, who attend
either four summits (Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush), or eight
summits (Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and most likely George W.
Bush) unless they are impeached, assassinated or retire.
However, it is not just length of service that is important.
Consistency in attendance needs to exist across the participating coun-
tries in order to create the esprit de corps at the heart of the G8. Box
2.2 demonstrates the two periods during which the same group of
faces attended the summit on a regular basis: 1) the mid-1980s when
Mitterrand, Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl, and Nakasone were all in power;
and 2) more recently since 2001 when Chirac, Bush, Blair, Schröder,
Koizumi, and Berlusconi have been in power. The latter period ought
to be regarded as something of a renaissance in the relevance and
success of the summit. Interestingly, however, the former period is
often regarded as one of atrophy in the summit process, leading one to
wonder whether the goal of fostering intimacy amongst the G8 leaders
translates into successful summit outcomes.
It has been known on a number of occasions for the G8 leaders to
use their position as chair and host of the G8 to enhance their
domestic position, often with one eye on an upcoming election. As
Box 2.1 Summit Attendance, 1975–2005

Leader Times attended Times attended Total

as elected in other
head of ministerial
government position

Helmut Kohl (Germany) 16 0 16

François Mitterrand 14 0 14
(France)

Margaret Thatcher (UK) 12 0 12

Jacques Chirac (France) 11 2 13
Jean Chrétien (Canada) 10 1 11

Tony Blair (UK) 9 0 9

Bill Clinton (U.S.) 8 0 8
Brian Mulroney (Canada) 8 0 8

Ronald Reagan (U.S.) 8 0 8

Helmut Schmidt (Germany) 8 0 8

Pierre Trudeau (Canada) 8 0 8

Gerhard Schröder 7 0 7
(Germany)
John Major (UK) 6 1 7
Silvio Berlusconi (Italy)* 6 1 7

Vladimir Putin (Russia)** 6 0 6

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing 6 0 6
(France)
Giulio Andreotti (Italy) 5 6 11

George W. Bush (U.S.) 5 0 5

Koizumi Junichirô (Japan) 5 0 5
Nakasone Yasuhiro (Japan) 5 0 5

George H. W. Bush (U.S.) 4 0 4

(continued on next page)

Leader Times Times attended Total
attended as in other
elected head ministerial
of government position

Jimmy Carter (U.S.) 4 0 4

Hashimoto Ryûtarô (Japan) 3 4 7
James Callaghan (UK) 3 1 4
Bettino Craxi (Italy) 3 0 3
Romano Prodi (Italy) 3 0 3
Boris Yeltsin (Russia)** 3 0 3
Miyazawa Kiichi (Japan) 2 6 8
Giuliano Amato (Italy) 2 2 4
Amintore Fanfani (Italy) 2 0 2
Gerald Ford (U.S.) 2 0 2
Fukuda Takeo (Japan) 2 0 2
Kaifu Toshiki (Japan) 2 0 2
Ciriaco de Mita (Italy) 2 0 2
Miki Takeo (Japan) 2 0 2
Aldo Moro (Italy) 2 0 2
Murayama Tomiichi 2 0 2
(Japan)
Giovanni Spadolini (Italy) 2 0 2
Suzuki Zenkô (Japan) 2 0 2
Paul Martin (Canada) 2 0 2
Joe Clark (Canada) 1 6 7
Lamberto Dini (Italy) 1 6 7
Takeshita Noboru (Japan) 1 5 6
Carlo Azeglio Ciampi 1 4 5
(Italy)
Obuchi Keizô (Japan) 1 2 3
Ôhira Masayoshi (Japan) 1 2 3
Mori Yoshirô (Japan) 1 1 2

(continued on next page)

22 Organization and Functioning

Leader Times Times attended Total

attended as in other
elected ministerial
head of position
government

Mori Yoshirô (Japan) 1 1 2

Uno Sôsuke (Japan) 1 1 2
Massimo d’Alema (Italy) 1 0 1
Kim Campbell (Canada) 1 0 1
Francesco Cossiga (Italy) 1 0 1
Harold Wilson (UK) 1 0 1

* Silvio Berlusconi attended the 2002 Kananaskis Summit as both Prime

Minister and Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs
** Russia participation began officially from the 1997 Denver Summit of the Eight

mentioned in the previous chapter, this was one reason that US

President Gerald Ford called for a second summit in 1976 at San Juan
although it resulted in very little. The effect of using the summit in this
way has been referred to as “the tailwind provided by the summit.”1
Equally, the leader might be forced to respond to an influential
domestic pressure group. For example, both George W. Bush and
Jacques Chirac have responded to farming interests in their own coun-
tries and thereby stalled agreements on international trade and
protectionism. Blair and Schröder were sensitive to the Jubilee 2000
campaign for African debt relief in the run-up to their respective
hosting of the 1998 Birmingham and 1999 Cologne summits.
Although the G8 leaders are the most readily identifiable of
summit participants, the summit process has deepened to embrace
regular meetings at the ministerial level. The leaders were accompa-
nied by their foreign and finance ministers at the first summit in
1975 and regularly thereafter until 1998. It was still only relatively
recently that this aspect of participation was addressed by Tony
Blair’s reforms introduced from the 1998 Birmingham Summit
onwards. With the goal of returning the main summit meeting of
leaders to the idealized intimacy and informality of a fireside chat,
Blair separated these ministerial meetings both geographically and
temporally from the leaders’ meeting. As a result, since 1998, foreign
Box 2.2 Overlap in Attendance 1975–2005
Box 2.2 Continued
 Organization and Functioning 25
and finance ministers have met a few weeks in advance of the
leaders’ meeting.
Beyond the key foreign and finance ministries, the G8’s work has
expanded across other ministerial remits: education, employment,
energy, environment, justice, labour, and trade, to mention but a few.
The most high-profile of these meetings is probably that of the G7
finance ministers who meet without Russia three to four times a year.2
As mentioned above, the foreign ministers meet annually before the
leaders’ meeting but can also meet on an ad hoc basis when necessary.
Since its creation at the 1981 Ottawa Summit, the Quad meeting of the
USTR, EU Trade Commissioner, and Canadian and Japanese trade
ministers has met three to four times a year. Environment ministers have
met on an annual basis since 1994, employment ministers since 1996,
and energy, health and labour ministers meet on an irregular basis. In
addition, a series of ad hoc meetings have taken place as is required. For
example, the G7 foreign and finance ministers met in Tokyo in April
1993 to decide an aid package to Russia. A G8 education ministers’
meeting took place in Okinawa in April 2000 and a meeting of drug
experts took place in Miyazaki, Japan in December 2000.
One key development in the summit process was the emergence of
the position of a personal assistant to each leader, who is called the
“sherpa” after the Nepalese mountain guide that leads mountaineers
to the top of a summit. In order to guide their leaders to the summit
meeting, the sherpas meet on a regular basis during the year in order
to establish the agenda of the upcoming summit, the wording of state-
ments and communiqués, and on occasion have met after the summit
to oversee the implementation of pledges. Usually the sherpa is a top
bureaucrat from the foreign ministry of each respective country and
will serve for more than one summit. However, this is not an estab-
lished rule. US sherpas have come from the White House staff and
German sherpas have come from the finance ministry. She (there have
only ever been five female sherpas) is assisted by two sous-sherpa,
usually representing the finance and foreign ministries.
These are the main actors in the actual summit negotiations. However,
a number of other actors are also involved with and shape our under-
standing of the summit. Recently, as part of the policy of outreach,
non-G8 members have been invited to the summit table. In addition,
protest and civil society groups have targeted the summit since its very
beginning and over recent years have been included in the policy of
outreach. Both of these groups will be discussed in more detail in the
following chapters. The world’s media are an important conduit through
which the summit is understood by the peoples of the world and the
26 Organization and Functioning
press media in its broadsheet form have often carried each summit’s
communiqué on its pages. Originally only a few hundred media represen-
tatives attended the 1975 Rambouillet Summit but preparations were
made to welcome 4,000 journalists to Okinawa in 2000. Thus, the media
centre has come to be an important facility at the summit that provides a
base of operations not only for journalists but also a point of reference
for civil society groups. These media centres have at times been kept at
arm’s length from the summit proceedings, as at the 2002 Kananaskis
Summit, or have been included within the summit venue’s perimeters, as
at the 2005 Gleneagles Summit. Finally, the leaders’ wives (and some-
times even their children) have often accompanied their husbands to the
summit and have come together to conduct a number of social and polit-
ical activities from performing the Japanese tea ceremony to conducting a
day-and-a-half political round table at the 2004 Sea Island Summit.

Preparing the Summit

Preparations for the summit begin some time in advance at both the
international, regional, national, and local levels. The key role in the
official preparations is played by the sherpa of the host country and
his counterparts, who meet at regular intervals in the run-up to the
summit. The summit schedule is very much a result of these prepara-
tions and the individual host’s wishes; a typical running order can be
seen in Box 2.3. This was the predicted schedule before the opening of
the 2005 Gleneagles Summit and, although disrupted by terrorist
attacks on 7 July 2005, proceeded by and large as planned.
It is evident that with many summits’ schedules, there is a certain
amount of ceremony and a number of functions are involved, but at the
same time it represents quite an intensive period of time for the leaders
to be in the same room as each other. The degree of bunking down
together and informal interaction is such that it has been noted that
Blair bumped into Bush at 6:30 a.m. in the gym at the 2002 Kananaskis
Summit.3 There has also been some fluctuation in the length of the
summit. Summits in the first cycle tended to last two days but thereafter
have generally spanned three days. However, an attempt was made to
pare down the proceedings to a two-day summit at Kananaskis.
Preparing for the summit is not limited to the remit of discussion
and the possible pledges. A degree of festivity can also accompany the
summit, as seen in the brewing of beers specific to each G8 leader by a
local pub before the 1998 Birmingham Summit or the concerts that
took place in the run-up to the 2000 Okinawa Summit and 2005
Gleneagles Summit. In addition, education campaigns are often
Box 2.3 Summit Working Schedule – Gleneagles Summit, 6–8
July 2005

Wednesday, 6 July 2005

11:00 onwards G8 leaders arrive at Gleneagles Hotel

19:00 Pre-dinner drinks at Gleneagles Hotel
19:30 The Queen and Prince Philip arrive
19:40 The Queen and Prince Philip greet G8 leaders and
spouses
19:55 Group photograph
20:00 Dinner for G8 leaders and spouses hosted
by The Queen
22:00 The Queen and Prince Philip depart Gleneagles

Thursday, 7 July 2005

08:20 onwards Leaders from Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and
South Africa, and heads of the International
Energy Agency, International Monetary Fund,
United Nations, World Bank, and World Trade
Organization arrive at Gleneagles Hotel
09:40 Prime Minister greets G8 leaders individually and
formally welcomes them to G8 Summit at the
Glendevon Terrace
09:55 Pre-meeting of G8 leaders in the Glendevon Room
10:00-11:30 First working session on global economy
(including trade and oil) and climate change
12:10 Pre-meeting with G8 leaders of leaders from
Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa,
and heads of the IEA, IMF, UN, World Bank,
and WTO at the Strathbearn Restaurant
12:15–13:15 Meeting of G8 leaders with leaders from Brazil,
China, India, Mexico, and South Africa and heads
of the IEA, IMF, UN, World Bank, and WTO,
opened by presentations by invited guests
13:20 Group photograph with the G8 leaders, leaders
from Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South

(continued on next page)

 Africa, and heads of the IEA, IMF, UN, World
Bank, and WTO, at the Glendevon Terrace
13:30–15:00 Working lunch with the G8 leaders, leaders from
Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa,
and heads of the IEA, IMF, UN, World Bank, and
WTO, opened by presentations by invited guests
16:15 onwards Departures of leaders from Brazil, China, India,
Mexico, and South Africa, and heads of the IEA,
IMF, UN, World Bank, and WTO from
Gleneagles Hotel
16:50 Group photograph of G8 leaders at Glendevon
Terrace
17:00-18:00 Second working session on regional issues (Middle
East) and broader Middle East and North Africa
20:15–22:00 Working dinner on regional issues, counter-prolif-
eration, nuclear issues, foreign policy issues

Friday, 8 July 2005

08:35 onwards Leaders from Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria,
Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania and heads of
the African Union Commission, IMF, UN, and
the World Bank arrive at the Gleneagles Hotel
10:00-11:15 Third working session on Africa
11:25 Pre-meeting with G8 leaders of leaders from
Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South
Africa, and Tanzania, and heads of the African
Union Commission, IMF, UN, and the World
Bank at the Strathearn Restaurant
11:30-12:45 Meeting with G8 leaders, leaders from Algeria,
Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa,
and Tanzania, and heads of the African Union
Commission, IMF, UN, and the World Bank,
opened by presentations by invited guests
12:50 Group photograph of G8 leaders, leaders from
Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South
Africa, and Tanzania, and heads of the African
Union Commission, IMF, UN, and the World
Bank and Glendevon Terrace

(continued on next page)

 Organization and Functioning 29

13:00-15:00 Working lunch with G8 leaders, leaders from

Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South
Africa, and Tanzania, and heads of the African
Union Commission, IMF, UN, and the World Bank
15:15 Prime Minister Tony Blair holds final G8 press
conference
15:45 G8 leaders hold individual press conferences
16:00 G8 leaders, leaders from Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana,
Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania, and
heads of the African Union Commission, IMF,
UN, and the World Bank depart the Gleneagles
Hotel

Based on http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/2005gleneagles/agenda.html

conducted to inform locals, non-locals, and visitors of the history and

purpose of the summit. In addition, both the choice of venue and the
schedule of the summit are important considerations. As regards the
summit venue, G7/8 meetings are often held in (quite literally) palatial
surroundings, such as the châteaux of Rambouillet and Versailles in
France, the Geihinkan (modelled on the palace of Versailles) in Tokyo
and the Ducal Palace in Genoa. However, other buildings have acted
as venues, such as the prime minister’s residence in Downing Street,
London, UK, the largest log cabin in the world in Montebello,
Canada, and Rice University in Houston in the US. Hotels have often
been utilized as venues, including both pre-existing hotels, such as the
Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, and hotels and conference facilities
purpose-built at great expense for the summit, such as the Bankoku
Shinryōkan in Okinawa, Japan. The choice of summit venue is not as
peripheral to the summit’s proceedings as it may seem at first glance.
Considering the original goal of the summit was to create an atmo-
sphere conducive to discussion and intimacy, a comfortable venue is a
necessity. In this light, even the food served at the summit and the cere-
monial functions attended by the leaders’ wives can also be regarded as
playing an important diplomatic role in contributing to the success or
failure of the summit.
From the host government’s point of view, the summit can be a
source of national pride and an indication of a country’s contribution
and commitment to international society. For example, Japanese
prime ministers campaigned from the very first summit onwards to
30 Organization and Functioning
secure the right to host the summit. The 1989 Paris Summit coincided
with the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. From the point
of view of the local communities, hosting the summit has often been
regarded as a potential fillip to the local economy. On the one hand,
cities have petitioned their governments for the chance to host the
summit and have utilized the media to raise their profile both nation-
ally and internationally. On the other hand, politicians have presented
the honour of hosting the summit to the cities in question as a present
of sorts. For example, before he was forced to resign (for the first
time), UK Home Secretary David Blunkett selected his home town of
Sheffield to host the G8 Home and Justice Ministers’ meeting and the
announcement was welcomed by the local council as a money-spin-
ning and profile-raising opportunity. The trend in recent years of
hosting the summit outside of the capital city has only contributed to
this. It is believed that the 1995 Halifax Summit promoted a positive
image of the city and region and led to an influx of tourists and new
residents. The 2000 Okinawa Summit was used by the locals to both
promote Okinawa as a holiday destination and highlight the dispro-
portionate concentration of US military bases on the islands.
However, hosting the summit has also been regarded as a source of
annoyance and dislocation as a result of disruption to economic
activity, road closures, and violent protests.
No record of the cost of the summit is kept beyond newspaper
reporting of the time, but it can vary wildly. The most expensive summit
was the 2000 Okinawa Summit at US $750 million, roughly 100 times
more expensive than the preceding 1999 Cologne Summit. This
provoked vociferous criticism of a process whose concrete results are
often difficult to discern but whose extravagance is all too evident. The
2001 Genoa Summit was thought to cost US $225 million in total and
the 2002 Kananaskis Summit cost US $200 million to host with secu-
rity being the major costing.4 In recent years, as a result of the threat of
terrorism, the cost of policing the summit has increased considerably, to
the point where this is now the main budgetary concern.
Security has always been a concern in preparing for the summit and
from its earliest meetings the summit presented itself as a target for all
manner of protests. The opening day of the 1976 San Juan Summit
was targeted by 15,000 protesters calling for the independence of
Puerto Rico from the US and the 1979 Tokyo Summit suffered from a
certain amount of disruption as a result of Japanese Communist and
Anarchist groups.5 In recent years, the demonstrations of anti-global-
ization protesters of all shades at the meetings of a range of
institutions of global governance have become ubiquitous. The disrup-
 Organization and Functioning 31
tion caused to the meeting of the WTO in Seattle in 1999 remains the
most resonant example of recent protest; however, the riots at the 2001
Genoa Summit and the heavy-handed police response resulting in the
death of Italian protester Carlo Giuliani remained as the lasting
impression in the popular imagination of this summit. Thus, how to
handle the inevitable accompanying protest – both peaceful and
violent – has become an important consideration in the selection of a
summit venue. Connected with this, since the terrorist attacks of 11
September 2001 on New York and Washington, it could be said that
the G8 is now the biggest terrorist target in the world today. It may
seem Cassandra-like to warn of a single bomb killing eight of the
world’s most important leaders but it was rumoured that al-Qaeda
plotted to fly a hijacked plane into the Ducal Palace in Genoa.
Moreover, the London bombings of 7 July 2005 were thought to be
timed to coincide with the 2005 Gleneagles Summit. Thus, with one
eye in the post-9/11 terrorist threat and one eye on creating a space for,
but containing, legitimate protest, security has become a top priority
in preparing for the summit. The initial reaction was to move the
summit venue to a remote and inaccessible venue – the 2002
Kananaskis Summit was held in the mountains of Alberta, Canada;
the 2004 Sea Island Summit was held on an island resort off the coast
of Georgia, US; and the 2005 Gleneagles Summit was held in a hotel
surrounded by a specially constructed security fence. This trend of
hosting summits away from the capital and in inaccessible locales is
likely to continue in the future but does raise crucial questions as
regards the transparency and legitimacy of the summit process, in
addition to conflicting with the constitutional and legal aspects of the
host country. The Canadian constitution, for example, includes the
right not only to protest but also to have one’s protest heard. If
demonstrations are contained to nearby conurbations it is unlikely that
this right can be fulfilled.

Summit Documentation and Post-Summit Compliance

The G8 deliberately has no formal decision-making mechanism or
ability to enforce decisions reached; in fact, US proposals to include
these functions were deliberately vetoed prior to the first summit.6
Rather, the G8 can encourage or exhort through its public declara-
tions. However, even this practice has not been supported unanimously
and the release of the first joint declaration at the 1975 Rambouillet
Summit was initially opposed by France and the UK but supported by
Germany, Japan, and the US.
32 Organization and Functioning
There is a wide range of summit documentation including the
centrepiece of the final communiqué (previously also known as the
economic declaration) released at the end of each summit and covering
all aspects of the summit’s discussions. The length of the communiqué
has varied over the years. The 1975 Rambouillet communiqué
consisted of fifteen articles and just over 1,000 words. By the time of
the 1990 Houston Summit the length of the communiqué had
increased seven-fold. The Chair’s summary at the 2004 Sea Island
Summit was of similar length but was supported by a host of
supporting statements and action plans released on an almost daily
basis. The communiqué is partly the product of the sherpas’ regular
meetings during the year but also incorporates eleventh-hour decisions
and last-minute changes in phrasing. This can be seen in the fact that
the 1995 Halifax Summit’s communiqué was leaked to the press before
its official release but differed from the document that was eventually
issued. Below the communiqué, a political declaration, action plan/s
and/or chairman’s statement are often issued to address a specific issue
like hijacking, regional conflicts, and East–West relations. Other docu-
ments include responses by the presidency on behalf of the G8, such
as Tony Blair’s response to the Jubilee 2000 campaign at the 1998
Birmingham Summit. Finally, transcripts of the press conferences
conducted after the summit by each leader are also released.
The language used in summit documentation depends on the host
country. It has been suggested that the Canadians, French, and
Germans prefer simple, accessible, and shorter communiqués.7
However, as mentioned in the Preface, the language of summit docu-
mentation can be uninspiring and vague at times. This may reflect the
inconclusive nature of the summit discussions.
Nevertheless, summit declarations matter in that

[l]ong after the leaders have flown home, their diplomats in

dialogue with difficult foreigners, officials engaged in bureaucratic
battles with recalcitrant colleagues in other departments, and
leaders tempted to backslide in the parochial heat of the political
moment, wave these summit documents at their adversaries, have
them waved back at them in turn, and see the provisions of those
documents having real, continuing political force. Cheat they can
and do, but in the cozy world of summitry, they are inhibited from
becoming repeat offenders by the knowledge that they are likely to
have their transgressions noticed, and by the certainty that they
will have to confront, face to face, their powerful peers in less than
one year’s time.8
 Organization and Functioning 33
In more popularist terms, this inhibition from offending repeatedly
was captured at the Live 8 concert in London before the 2005
Gleneagles Summit, when the pop star Sting sang “I’ll be watching
you” as faces of the eight leaders were projected onto a backdrop.
Summit statements also provide guidance to the other multilateral
mechanisms that provide global governance:

Summit decisions are thus able to bite deeply, and effectively, into
the intractable reaches of domestic politics and international insti-
tution-building, some of which have long remained immune to the
ordinary diplomatic processes of the post-Westphalian world.
They can and do impose discipline on the domestic economies of
those powerful countries beyond the effective reach of the old
international institutions formally charged with this purpose. And
they define the parameters, priorities, principles and work
programs for the international institutions of the previous two
generations. In short, these texts are not just pious expressions of
passing politeness from preoccupied politicians but documents
that matter in the real world of politics and economics at the
national, international and global level alike.9

In other words, they demonstrate that the leaders of the world’s leading
economies have reached an agreement that can range from a “soft
consensus” to a “fully, negotiated binding settlement.”10 In enforcing
this range of pledges of promises, the G8 can implore, encourage, dele-
gate or berate fellow members, non-G8 members, international
organizations, and so on, to change their behaviour and comply but it
does not have any legal basis to do so. Herein lies the only mechanism
by which compliance with summit pledges can be ensured moral
weight. In this context, it would appear intuitive to equate compliance
to the pledges included in summit declarations with a commitment to
the goals and successful functioning of the summit process. To this end,
detailed research has highlighted various aspects of compliance with
the pledges made at the G7/8 summits. This research is ongoing and has
been conducted on the basis of individual G8 members’ behaviour in
line with what has been promised after individual summits, over
extended periods of time, and on specific issues. In terms of G8
members’ commitment to the promises they have made at their summit
meetings, the results demonstrate something of a mixed bag at best.11
During the period 1975 to 1989, the UK was the most compliant
member insofar as it fulfilled the pledges it made at the summits
during this period 41.3 per cent of the time. The UK was followed by
34 Organization and Functioning
Canada (40.9 per cent), and Germany (34.6 per cent). Only these three
members were above the average compliance rate of 30.7 per cent.
From 1996 to 2001, the UK remained the most compliant G8 participant
with its average rate of compliance rated at 63 per cent. Canada
remained second (53 per cent), Italy and the US tied for third (51 per
cent), and Japan came in fourth (48 per cent), the only other summit
member above the average compliance rate of 45 per cent.12 What this
demonstrates is that certain members (the UK and Canada) have repu-
tations as participants who stick to their G8 pledges. Other members
(France) might regard their role of handmaiden of the summit proudly
but fail to translate this into the implementation of promises. Other
participants (Japan and the US) demonstrate a more inconsistent and
evolving relationship with the G7/8 summit process.
One of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s interesting innovations has
been the physical signing of the communiqué by the G8 leaders and his
accompanying declaration that they were “held by this, bound by
this.”13 Whether or not this practice is effective in fostering compliance
and a sense of obligation remains to be seen.

Post-Summit Developments and the G8’s Position in Global

Governance
In the words of Bayne, “the best future approach for the summits is
that of catalyst, providing impulses to wider international institutions
but not trying to do their work for them, either from inside or
outside.”14 Thus, the way in which the G8 functions in the provision of
global governance can only be truly understood in relation to other
organizations, institutions, and mechanisms.
As mentioned above, the summit’s communiqué and related docu-
ments are its only mouthpiece and have been used as a clarion call to
coordinate these institutions. For example, the final summit commu-
niqués have repeatedly highlighted the work of the UN and in turn
have called for the streamlining of its functions and the reform of its
institutions, the evolution of a concerted anti-terrorist policy, and the
development of preventive diplomacy and its peacekeeping operations.
In addition to this “gentle prodding,” the G7/8 has replaced the UN at
times as the international community’s institution of choice. It was the
G7, not the UN, which played a central role in coordinating Germany
and Japan’s financial support of the Gulf War of 1990–91, in addition
to ending the Kosovo conflict of 1999. It has also been argued that the
G8 is more representative of the contemporary great powers than the
UN Security Council (UNSC) due to the inclusion of Germany and
 Organization and Functioning 35
Japan. Especially during the US-led war on Iraq of March 2003, which
was instigated with little regard for the UN, it was suggested by some
that real influence and authority was, or in the future will be, trans-
ferred to the G7/8.15 However, rather than constituting a zero-sum
game, the G7/8 and the UN can be seen to complement each other –
the G8 is, after all, an opportunity for national leaders to meet infor-
mally and discuss chiefly economic issues; whereas the UNSC is a
highly formalized meeting of ambassadors concerned chiefly with
security issues. In this light, it would make more sense for the two
groupings to engage in closer dialogue.
Equally, the G8 has sought to promote in its annual communiqués
and declarations both the work of, and coordination amongst, interna-
tional institutions and organizations both horizontally and vertically.
At the first summit in 1975, UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson claimed
that a glut of international bodies were concerned with the same issues
that were discussed in the summit process and that the system needed to
be streamlined – an initiative that was not taken up immediately there-
after. However, at the 1994 Naples Summit, the member states came to
agree upon the need for a review of these institutions. This call was
more effective in setting the ball rolling and at Halifax the following
year the summit agenda focussed on international financial issues and
recommended a number of reforms in the functioning of the IMF,
especially as regards its early-warning mechanisms, and the World
Bank, especially as regards the most effective use of its resources.
However, the objective of the G7/8 member states has not been to
pursue radical reform of these mechanisms of global governance, but
rather “to protect the existing system and make it work better.”16 To
this end, the G7/8 has supported the work of GATT and the WTO by
regularly emphasizing the rapid conclusion of trade negotiations in its
communiqués and in its creation of the Trade Ministers’ Quadrilateral
(more commonly known as the “Quad”) at the 1981 Ottawa Summit to
meet three to four times a year. These initiatives have been credited
with some success, particularly in exerting pressure on the conclusion
of the Uruguay Round. In addition, formal and informal techniques
have been used to link the G7/8 with the OECD, the most salient
example being the practice from 1976 of holding the OECD Council
just prior to the annual summit meeting.
Regional organizations, such as the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations and the Organization of American States, have also taken up
the guidance and political will displayed by the G8 in combating issues
such as terrorism. Other participants brought into the summit process
have included business groups such as the International Chamber of
36 Organization and Functioning
Commerce, the Business and Industry Advisory Committee, and the
Trade Union Advisory Committee of the OECD. The participation
not only of state actors but also non-G8 and non-state actors is part of
a policy of “outreach” that will be discussed in following chapters.
Within the framework of the G8, institutional depth is also evident
as the number of “Gs” has increased. The creation of the Quad has
been mentioned above. In addition, the foreign ministers of the summit
members met at the annual summit from 1975 to 1998 and usually meet
before the opening of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in
September each year. G7 finance ministers have had the opportunity to
meet regularly: 1) at the annual summit from 1975 to 1998 before their
meetings were separated from the leaders’ meeting; 2) at their own
meetings which have been held three or four times a year since 1986,
and, on occasion, have included the managing director of the IMF; and
3) at IMF, World Bank, and World Economic Forum (WEF) meetings.
As mentioned above, ministerial-level meetings on education, employ-
ment, energy, the environment, and justice have also taken place. Other
groups have been created to address pressing global issues. For example,
the G24 was created in 1989 to assist in the transition of former coun-
tries of the Warsaw Pact to a democratic and market economy. In
addition, the creation of the Group of 20 finance ministers and central
bank governors in September 1999 as a permanent grouping including
several important developing countries, in order to address financial
and monetary reform in cooperation with the IMF and World Bank,
was a significant achievement. Finally, over the years a number of
working groups and expert groups have been created as necessary to
address specific issues. For example, the “Lyon Group” of experts on
international crime has its roots in the 1995 Halifax Summit and meta-
morphosed as a result of the 1996 Lyon Summit. Again, this suggests
that the G8 has not eclipsed other international institutions, but rather
has created a mutually reinforcing division of labour.
Thus, in short, what the G8 does best is offer a blueprint for global
governance through its communiqués and declarations in order “to
provide political will and direction.”17 Thereafter, it delegates to more
traditional international institutions to provide the specialization and
implementation. Ultimately, most observers seem to agree that the G8
represents “a recognition of the growing need for coordination of
policy and behavior on a number of fronts, reinforced by a conviction
that more participatory frameworks, even the UNSC, would be too
cumbersome, not sufficiently likeminded, and not as ready to collabo-
rate with global market forces as junior partners.”18
3 Perspectives of Member States

The previous chapters have provided a historical review of the G7/8

summit process and, in an attempt to untangle the “gaggle of Gs,” an
explication of how it functions and relates to other fora, institutions,
and organizations of global governance. This chapter shifts the focus
to the member states that constitute the G7/8, their roles and
behaviour, the degree of importance each accords to the summit
process, and the domestic impact of summitry in each country. This
discussion will follow the revised order of hosting the summit intro-
duced from the 2003 Evian Summit onwards: France as the founding
member; the US as both the only superpower to emerge from the Cold
War’s end and “doubting Thomas” as regards multilateral projects; the
UK with its split personality as member of Europe and supporter of
the US; Russia as the “new kid on the block”; Germany as the power-
house of Europe; Japan as the representative of Asia and bridge
between East and West; Italy as the peripheral member; Canada as the
“true believer” in multilateralism; and the EU as a full member on
paper but permanent observer in practice. The chapter will conclude
by exploring the position of possible future members, especially
China’s shift from open hostility during the Cold War to more recent
engagement with the G8.

France
France’s role in the G8 appears to be riddled with contradictions. It is
proud of the fact that it is one of the original members of the summit
and also one of the core G4 members but is also vehemently indepen-
dent in pursuing its national interests and, as a result, often ignores G8
pledges. The French government has regarded the summit as func-
tioning most effectively and usefully in its original and simple format
but has also added to the carnival and expense of the summit. Equally,
38 Perspectives of Member States
it has sought to maintain the summit agenda’s focus on economics but
has not ignored security issues when absolutely unavoidable.
The French government is understandably proud of its position as
the progenitor of the summit process. In a sense, the summit was a
Franco-German creation as President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing sought
to create the intimate working relationship he had enjoyed with
German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt when the two were both finance
ministers of their respective countries. Giscard d’Estaing explained his
attitude towards the first summit in the following terms at the time:

The capitalist countries seemed absolutely unable to manage their

economic and monetary situations . . . but we never have a serious
conversation among the great capitalist leaders to say “what do we
do now” . . . The question has to be discussed between people
having major responsibilities like the United States – a matter of
conversation between a very few people and almost on a private
level.1

In another sense, a core role in the G7/8 is proof of France’s great

power status, despite a post-war decline similar to that of the UK.
However, amongst the French people, “summits have not really engen-
dered any major debate in France since their inception. By nature, they
are considered the president’s business and belong to this mysterious
high-level sphere of power.”2
France is the instigator of each cycle of summitry and to a degree
can set the tone for the cycle. With this in mind, it displays a very high
level of consistency in attendance over the summit’s thirty-year history.
In total, only three French presidents – Giscard d’Estaing (six
summits), Mitterrand (fourteen summits), and Chirac (eleven
summits) – have attended the summit. What is more, the five summits
hosted by the French (Rambouillet 1975, Versailles 1982, Paris 1989,
Lyon 1996, and Evian 2003) have been relatively successful. Using the
grading system developed by Nicholas Bayne, as introduced in Chapter
1, French-held summits have received the respective grades of A-, C,
B+, B, and C+, resulting in an average of around a B+/B (see Box 1.2).
However, this facet of France’s participation gives an overly positive
impression of France’s participation. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the
level of compliance with the decisions and pledges made at the
summits could be one indicator of a country’s commitment to the G8
as an effective mechanism of global governance. France’s level of
compliance with summit pledges from 1975 to 1998 (24 per cent) is the
lowest of the G8 members and suggests a high degree of unilateralism.
 Perspectives of Member States 39
More recently, during the period 1996 to 2001, France’s level of
compliance has improved (35 per cent) but remains very much towards
the lower end with only Russia ranking worse (22 per cent).3
One salient aspect of French participation is that it has tried to
prevent the summit from broadening its discussions into areas such as
security and social issues and has sought to steer it back towards the
economic issues that it was created to address. In French eyes, the
summit was originally intended to be a forum for iterative and
informal discussion amongst like-minded leaders who share the same
values. Formal decisions and actions should be taken through the UN
as it possesses the legitimacy that the G8 lacks. This can be seen in the
issues that the French government has selected for discussion at
summits it has hosted: macroeconomic policy at Rambouillet, mone-
tary policy and exchange rate stability at Versailles, development issues
and debt relief at Paris and Lyon. However, France has not shied away
from security issues. Its position as a member of the core G4 within
the summit process meant that Giscard d’Estaing attended the 1979
Guadeloupe meeting to discuss regional security issues such as missiles
in Europe, China, and the Middle East. Alongside Germany, it was
eager to have the end of the Cold War and the handling of Russia
discussed within the summit. In fact, Gorbachev’s letter to the G7
members was encouraged by the French sherpa, Jacques Attali.
In addition, as a result of the shift away from the original emphasis
on a simple and informal summit process, the French, like other
summit members, have held lavish, high-profile and self-glorifying
summits. Like other G8 participants, France’s participation is partly
the result of the character of its leader, the President of the Republic,
and this shift towards lavishness can be pinned to the influence of
Mitterrand in particular: “For François Mitterrand . . . deeply sensi-
tive to shows of grandeur and power, G7 summits certainly are and
must be ceremonies.”4 For example, at the 1989 Paris Summit, which
coincided with the bicentennial of the French Revolution, references to
the 1789 Revolution as the source of freedom, democratic principles,
and human rights were included in its declaration on human rights.5
As regards membership, on the one hand, France has regarded its
membership of the G7/8 proudly and does not want to see it diluted. It
was also originally against the inclusion of Canada in 1976 and the
EEC in 1977. However, on the other hand, it has promoted the inclu-
sion of non-G8 members. This is also motivated by a desire to instil a
degree of legitimacy within a summit process described by former
French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur as “a system that does not
involve emerging and developing economies in the decision-making
40 Perspectives of Member States
process.”6 At the 1989 Paris Summit, an effort was made to arrange
meetings between summit and non-summit leaders who had gathered
in Paris for the coinciding bicentennial of the 1789 Revolution. The
French government has also consistently supported the recent policy
of outreach as a means of imbuing the G8 with greater legitimacy. A
number of leaders from the developing world – Algeria, Brazil, Egypt,
India, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South
Africa, and possibly the most significant new participant China – were
invited to an extended dialogue meeting at the 2003 Evian Summit. It
was Chirac’s intention that this initiative should be institutionalized
within the annual summit, although it was limited the following year
to select African and Middle Eastern leaders by the US government in
its role as host of the 2004 Sea Island Summit.

The US
Through the vision of Henry Kissinger, the US can claim a hand in
creating the G7. Equally, the early history of the G7/8 is also the
history of the decline of US hegemony and the G7 was originally seen
as a mechanism to jointly manage global hegemony. However, the US
today finds itself in a unique position in the G7/8 as the only truly
global superpower. In addition (or rather, as a result) the US is known
for its conflicting and ambivalent attitude towards multilateral institu-
tions and the G7/8 is no exception. In the post-9/11 world and with
renewed US unilateralism, this traditional ambivalence to multilater-
alism mechanisms of global governance may well intensify.
The five summits hosted by the US have been mixed. The 1976 San
Juan Summit is widely regarded as a pointless summit that had more
to do with enhancing (unsuccessfully) Ford’s election chances. In
contrast, the 1983 Williamsburg Summit was highly successful and
served to place security issues and the East–West conflict firmly on the
summit’s agenda. The 1990 Houston Summit was important as part of
the iterative fashion in which the summiteers handled the collapse of
the Soviet Union. The 1997 Denver Summit was important as one of
the final stages of Russia’s inclusion within the summit process. The
2004 Sea Island Summit, however, seemed set to undermine much of
the good done at previous summits to streamline the summit’s
proceedings and its documentation. Respectively, US-hosted summits
have been awarded grades of D, B, D, C-, and C+, making one of the
worst averages, somewhere between C and C- (see Box 1.2).
US participation in the summit closely reflects its political system.
Six presidents have participated in the summit: Gerald Ford (twice),
 Perspectives of Member States 41
Jimmy Carter (four times), Ronald Reagan (eight times), George H. W.
Bush (four times), Bill Clinton (eight times), and George W. Bush (six
times, almost certain to rise to eight). Thus, whether elected for a single
term or two terms, the US president attends four or eight summits
unless something exceptional occurs. The president has selected a
sherpa according to his own proclivities. Reagan and George H. W.
Bush chose a senior official from the US Department of State, whereas
Carter, Clinton and George W. Bush selected a member of the White
House staff.7 Similarly, the president in question has stamped his
personality on the summit. The exception is Ford, who only attended
the first two summits including the non-event that was San Juan.
Jimmy Carter was eager to place human rights on the summit agenda.
Despite the initial cynicism of the Reagan administration, the summit
acquired a more political hue during the bipolar tensions of the early
1980s and became “an important, possibly even essential, forum for
the pursuit of American foreign policy goals in the late 1980s.”8
George H. W. Bush was wary about assisting the Soviet Union/Russia
but happy for the G8 to be the mechanism through which aid was
channelled. Clinton was keen to embrace Russia within the G8 and
“[c]ontrary to the image of an ineffective talk shop, . . . [he] tried to
take advantage of the group’s unique abilities while addressing its
obvious shortcomings.”9 George W. Bush has not wholly rejected the
G8 as some observers predicted but has rather sought to shape it in
line with the US-led “war on terror.” These positions towards the G8
also demonstrate that the US has not been as reluctant as the French
to include the discussion of political and security issues alongside
economic ones.
The fact that the US is the world’s only superpower which can act
unilaterally begs the question of why it would want to work with the
G8, and US suspicion of multilateral initiatives can be seen in its low
level of compliance with G8 pledges. Between 1975 and 1989, the US
had the second worst level of compliance with G8 pledges at 27.4 per
cent, only slightly better than last-placed France. As with France, this
average improved considerably between 1996 and 2001 to 51 per cent.10
Thus, despite recent enthusiasm under the Clinton administration for
the G8, the traditional US position has been one of independence and
unilateralism. At the 2005 Gleneagles Summit, this position was borne
out when it became clear that the administration of George W. Bush
was the main obstacle to striking a more far-reaching deal on global
warming and debt relief.
In a similar trend that is not conducive to the G8’s future develop-
ment, many of the reforms implemented since the 1998 Birmingham
42 Perspectives of Member States
Summit by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair came undone at the 2004
Sea Island Summit. Where Blair had attempted to reduce the length of
the communiqué and the number of statements, Bush issued a wide
gamut of summit declarations and action plans; where Blair had limited
the agenda to specific issues, Bush placed vague and all-encompassing
issues on the agenda; where Blair had made a special statement at
Birmingham welcoming the participation of civil society and the anti-
debt Jubilee 2000 campaign, no attempt was made to engage with civil
society at Sea Island.11 It would be more accurate to say that civil
society was notable by its absence and security guards actually
outnumbered demonstrators.
However, Bush did not reject or stymie a role for the G8. Rather, he
worked with it in a pragmatic fashion to influence the agenda in the
direction he wanted, namely a distinct focus on issues beyond the
summit’s traditional economic focus, in particular the Middle East.
And despite undermining some of the recent reforms introduced by
Blair to streamline the summits, Bush continued the process of
outreach to non-G8 members by inviting a variety of leaders from
African and Middle Eastern countries to meetings on the second and
third days of the summit, including Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain,
Ghana, Iraq, Jordan, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Turkey, Uganda,
and Yemen. However, these meetings were poorly organized (the non-
G8 leaders were only contacted a month before the summit) and not
really part of a concerted effort to continue the reform of the G8.12
Possibly, like Ford in 1976, Bush was using the photo-opportunity of
the summit in an election year.
As regards Russia’s participation within the G8, the US position
was one of initial wariness but emerging support for democratic and
free-market reforms. However, with the recent authoritarian turn in
Russian politics, it is the Bush administration that has attempted to
chastise Russia and there has even been talk of removing Russia from
the G8 if democratization continues to suffer. In 2005, two US sena-
tors proposed a resolution whereby Russia would be suspended from
the G8. Whilst taking a slightly less punitive position, a Newsweek
feature argued that “President Bush should attempt to prevent Russia
from being named the titular leader of the group this July and from
hosting the G8 summit in the summer of 2006.”13

The UK
The UK is a founding member of the G7/8 and, in similar fashion to
France, its governments have regarded it as both symbolic of its position
 Perspectives of Member States 43
in the world despite the UK’s relative post-war decline, and a useful
forum for international policy coordination. It has been asserted that the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office maintains “an entirely pragmatic
opinion of the G8.”14 Although true to a large degree, the UK has
carved out a role for itself as innovator at the summit with the goal of
improving the way in which it functions, as explored below in more
detail. It can also boast a solid record of summit performance compa-
rable to other summit members, a tradition of hosting relatively
successful summits and one of the highest levels of compliance with G8
pledges. The UK’s position within the G8 is seen to be a central one, as
reflected in its invitation to the January 1979 four-power Guadeloupe
meeting to discuss security issues. Similarly, on the eve of the 1980
Venice Summit, it became known that France, West Germany, the UK,
and US had been conducting secret ambassadorial-level meetings in
Washington, which served to create the sense of a two-tier summit
process that, like the Guadeloupe meeting, excluded Canada, Italy, and
Japan. However, the UK has also found itself torn at times between two
personalities: its regional identity as a member of the European project
and its “special relationship” with the US that can be useful in
addressing divisive issues such as combating climate change.
It would appear that the UK is the most committed of all summit
members in terms of compliance with G7/8 pledges. From 1975 to
1989, the UK registered the highest rate of compliance at 41.3 per
cent. From 1996 to 2001, this level rose to 63 per cent, still ranking the
UK as the most compliant summit participant by a considerable gap
of 10 per cent between it and Canada on 53 per cent.15
The five UK-hosted summits have also tended to be relatively and
consistently successful. The 1977 London Summit was ranked as a B-,
the 1984 London Summit was the least successful at a C-, the 1991
London Summit was a B-, and the 1998 Birmingham Summit was the
most successful at a B+ (see Box 1.2). The 2005 Gleneagles Summit
has yet to be awarded a grade but it was certainly the most high-profile
summit in the G8’s thirty-year history and expectations were high that
it would contribute positively in the future to environmental issues and
Africa’s debt problem.
UK prime ministers have tended to play a vocal and active role in
summit discussions. On the one hand, this may be a result of the
personality of the prime minister of the day. For example, Margaret
Thatcher is the longest-serving UK participant in the summit and was
a forceful supporter of the US and defender of UK national interests
during the 1980s. In addition, Tony Blair is the first UK prime minister
to host two summits (1998 Birmingham and 2005 Gleneagles) and has
44 Perspectives of Member States
been partly responsible for putting debt relief so saliently on the
summit agenda.16 On the other hand, a higher degree of stability in
representation at the summit may have engendered a more active role
for the UK prime minister. Five UK prime ministers have attended the
summit in total and this has given the UK a consistency in personnel
that is necessary to create the interpersonal relationships that are
central to the successful working of a concert mechanism like the G8
summit.
Although the UK sherpa has traditionally come from the Treasury,
the UK has demonstrated flexibility in the issues to be placed on the
summit agenda, whether they be economic, political, or security. The
London summits dealt with terrorism and peacekeeping, whilst the
Birmingham Summit focussed on Indian nuclear testing alongside
traditional economic issues.17
Probably the UK’s most significant contribution to the G8 has been
to spur internal reform. There has been a concern with streamlining
the summit that can be traced back to the very first summit when
Prime Minister Harold Wilson pointed to the fact that numerous inter-
national institutions existed concerned with the same issues and that it
was necessary to avoid overlap.18 Thereafter, John Major was a keen
advocate of simplification of the summit process. In particular at this
time:

[i]n the British view, the Munich summit in 1992 was singularly
unproductive: before President Yeltsin arrived it consisted of one
ceremonial meal after another, interspersed by prescripted
exchanges of almost stupefying boredom. Munich ducked the
GATT question (despite John Major’s efforts) and the finance and
foreign ministers had little to do. An example of the ceremonial
aspect was that President Bush and the U.S. sherpa had over 40
vehicles to transport them from one location to another.19

Many of his suggested reforms only came to be realized by Tony Blair

at the 1998 Birmingham Summit. As mentioned in previous chapters,
these reforms included separating the ministerial meetings and estab-
lishing leaders-only meetings, downsizing the summit delegations,
having a specific and limited agenda, and fewer and shorter statements.
Although the US undermined many of these reforms by introducing
the amorphous agenda items of freedom, security and prosperity at the
2004 Sea Island Summit, the UK was able to return the summit to the
specific discussion of African poverty and global warming at the 2005
Gleneagles Summit.
 Perspectives of Member States 45
As regards membership of the G8, the UK played a leading role in
incorporating Russia so that the G8 could come into existence at the
Birmingham Summit. The UK has also been supportive of expanding
the dialogue to include the leaders of non-G8 countries such as
Algeria, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Mexico, Nigeria,
Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania, who attended the Gleneagles
Summit in addition to the heads of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, the IMF, UN, World Bank, and WTO. Chancellor of the
Exchequer Gordon Brown has invited China and India to the G7
finance ministers’ meeting. Blair has been keen to promote the policy
of outreach but is less committed on whether this will lead to new full
members in an expanded G9 or G10:

I think there is certainly a case for trying to involve countries that

are self-evidently important as China and India in discussions on
these issues. There is a continuing debate about changing the
structure of the G8. I think at some point in time it probably
should change, but obviously that has got to be done with the
agreement of everyone and it is sometimes a bit like the UN
Security Council, everyone agrees in principle it should be
reformed, but when you come to agreeing which countries and on
what basis it gets more difficult. But certainly I think we have
already begun the process in the G8 of outreach as it were to other
countries and I am sure that will continue.20

The UK has also taken a lead in embracing civil society within the
summit process. Blair’s statement as President of the G8 at the
Birmingham Summit publicly welcomed “the commitment so many of
you have shown today to help the poorest countries in the world. Your
presence here is a truly impressive testimony to the solidarity of
people in our own countries with those in the world’s poorest and
most indebted.”21 By pushing the debt relief agenda at Birmingham
and the following year’s summit in Cologne, Blair was responding to
e-mail and postcard petitions and also continuing the UK’s tradi-
tional concern with this issue, and has also sought to petition the US
on the worth of the campaign. Blair has been comfortable meeting
with some of the celebrity campaigners like the rock musicians Bob
Geldof and Bono and even breakfasted with them before the 2003
Evian Summit. The crescendo of the concern and campaigning
surrounding this issue was reached at the 2005 Gleneagles Summit,
although the pressure and focus was dissipated by terrorist attacks in
London during the summit.
46 Perspectives of Member States
Russia
The Soviet Union’s reaction to the first meeting of the G6 in 1975 was
one of open hostility, a stance that continued through to the last years
of the Cold War. In the Soviet Union’s eyes, the summit meetings were
meaningless and irrelevant at best, unrepresentative and ideological
anathema at worst. In particular, it objected to the overt discussion of
security issues at the 1983 Williamsburg Summit and the Soviet
Union’s news agency TASS warned that “the Soviet Union cannot
ignore efforts to turn Japan into Asia’s largest springboard for carrying
out all kinds of Reagan’s delirious military concepts.”22
However, with the processes of glastnost and perestroika, the Soviet
Union under Mikhail Gorbachev began to approach the G7 as the
vehicle through which aid in support of his reform programme could
be organized. Thus, from the 1989 Paris Summit, how to deal with the
unravelling of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
securing of democratic and free market reforms became core themes of
summit discussions. As mentioned above, the French sought to invite
Gorbachev to the 1989 Paris Summit but it took over a decade for this
process to unfold. The Soviet Union/Russia’s steady and incremental
participation throughout the 1990s from “guest” at the 1991 London
Summit to “participant” at the 1994 Naples Summit built a head of
steam so that Boris Yeltsin was invited to attend political discussions at
the 1997 Denver Summit (which was not called the “G8,” because of
Japanese objections to Russia’s membership, but rather euphemisti-
cally the “Summit of the Eight”). The following year at Birmingham,
the term “G8” was used for the first time and Yeltsin made a
concerted, but ultimately unsuccessful, campaign to wrest the hosting
of the 2000 summit from Japan. Russia’s full membership of the G8
was confirmed at the 2002 Kananaskis Summit that completed the
fourth cycle of summitry. Thus, it was decided that Russia would host
the 2006 summit with Germany ready to delay its turn in order to
accommodate Russia into the cycle. There is a precedence for the
hosting of the 2006 St Petersburg Summit in the shape of the two-day
1996 Nuclear Safety and Security Summit, which was held in Moscow.
However, it is difficult to read the following sentence and not think
of the position of the Soviet Union/Russia in the G8: the “formal
admission of the Ottoman state to the Concert of Europe in 1856 . . .
could be read as a protectorate of sorts rather than as an admission to
genuine parity of status.”23 In one respect, the original G7 members
regarded the inclusion of Russia partly as a security issue in an attempt
to encourage a peaceful transition to free-market economics and
 Perspectives of Member States 47
democratic principles. In addition, extending membership of the G8
was seen as a quid pro quo for Russia’s acceptance of the expansion of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. However, it appears that
Russia’s prime motivating factor in joining the G8 has been the recog-
nition of great power status that accompanies membership of this elite
club, as well as the opportunity to build links with the West. This
became particularly evident in 1998 when Yeltsin arrived at
Birmingham with the goal of wresting the right to host the 2000
summit away from Japan. The 2006 St Petersburg Summit was, to a
degree, a self-glorifying affair as Russia attempted to justify its global
status and position within the G8.
Russia’s level of compliance with G8 pledges displays a great deal of
room for improvement to say the least. From 1996 to 2001, it ranked
bottom with 22 per cent.24 Similarly, its diplomatic style at the summits
has been surprisingly low-key considering the effort that went into
securing its status amongst the elite of the G8. Russia appeared to be
learning the ropes of summitry with the goal of occupying the chair of
the G8 in 2006 in mind. Equally, the Russians have little to contribute to
the discussion of financial issues (it is still excluded from the meetings of
the G7 finance ministers) or African aid and debt relief, preferring
instead to focus upon political and security issues. Thus, as an issue of
immediate foreign policy concern to Russia, the G8 provided the ideal
forum in which to discuss conflict resolution in Kosovo. In the post-9/11
security milieu and with its own domestic problems to address, the
summit provides Russia with a useful forum in which it can act proac-
tively. As a result, the 2006 summit focussed upon these issues, thereby
deflating the intense pressure that had been placed on the G8 in the run-
up to the 2005 Gleneagles Summit to address African aid and debt issues.
It has been argued that, in line with the G7’s original intention that
allowing Russia to join a G8 would encourage a peaceful transition to
capitalism, considerable progress has been made: “We are consistently
turning from a major debtor into an active creditor. We have the
highest gross domestic product growth rates among the G8 countries,
and our gold and foreign currency reserves, as well as foreign trade
turnover are steadily growing.”25 However, as mentioned above, under
Putin, Russia has experienced a radical lurch towards authoritarianism
and there have been calls, most vocally from within the US, to recon-
sider Russia’s membership of the G8, which is meant to be a grouping
of like-minded countries committed to free-market economics and
democracy. As the G8 has no declared criteria for membership and no
member of the G8 has ever been disbarred in the past, it is unclear
how this diplomatic procedure would be completed.
48 Perspectives of Member States
Germany
Germany, like France and the US, can lay claim to being one of the
creators of the summit. It was, after all, German Chancellor Helmut
Schmidt and the close relationship he forged with Giscard d’Estaing
when they were both finance ministers that acted as the model for what
the summit of leading powers could be. Traditionally, Germany’s post-
war foreign policy has more than favoured a multilateral approach; it
has been regarded as a principle of German foreign policy.26 Thus, the
G7/8 has provided a useful and comfortable forum for discussion.
Whilst Germany was still divided between East and West, it also served
as a forum for the pursuit of one of its chief foreign policy goals:
reunification. To this end, the 1985 Bonn Summit included a political
declaration on the fortieth anniversary of the end of WWII with a
specific statement that the summit members “look forward to a state of
peace in Europe in which the German people will regain their unity
through free self-determination.”27 What is more, and in similar
fashion to Japan, membership of the original G7 accorded Germany
the recognition of its post-war recovery and great power status, some-
thing it was (and still is) denied by the UN.
Between 1975 and 2005, apart from Schmidt, only two other
German chancellors represented their country at the summit. From
1999 to 2005, Gerhard Schröder attended seven summits. Alongside
Blair, he actively promoted the issue of African poverty at the summit,
especially the first summit he hosted in Cologne in 1999. However,
Germany’s role in the summit and its recent political history has been
dominated by the longest-serving summiteer: Helmut Kohl, who
attended sixteen consecutive summits. Kohl liked the emphasis that the
summit placed on personal dialogue and was eager to engage in collec-
tive management of the global economy and to pursue effective
compromises on key issues. German participation has also been
coloured by the trend towards coalition politics at home and, thus,
Germany was keen that supporting ministers accompany the chan-
cellor. German chancellors have traditionally selected their sherpas
from the Ministry of Finance.
However, Germany’s behaviour at the summit has clashed with its
declared elevation of multilateralism to the level of a principle and its
level of compliance with G8 pledges has been somewhere between
middling and unimpressive. From 1975 to 1989, its level of compliance
stood at 34 per cent, placing it fourth amongst the seven behind the
UK, Canada, and Italy. During the period from 1996 to 2001, its level
of compliance rose to 43 per cent but other members had improved
 Perspectives of Member States 49
their record so that Germany now stood at sixth with only France and
Russia having worse records.28
As a host, German summits have been erratic to say the least. The
first Bonn Summit in 1978 was awarded a grade A for its handling of
the issues of oil consumption, trade and aircraft hijacking. However,
the second Bonn Summit in 1985 was characterized by open conflict
between the summiteers on the issue of the starting-date for the
Uruguay Round of trade negotiations and hence was given an E. The
1992 Munich Summit fared slightly better with a D, again stymied by
the issue of trade. The 1999 Cologne Summit and its declared commit-
ment to debt relief received a B+. Thus, the average grade for a
German-hosted summit is a middling C, although this masks the
sudden lurches between success and failure (see Box 1.2). In addition,
Kohl added to the expansion of the summit’s agenda and the length of
its statements that prompted John Major to call for its downsizing.
However, at Cologne in 1999, Schröder continued the reforms intro-
duced by Blair the previous year at Birmingham. Germany is due to
host its fifth summit in 2007 and if the “grand coalition” of Socialists
and Conservatives that formed the German government in November
2006 is still in power this will be the first time for Germany that a
woman, in the shape of Chancellor Angela Merkel, acts as host of the
summit.
As regards the remit of discussion, although Germany’s post-war
recovery was based upon it becoming an economic animal and
forgoing a high-profile security role, it has not shied away from
including a range of other issues in the summit’s discussions. In fact, it
was at the 1978 Bonn Summit that a statement was issued on terrorism
and hijacking. With the end of the Cold War, Germany began to
assume a greater security burden and its role in the resolution of the
Kosovo conflict through the G8 is an example of this.29
As regards widening the membership from the original summiteers,
Germany has acted pragmatically. With the Soviet Union/Russia near
its eastern borders, the German government was probably the most
keen of the G7 members to extend assistance and welcome the former
Cold War enemy into an expanded G8. Germany went so far as to
relinquish its place in the order of hosting the summit to accommodate
Russia, something Japan (equally close in geographical terms) refused
to contemplate. As regards China’s relationship with the G8, Germany
worked throughout the Kosovo conflict to keep China informed of
developments and at the 2004 Sea Island Summit, Schröder expressed
qualified support in a post-summit press conference for China’s inclu-
sion in a G9:
50 Perspectives of Member States
Whether one would not have to think about inviting China – I
mean, just think of the influence China has, even on such a strong
and powerful economy as the American economy, not to speak of
the European ones. Think of the impact it has. Then that certainly
would be one country that we would have to think about first. I
mean, I’m saying this with all the due prudence because I don’t
want to make headlines over this, but certainly not only for polit-
ical but also for economic reasons that [is] certainly something that
one needs to think about.30

Japan
Japan’s contribution to the summit discussions has often been to
finance the initiatives brought to the table by other participants. The
most well-known example of this was the “locomotive theory” of the
1970s whereby the leading economies of Japan, West Germany, and
the US would pull the other G7 economies out of recession. Equally,
Japan was expected to contribute a large proportion of aid to Russia
after the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s, Japan found this role
problematic as its economy faltered. Although being known more as
an ATM than an “ideas man,” with some justification, on occasion
Japan has sought to take the lead in the discussion of specific issues.
Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro launched his Human Frontiers
Science Programme at the 1987 Venice Summit, and Prime Minister
Koizumi Junichirō has been keen to promote the discussion of African
development and environmental issues at recent summits. In addition,
the Japanese government has not shied away from seeking to take
domestic and/or non-G8 issues to the summit table in an attempt to
secure international approval. For example, support for Japan’s posi-
tion over the Northern Territories dispute with the Soviet Union/
Russia found its way into the communiqués of three summits in the
early 1990s, and the issue of the kidnapping of Japanese citizens by
DPRK agents found its way into the summit statements in the early
2000s.
The most salient aspect of Japan’s membership of the G8 is that it is
the only Asian participant. In a forum dominated by Europeans and
North Americans, the Japanese government has actively sought to
input Asian issues and perspectives into the discussion at the summit
table and act as a bridge between East and West (especially on the four
occasions when Japan has acted as the host of the summit: 1979, 1986,
1993 and 2000). The assumption and recognition of this role can be
seen in the memoirs of Yoshino Bunroku, one of the earliest Japanese
 Perspectives of Member States 51
sherpas, recalling Prime Minister Miki Takeo’s position at the 1975
Rambouillet Summit: “[Miki] always felt strongly about speaking for
Asia . . . At that time Southeast Asian nations . . . didn’t have a lot of
confidence then, so I think they welcomed Japan’s willingness to speak
for them and were willing to support Japan. I think that is why he
spoke about Southeast Asia with confidence.”31
To this end, foreign ministry officials and even the prime minister
himself have toured Japan’s Asian neighbours both before and after
the summit and conducted telephone meetings in order to collect opin-
ions and issues of regional interest and report back on the summit’s
discussion and possible outcomes.32 When hosting the summit, the
Japanese government has worked to input other Asian voices more
directly into the discussions. This was most obvious at the 1993 Tokyo
Summit when Japan worked towards inviting Indonesian President
Suharto to the summit.33 Similarly, some discussion of and tentative
approaches towards China’s participation as an observer characterized
the preparations for the 2000 Okinawa Summit.
However, it is not just the motivation to act as Asia’s representative
that characterizes Japan’s position within the G8. The fact that the
Japanese prime minister was invited to the very first summit at the
château of Rambouillet in November 1975 was regarded in Japan as
recognition of its position in the global political economy and its
status as a great power of the day. It must be remembered that
although Japan had been admitted to the UN in December 1956, it
was still excluded from a permanent position on the UNSC despite
its growing economic status and contributions to the maintenance of
this body.34 Thus, the G8 represents for the Japanese government and
its people validation of its status in the world and to this end it has
worked actively to ensure that the summit is successful (especially
when hosted in Japan).
However, Japan has felt excluded from the inner sanctum of the G8.
This was felt particularly strongly when in January 1979 Japan was not
invited to the Gaudeloupe Summit of the core four: France, Germany,
the UK, and US. Japan was seen as having little to contribute to the
discussion of security issues, even though arms sales to China was
included on the agenda, and the Japanese government’s reaction was
described as “ambivalent.”35
Japan’s active participation in the summit process is also stifled by
aspects of its domestic politics that prevent the prime minister from
realizing the independent, figurehead role played by his counterparts.
In Japan, the prime minister is often a transient figure, more the
product of inter-factional compromise between factions of the ruling
52 Perspectives of Member States
Liberal Democratic Party. Between 1975 and 2005, fourteen Japanese
prime ministers attended the summit (not including 1980 when the
Foreign Minister deputized for recently deceased Prime Minister
Ohira Masayoshi), in contrast to three German chancellors, five UK
prime ministers, and six US presidents (see Box 2.2). Only two prime
ministers – Nakasone Yasuhiro and Koizumi Junichirō – have a record
of sustained summit attendance (five summits each) combined with a
proactive (even aggressive) approach to summit diplomacy that stands
in relief to the traditional characterization of the Japanese prime
minister as silent participant (see Box 2.1).
Japan has demonstrated an improved but still average commitment
to summit pledges. From 1975 to 1989, it was ranked towards the
bottom of G8 summiteers with a compliance rate of 26.2 per cent.
However, from 1996 to 2001, this rate improved to 48 per cent, putting
Japan just above the average compliance rate.36 The Japanese govern-
ment has shown more application in its efforts to host successful
summits and it has achieved a high level of consistency with its four
summits having been awarded grades of B+, B+, C+, and B resulting
in an average of a B (see Box 1.2).
The Japanese public pay a great deal of attention to the summit and
it attracts probably more newspaper coverage than in any other
country. The Japanese people echo its government’s position that the
G8 confirms its great power status, although a minority of extremists
have targeted the summit for violent protest. Like other G8 partici-
pants, the Japanese prime minister has equated a positive performance
at the summit with an increase in popular support at home and on
occasions opinion polls have reacted accordingly.37

Italy
Italy’s position in the G7/8 is as one of the peripheral powers that has
oriented its foreign policy towards multilateral mechanisms. In other
words:

Italian leaders know what it means to be a team player, how to

be mandate-sensitive, and ultimately how to master the politics
of coordinated decision-making across jurisdictions. The record
of Italian achievements over the period the summits have been
meeting are testimony to the extent to which concert summitry is
a natural extension abroad of Italian domestic political practices,
a reality which has enabled Italy to emerge as a leading
survivor.38
 Perspectives of Member States 53
The G7/8 is not only a forum in which the Italians are comfortable, it also
provides them with access to and the status associated with the discussion
table of contemporary great powers. This tends to exaggerate Italy’s
importance in international affairs. Originally, Italy was only included
(with strong US backing) within the very first summit at a very late
stage, with one objective being to secure its position within the leading
capitalist economies of the West in the face of the rise of Communism.
Italian-hosted summits have been below average with the four
summits it has hosted having been awarded grades of C+, D, C, and B,
averaging out at a C (see Box 1.2). The Italian government has been
one of the most eager to include political and security issues on the
summit agenda. The 1980 Venice Summit dealt with Afghanistan and
the US hostage crisis in Iran. A similar trend was noticeable at the
second 1987 Venice Summit.39 Whereas the 2001 Genoa Summit saw a
return to economic issues and the successful launching of the Doha
Round of multilateral trade negotiations.
However, the Italians’ role at the summit has been hampered by the
inconsistency and short lifespan of its leaders. In total, from 1975 to
2005, thirteen Italian leaders attended the summit with Silvio
Berlusconi ranking as the longest-serving Italian summiteer with six
summits (five in succession since 2001). This is partly a reflection of
the Italian political system and renders Italian representation at the
summit alongside Japan’s.
As regards Italy’s attitude towards the engagement of civil society in
the summit process, the Genoa Summit demonstrated a double-edged
sword. On the one hand, Genoa has been rated as one of the more
successful and productive summits and as regards the G8’s engagement
with civil society, Berlusconi declared the need to introduce measures
to promote dialogue during the upcoming fifth summit cycle.40
However, on the other hand, Genoa was remembered for the heavy-
handed approach to policing and the death of one demonstrator.
As regards expanding the membership of the summit, Italy was eager
to include Russia as part of the G8 and it was at the 1994 Naples
Summit that Russia joined the political discussions. Berlusconi has also
expressed support for the addition of China and India to create a G10
by announcing that “[i]t doesn’t make much sense for us to talk about
the economy of the future without two countries that are protagonists
on the world stage.”41 As part of the policy of outreach, the leading
African leaders from Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa
were invited for the first time to the final day of the Genoa Summit so
that the New Partnership for Africa’s Development could be
announced.
54 Perspectives of Member States
Canada
Canada is a country with a long tradition of multilateralism in its
foreign policy. One summit-watcher has captured this tradition in
relation to the G8 by paraphrasing Voltaire: “[i]f the G8 did not exist,
the Canadians would undoubtedly want to invent it. That is how
important the G8 is to Canada’s international role.”42 However,
Canada is not an original summit member. Its participation at the
first Rambouillet Summit was discussed but ultimately rejected
although Japan played the role of reporting back to the Canadian
government after the summit on the major discussions. Only after
overcoming considerable French opposition and with the goal of
creating transatlantic balance was Canada invited to the summit table
in 1976. In 1986, Canada (along with Italy) joined the meetings of the
G7 finance ministers that replaced the G5. As for Italy and Japan,
membership of the G8 accords Canada great power status that it is
denied elsewhere.
Between 1975 and 2005, Canada was represented by six prime
ministers, with Jean Chrétien establishing himself as the longest-
serving summiteer with ten consecutive summits. Canada’s participation
is rather similar to that of the UK, also in the fact that Canada is the
only other summit member to have been represented by a woman, Kim
Campbell, during the period.
Canada’s level of compliance with summit pledges is high and
always has been. From 1975 to 1989, Canada was the second most
compliant summit member with a rate of 40.9 per cent, just behind the
UK. More recently, from 1996 to 2001, its compliance has risen to 53
per cent and it has maintained its second position.43
The four summits it has hosted have been above average with a C,
C-, B+, and B+ having been awarded by summit-grader Nicholas
Bayne, averaging out at a B- (see Box 1.2). This fits Chrétien’s assess-
ment that “Canada can further its global interests better than any
other country through its active membership in key international
groupings, for example hosting the G7 Summit.”44 Canada has
worked to ensure the success of the summit – the first summit it hosted
in 1981 at Ottawa resulted in the creation of the Quad – and has acted
independently of its hegemonic neighbour, the US, by responding inde-
pendently or building coalitions with its European and Japanese
counterparts. In addition, the Canadian government has displayed
little resistance to the expansion of the summit agenda into new issue-
areas. In fact, before the terrorist attacks of 9/11 shifted the focus of
the 2002 Kananaskis Summit to terrorism, this had been billed as the
 Perspectives of Member States 55
“education summit.” Equally, environmental and development issues
have been placed on the agenda by Canada.
Canada was particularly eager to reform the summit process and
return it to its original intention. These efforts came clearly into relief
at the 1995 Halifax Summit and Kananaskis. At Halifax, the venue
was shifted away from a major city. At Kananaskis, the length of the
summit was reduced to two days, as it had been in the early days of the
summit and the atmosphere created in Canadian Rockies miles from
the media and civil society was one of relaxed informality. Italian
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi described it as being “ringed by
mountains, surrounded by greenery and protected by bears.”45
Whereas, one White House spokesman declared that “leaders [are]
literally bumping into each other, talking informally, which is what the
G8 was always intended to be.”46
As regards expansion of the G8, Canada has supported Russia’s inte-
gration and it was at the Kananaskis Summit that Russia was accorded
full rights as a member of the G8. The Canadian government has also
been extremely supportive of the creation of a Group of Twenty (G20)
of finance ministers and central bank governors (Paul Martin served as
the chair for two years before becoming prime minister) and hopes to
replicate this grouping at the level of the leaders:

As envisioned by Martin, it would play the roles of both a deliber-

ative body, for free and frank informal exchange, and a directional
body, producing consensus on priorities and policies. . . . The G20
helped the world’s economic leaders to go from simply managing
crises to making long-term improvements in the international
economy . . . a leaders’ forum could do something similar for
political problems.47

After being invited to the G8 summit for the first time at Genoa,
Canada continued this trend the following year in 2002 by inviting
African leaders to participate as equals in a summit session on Africa.
Finally, it should not be forgotten that Canada is home to the G8
Research Group, the leading centre for G8 studies and without whose
resources many publications on the G8 (this book included) could not
have been written.

The EU
The EU occupies a peculiar position in the summit process. The EU is a
highly legalized, bureaucratized, and formal international organization
56 Perspectives of Member States
to which member states concede their sovereignty, whereas the G8 is an
informal gathering of like-minded leaders with no legal basis. No two
bodies could be further apart in character and objectives. Although the
EU’s participation has created a degree of friction, there have also been
areas of cooperation.
It is often incorrectly said that “eight men sat round a table” consti-
tute the G8 summit. Ignoring the gender bias of this statement, it is
more usually the case that nine (and sometimes ten) men are sat round
the table as the President of the EEC Commission has attended the
summit since 1977 and the President of the European Council since
1982. According to the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which accords the
European Commission the sole right to speak on the behalf of its
members on a range of economic issues, the European G8 members
could be regarded as acting in violation of the treaty. Thus, this often-
forgotten ninth participant was originally invited in order to avoid
these complications and give a voice to the smaller states of Europe at
the summit. Pascal Lamy, sherpa to Jacques Delors, President of the
European Commission from 1985 to 1989, justified EC participation
in the following terms:

The first and most important reason is that the European

Community has taken over powers from its member states in a
number of areas which are also treated by the Summits . . . The
second reason is that the process of political cooperation is
becoming increasingly important within the European Community;
and Summits which were initially confined to economic issues have
also to a growing extent turned their attention to international
political questions . . . The third reason is that its participation
allows it to represent the eight smaller states that are not included
in their own right.48

Although on paper the EU is a full member of the G8 that participates

in the preparations through a sherpa and sends a delegation to each
summit, it does not have the right to host a summit, was only invited
to participate in political discussions from the 1981 Ottawa Summit
onwards, and its contribution has often been limited to one of
observer.
The presidency of the European Council rotates amongst the
members of the EU, and on occasions when it is not held by France,
Germany, Italy or the UK, then the summit table becomes slightly
more crowded. This also begs the question of whether the EU
members of the G8 should coordinate their position with other
 Perspectives of Member States 57
members of the EU and the EU itself. As the G8 is not formally recog-
nized as an international organization, a consensus that there is no
need as long as this does not interfere with EU policy has emerged but
no clear answer.49 Non-EU members of the G8 also regard EU repre-
sentation as creating an imbalance. Thus, there is an argument that the
European G8 members should conflate their representation into a
single EU seat at the summit table, although it is highly unlikely that
this will happen in the near future. It has been argued that allowing the
EU into the G8 runs counter to its founding principles of creating an
informal gathering of like-minded leaders by introducing the represen-
tative of a formal and highly bureaucratized international organization
and breaking the circle of intimacy by allowing outsiders into the
process. In fact, Giscard d’Estaing objected to the inclusion of the
President of the EEC Commission for these very reasons.50
However, the EU has contributed to the working of the G8. The
President of the European Commission Jacques Delors was a long-
term participant in the summit (longer than many presidents and
prime ministers), and at the 1989 Paris Summit the EU was given a key
role in the organization of the programme for extending aid to Eastern
Europe known as “Poland and Hungary: Aid for Restructuring of the
Economies” and the creation of the G24.51 It is also well positioned to
discuss both economic issues such as financial stability on the one
hand, and political and security issues such as conflict prevention in
Kosovo on the other hand.

New Members?
As is clear from the above discussion of the actors involved and the
history of the summit process provided in Chapter 1, no criteria exist
to approve or disqualify membership of the G8. New members have
been added to the original six leaders who met at Rambouillet
(Canada, the EU, and Russia) but these decisions have been made
without reference to any formalities or qualifications. Thus, the accu-
sation that has often been levelled at the G8 as a result is one of lack
of legitimacy, yet over the years the G8 has sought to address this
issue through a policy of outreach whilst maintaining the core
membership. For example, at the first Tokyo Summit in 1979, the
Japanese government sought to invite Australia, and at the third
Tokyo Summit in 1993 it went to considerable lengths to accommo-
date Indonesian President Suharto’s demands for an audience with
G8 leaders, ultimately by arranging a pre-summit meeting with US
President Bill Clinton.
58 Perspectives of Member States
As a result of its increasing economic importance, probably the
most touted potential member of the G8 is China.52 China has tradi-
tionally been openly hostile towards the G7/8 summit by ignoring or
dismissing its communiqués and emphasizing the importance of the
UNSC, upon which China has a permanent seat. China did become
the focus of the G7’s attention in the aftermath of the Tiananmen
Square massacre when on the one hand the Western members used the
vehicle of the G7 to introduce sanctions, and on the other hand Japan
sought to appeal to the other summiteers to soften and eventually lift
these sanctions. Despite this traditional tension between the G8 and
China, Japanese Prime Minister Obuchi Keizō attempted unsuccess-
fully to invite China to the 2000 Okinawa Summit. French President
Jacques Chirac was more successful in inviting Chinese President Hu
Jintao to an enlarged dialogue meeting on the first day of the 2003
Evian Summit. Since then, Hu has attended the 2004 Sea Island
Summit and 2005 Gleneagles Summit in a similarly limited capacity.
If the example of Russia’s membership is anything to go by, the
logical progression is that China will be invited eventually to become
part of a G9. Unlike Russia, however, this is likely to be because of
China’s economic importance. This would certainly enhance the G8’s
legitimacy and hopefully constructively engage China in another inter-
national grouping whereby it will be encouraged to behave in line with
international norms. However, there are a number of problems that
exist that make China’s membership of a G9 highly unlikely. First,
although the G8 does not have declared criteria for membership, it is a
grouping of liberal, free-market democracies and China still has a long
way to go before it can be thought of in the same bracket as Canada
and the UK. Second, China is still a developing country and as the
focus of much summit discussion over recent years has been the distri-
bution of G8 members’ funds, it would seem peculiar to include China
in these discussions. Third, the Japanese government would view the
inclusion of China with suspicion as this would devalue the long-
standing role Japan has cultivated for itself of Asia’s sole representative
at the summit.
Echoing the discussions that surround reform of the UNSC, there
are also other candidates with equally valid claims to membership of
an expanded G8 and who would add to the geographical representa-
tion of the grouping. In particular, Brazil, India, and South Africa
could provide important regions, previously unrepresented at the
summit, with a voice at the summit table.
The logical conclusion of this argument is that if the G8 is to be
expanded as a result of outreach, can it not be replaced with a new
 Perspectives of Member States 59
grouping, known as the G20?53 The G20 was created in September
1999 as a meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors
from the G8 members (including the EU), Argentina, Australia, Brazil,
China, India, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South
Korea, and Turkey. This was the result of a meeting of the G7 on the
first day of the 1999 Cologne Summit and aimed to provide a more
effective force for strengthening the international financial architec-
ture.54 This grouping embraces the main candidates for inclusion in an
expanded G8 in addition to many of the dialogue partners that have
joined the annual summit over recent years as part of the outreach
policy. The logic of replicating this kind of meeting at the leaders’ level
is similar to that which linked the meetings of finance ministers in the
White House library to the Rambouillet Summit. It would also
contribute to addressing the issue that has constantly plagued the G8:
illegitimacy, an issue that will be explored in more detail in Chapter 5.
4 Achievements and Failures

In the 1979 film, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the complaint “What
have the Romans ever done for us?” is famously heard. A similar ques-
tion has been regularly levelled at the G7/8. However, the question of
what the G7/8 has done for us is a very difficult question to answer,
owing to the nature of this forum for informal discussion.
Nevertheless, the aim of this chapter is to attempt to establish the
concrete outcomes, successes, and failures of the summit process.
Although established as a forum for the coordination of macro-
economic policy, the G7/8 summit rapidly came to address a range of
other issues such as energy consumption, East–West tensions, interna-
tional terrorism, debt relief, education, and so on. Thus, in order to
enforce some order upon these issues, this chapter will be divided into
the four main sections of economic, political, security, and social
issues. However, at the same time, the reader needs to be aware that
these divisions are artificial and that a degree of inevitable overlap
exists between these issue-areas as most of the specific issues under
discussion here are of a multifaceted nature. In other words, this divi-
sion is simply a means of making greater sense of the remit and
development of the G7/8’s activities and pinpointing its numerous
contributions and failures.

Economic Issues
As has been mentioned several times already in this book, the G7 was
originally created in order to provide a forum for the discussion and
management of macroeconomic policies. What is more, the early
participants in the summit meetings of leaders were mostly former
finance ministers; at the 1977 London Summit and 1978 Bonn Summit
the leaders representing France, the UK, Germany, Japan, Italy, and
the European Commission were all former finance ministers.1 Thus, it
 Achievements and Failures 61
is not surprising that it is in this area where the greatest concentration
of G7/8 activity can be found, alongside its most prominent successes
and dismal failures.
The issues that the very first summit was meant to address included
macroeconomic issues such as a sound monetary system and stable
exchange rates, economic growth whilst avoiding inflation, the promo-
tion of sensible energy consumption, the liberalization of world trade,
debt relief, and relations with the developing world. As regards
economic growth, this period was well-known for the “locomotive
theory” whereby the leading economies of the US, West Germany, and
Japan would lead the weaker ones along. However, although the
leaders of these three countries agreed to growth targets at the annual
summits, they were under no commitment to meet them and this
strategy was dead and buried by the 1978 Bonn Summit. Nevertheless,
by the end of the 1970s the summit process had proved itself as a new
and useful mechanism for face-to-face discussion and was “successful
in overcoming the policy deadlock of the early 1970s and in restoring
growth to the G7 and other OECD economies after the setbacks of the
first oil crisis.”2
As regards these “traditional” issues for which the summit was orig-
inally created, the G7/8 has continued to deal with them although they
might not occupy a central position on its agenda. However, since 1986
when the G5 meeting of finance ministers stopped meeting in secrecy
and came out into the open as an expanded G7 with Canada and Italy
included, it has been this forum at which macroeconomic issues have
been discussed. For example, in September 1985, the G5 endorsed US
Treasury Secretary James Baker’s proposal to devalue the dollar
against the yen and the mark known as the Plaza Accord. Similarly the
Louvre Accord was thereafter agreed in 1987 to prevent the continued
decline of the dollar.
Despite drawn-out negotiations until the eleventh hour, the 1979
Tokyo Summit (dubbed the “energy summit” at the time) produced a
breakthrough compromise as regards the G7 members’ energy
consumption at a time of oil shortages and price hikes resulting from
the 1973 and 1979 energy crises. The eleventh-hour deal was a compro-
mise amongst the leaders by which they agreed to country-by-country
targets through to 1985. The daily US levels of oil consumption would
be limited to the 1977 levels of 8.5 million barrels. The EC was to
restrict its consumption to 1978 levels from 1980 through to 1985. In
the case of Japan its oil consumption would be limited to 1979 levels
for 1980 – 5.4 million barrels per day – and then somewhere in the
region of 6.3 to 6.9 million barrels of oil per day through to 1985, an
62 Achievements and Failures
actual increase of almost 30 per cent on 1979 levels. At the same time,
the Japanese government pledged to meet a growth rate of 5.7 per cent
from 1980. The momentum created at Tokyo was continued the
following year at the Venice Summit where the G7 leaders added a
number of concrete measures to conserve oil use and sought to “rely
on fuels other than oil to meet the energy needs of future economic
growth.”3 However, despite any short-term stabilization, the targets
decided in Tokyo were never met.
As regards trade, the G7/8 has since its creation sought to apply
pressure on the conclusion of multilateral trade negotiations
conducted under the aegis of GATT and the WTO. The very first
summit at Rambouillet saw the leaders agree upon a deadline of 1977
for the conclusion of the Tokyo Round of trade negotiations,
although by the 1977 London Summit they were forced to move the
deadline further back to 1978. The round was eventually completed in
1979, partly as a result of agreements reached at the 1978 Bonn
Summit, thus illustrating the way in which the G7/8 works in an itera-
tive fashion rather than providing a “quick fix” at the first attempt.
One of the lasting results of the summit process, and an example of
how it can both delegate to and create a more appropriate institution,
is the quadrilateral meeting of trade ministers, the “Quad.” Since its
creation at the 1981 Ottawa Summit, the Quad meeting of the USTR,
EU Trade Commissioner, and Canadian and Japanese trade ministers
has met three to four times a year and was instrumental in encour-
aging the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations.
However, one of the G7/8’s biggest failures was its inability to provide
the impetus to the beginning and conclusion of the seemingly never-
ending Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations. The
contradictions between the belief in high ideals but the divisions
between the summit leaders became evident in the uncommitted and
unconvincing wording of Article 10 of the 1985 Bonn Summit’s
Economic Declaration:

Protectionism does not solve problems; it creates them. Further

tangible progress in relaxing and dismantling existing trade
restrictions is essential. We need new initiatives for strengthening
the open multilateral trading system. We strongly endorse the
agreement reached by the OECD Ministerial Council that a new
GATT round should begin as soon as possible. Most of us [my
emphasis] think that this should be in 1986. We agree that it
would be useful that a preparatory meeting of senior officials
should take place in the GATT before the end of the summer to
 Achievements and Failures 63
reach a broad consensus on subject matter and modalities for
such negotiations. We also agree that active participation of a
significant number of developed and developing countries in such
negotiations is essential. We are looking to a balanced package
for negotiation.4

The EC resisted the considerable pressure emanating from the US at

the time to begin this new round and in its declaration the summit
desperately attempted to paper over the cracks that were all too
evident between these two positions. To a degree, this summit put the
process back and has been given the worst mark by summit grader
Nicholas Bayne, worse even than the purely cosmetic and unsubstan-
tial 1976 San Juan Summit because at least that was just pointless and
not damaging (see Box 1.2). Once the Uruguay Round began, the G7
was faced with the challenge of having to encourage its conclusion.
The 1990 Houston Summit agreed on the need to strengthen GATT’s
rules and to the creation in principle of the WTO but was ineffective in
pressing home the conclusion of the round. The 1991 London and
1992 Munich Summits repeated these agreements but were also unsuc-
cessful. In typically incremental fashion, it was not until the 1993
Tokyo Summit that impetus was given to the conclusion of the round,
partly as a result of calling a meeting of the Quad before the summit
to settle the issue of tariffs. The Uruguay Round could then be success-
fully completed in December 1993.
As regards debt relief, although the Mexican debt crisis of 1982 was
ignored at the 1983 Williamsburg Summit as a result of the emphasis
on political and security issues, the G7/8 played a key role thereafter
but in a typically difficult-to-discern fashion. The Brady Plan, which
was proposed by US Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady in March
1989 to provide debt relief for developing middle-income countries in
Latin America based on the resources of the World Bank and IMF,
was originally based upon the Miyazawa Plan proposed at the 1988
Toronto Summit. It was then extended at the 1991 London Summit to
low-income countries and the relief available on debts was further
extended at the 1994 Naples Summit.
The G8’s dealings with Africa have been mixed. The UK has been
one of the summit members that has taken on board the message of
Jubilee 2000 and has spearheaded the issue of debt relief at the G8
summits. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, unable to miss a photo
opportunity, has gone out of his way to engage with celebrity
campaigners. Before the 2003 G8 Evian Summit, the rock musicians
Bob Geldof and Bono met with Blair for a breakfast meeting to
64 Achievements and Failures
discuss debt relief and the upcoming summit. It was Blair that
attempted to convince the US of the worth of the Jubilee 2000
campaign. Germany and Japan (depending on the administration in
power) have also dragged their heels on embracing this issue.
The 1998 Birmingham Summit was the first summit to place the
issue so high up the G7/8’s agenda, partly as a result of the initiative of
Blair, who became the first UK prime minister to host a second
summit and was thereby able to promote the issue once more at the
2005 Gleneagles Summit. On the one hand, Birmingham was impor-
tant as a result of the attention civil society groups, and in particular
the UK church-based NGO umbrella group known as Jubilee 2000,
brought to the summit. At Birmingham, the highpoint was a “human
chain” of 70,000 people organized by Jubilee 2000 around the
Birmingham convention centre where some of the G8 summit meet-
ings had taken place (although the leaders were elsewhere on the day
of the demonstration). In addition, a meeting was held with UK
Development Secretary Clare Short. The objective was to elicit a
strong and clear message on debt relief by the G8 that would be taken
up by the IMF and World Bank.
In preparing the Birmingham Summit, the UK government
focussed attention on the need to take action to reduce the burden of
debt shouldered by the most Heavily Indebted Poor Countries identi-
fied by the IMF and World Bank. Although the discussion of this
issue at Birmingham was generally regarded as disappointing, Blair
defended it as an important step forward to be built upon afterwards.
To this end, he issued a separate document entitled Response By the
Presidency on Behalf of the G8 to the Jubilee 2000 Petition, which
acknowledged the efforts of Jubilee 2000, “[y]our presence here is a
truly impressive testimony to the solidarity of people in our own coun-
tries with those in the world’s poorest and most indebted. It is also a
public acknowledgement of the crucial importance of the question of
debt.”5
Although a number of initiatives on debt relief were decided at
Birmingham, they were evaluated negatively by Jubilee 2000.
Thereafter the focus of the summit members and Jubilee 2000 moved
to the following year’s summit in Cologne, Germany (the G8 summit
member singled out by Jubilee 2000 as one of the main obstacles to
resolving debt relief). However, a change in administration led to the
more sympathetic Socialist Chancellor Gerhard Schröder facilitating
the agreement of the “Cologne Debt Initiative” that aimed to reduce
the debts of countries that qualified from US $130 billion to US $60
billion.
 Achievements and Failures 65
Blair was a central actor in placing debt as almost the sole issue
under discussion at the 2005 Gleneagles Summit. As mentioned in
the Preface to this volume, the Gleneagles Summit stands out in the
G8’s history as the most high-profile and eagerly anticipated summit.
As a result of the Make Poverty History campaign (the natural
successor to Jubilee 2000) and the series of Live 8 concerts, the level
of expectation was so high that any G8 decision was almost
inevitably going to disappoint. This demonstrated a failure on the
part of the public at large and the media to understand that the G8
cannot provide a silver bullet and works in a more iterative style.
Thus, a number of summit observers declared their dissatisfaction
with the results. Dr Richard Norton, editor of the medical magazine
The Lancet, wrote that “[t]he G8 summit drew welcome attention to
the plight of the world’s least advantaged peoples. But Blair and
Brown failed those who truly believed that they wished to make
poverty history. Diplomacy won over delivery. Let that stand as the
shameful epitaph of the G8.”6
Nevertheless, this was the fifth year that Africa’s problems were
addressed with several African leaders in attendance. As regards debt
relief, the “Cologne Debt Initiative” addressed debts owed to govern-
ments, whereas Blair turned the G8’s attention to the debts owed to
multilateral banks. The finance ministers were able to agree in June
before the leaders upon the immediate debt forgiveness of US $40
billion and the extension of full relief on debts to twenty-seven coun-
tries eventually. As regards aid, the leaders persuaded Bush, Schröder,
and Koizumi and agreed at Gleneagles to double aid by 2010,
totalling US $50 billion per year. However, agreements on trade were
less impressive.7 Africa is an issue that now appears to be synonymous
with the G8.

Political Issues
Although created to address economic issues, as the G7/8 is simply
“the biggest show around,” it is inescapable that it would come to
address political issues.8 This was clear at an early stage and at the first
Rambouillet Summit, Article 1 of the Declaration announced that
“[i]n these three days we held a searching and productive exchange of
views on the world economic situation, on economic problems
common to our countries, on their human, social and political implica-
tions, and on plans for resolving them.” Furthermore, Article 2
emphasized that “[w]e came together because of shared beliefs and
shared responsibilities. We are each responsible for the government of
66 Achievements and Failures
an open, democratic society, dedicated to individual liberty and social
advancement. Our success will strengthen, indeed is essential to, demo-
cratic societies everywhere.”9
This emphasis on the promotion of democracy would continue to
appear in summit documentation through the 1980s and into the new
millennium, most recently at the 2004 Sea Island Summit when US
President George W. Bush presented an action plan to promote
democracy in the Broader Middle East.
Clearly, despite being known as the “economic summit” in its early
years, political issues were never very far away and, to a large degree, it
has been the structure of the international system that has dictated the
issues that is has addressed. During the first summit cycle, which ran
concomitantly with the decline of US hegemony, the G8 provided a
forum for the shared management of a number of global and regional
political issues. For example, at the 1980 Venice Summit a day of
discussion of political issues was scheduled for the first time and
resulted in the release of four political declarations on the taking of
diplomatic hostages, refugees, broad political issues (mostly occupied
with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), and hijacking. This initiative
was continued the following year at the Ottawa Summit when the
Chair’s Summary touched upon a wide range of political issues such as
East–West relations, conflict in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and the
Cambodian conflict, although it did little except to express concern.
In the 1980s, as a result of renewed East–West tensions and US
President Ronald Reagan’s desire to focus on related political issues,
the G8’s attention was placed on East–West relations. Although it
would be a gross over-exaggeration to suggest that the G7 was respon-
sible for the collapse of Communism, it did provide a forum for the
leading capitalist countries to meet and express their unity. For
example, the Chair’s Summary of the 1981 Ottawa Summit began with
the statement that “Our discussion of international affairs confirmed
our unity of view on the main issues that confront us all. We are deter-
mined to face them together in a spirit of solidarity, cooperation and
responsibility.”10 As mentioned in previous chapters, there was also a
high degree of consistency amongst the leaders during this period –
Mitterrand in France, Reagan in the US, Thatcher in the UK, Kohl in
Germany and Nakasone in Japan. The G7 could be described as the
bastion of the Cold War warriors and their solidarity was declared at
every opportunity. During this period the 1985 Bonn Summit provided
a good opportunity, with the fiftieth anniversary of WWII, to empha-
size the integration of former enemies within the Western camp and
make a link between the last war and the East–West conflict:
 Achievements and Failures 67
Other nations that shared with ours in the agonies of the Second
World War are divided from us by fundamental differences of polit-
ical systems. We deplore the division of Europe. In our commitment
to the ideals of peace, freedom and democracy we seek by peaceful
means to lower the barriers that have arisen within Europe . . .
Considering the climate of peace and friendship which we have
achieved among ourselves forty years after the end of the war we
look forward to a state of peace in Europe in which the German
people will regain their unity through free self-determination; and
in Asia we earnestly hope that a political environment will be
created which permits the parties to overcome the division of the
Korean peninsula in freedom.11

Nevertheless, like almost everybody else, the G7 failed to predict the

end of the Cold War that began towards the end of the 1980s. Even
towards the end of this decade, summit declarations and statements
were still written in the language of the Cold War. They reaffirmed the
rightness of democracy, capitalism, human rights and the G7’s poli-
cies, whilst extending the carrot of approval for any shift on the part of
the Soviet leadership towards their position and waving a stick where
no progress was evident.
Towards the end of the 1980s and during the 1990s, the G7/8
provided the chief mechanism by which the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe’s transitions to capitalism and democracy were managed. From
the 1989 Paris Summit, where a first attempt was made to include
Gorbachev in the proceedings and the G24 was created to funnel assis-
tance to Eastern Europe, the G7 dealt with the issue of providing
assistance to the Soviet Union/Russia through to the final settlement
of the amounts of aid in April 1993 ahead of the Tokyo Summit.
Thus, the G8 has acted as global fundraiser. For example, US $26
billion in 1992 and US $43 billion in 1993 to assist the former Soviet
Union (other examples of this role include the US $20 billion raised in
2002 to fund the Global Partnership against Weapons and Materials of
Mass Destruction, and US $500 million raised in 2003 to eradicate
polio as part of the G8 Action Plan on Health). However, more than
the assistance provided, it was the inclusion of Russia within the
framework of the G8 that had the greatest impact in bringing the
former Communist superpower into the fold of the international
community.
From the mid-1990s through to the present day, globalization has
commanded the attention of the summiteers. It was mentioned for the
first time in the 1994 Naples Summit communiqué, “[w]e have gathered
68 Achievements and Failures
at a time of extraordinary change in the world economy. New forms of
international interaction are having enormous effects on the lives of our
peoples and are leading to the globalization of our economies.”12
Since that time, the G7/8 has sought to both reap the economic
benefits of globalization and also limit its negative impact. Within this
context of globalization, it was around this time that the format of the
G7/8 went through a process of self-examination and reform in order
to pare it down and prepare it for the challenges of globalization.
Although calls along these lines had been made since the very first
summit, this process began in earnest at the 1994 Naples Summit,
whose communiqué asked:

How can we assure that the global economy of the 21st century
will provide sustainable development with good prosperity and
well-being of the peoples of our nations and the world? What
framework of institutions will be required to meet these challenges
in the 21st century? How can we adapt existing institutions and
build new institutions to ensure the future prosperity and security
of our people?13

These questions were answered with a two-track approach. On the one

hand, it encouraged reform of the main international institutions, espe-
cially the UN as it faced its fiftieth anniversary and in which it was
ultimately unsuccessful. On the other hand, it sought to reform the G7/8
itself and was much more successful. Thereafter, a number of reforms to
the summit process, as described in previous chapters, were introduced
and the rise of the G7/8 to its central position in the provision of global
governance can be dated back to this point. To a great extent, the
greatest achievement of the G7/8 was its ability to reinvent itself.
This section has deliberately avoided discussion of issues that
although political can more comfortably be discussed in the following
two sections on security and social issues, which are often overlooked
or played down in the case of the G7/8’s remit.

Security Issues
If it was inevitable that the G8 would have to address political issues,
then the same holds true for security issues. In one of the more
sustained analyses of the G8’s role in security, Risto Penttilä has illus-
trated the symbiotic relationship the G7/8 has experienced with
international security: “[it] has played a significant and constantly
evolving role in international peace and security since its inception in
 Achievements and Failures 69
1975. Development of its security function has been part of its
progression from a Western economic actor to a global political
powerhouse.”14 He continues by dividing his analysis of the G7/8’s
contribution to security into policy coordination and crisis manage-
ment. These areas play to the G8’s strengths as it was originally
intended to be a forum for the collective coordination of policy (albeit
economic) and is flexible enough to adapt to crises as they emerge. In
addition, it is clear that the G8 knows its limitations and is willing to
delegate; in other words, “[i]t has left work at the coal face to the
United Nations and to regional organizations, while urging them
on.”15 During the three decades over which the G8’s history spans, it is
these aspects of its contribution that are most salient.
What is more, the discussion of security at the G7/8 has not been
limited to the traditional “guns and bombs” definition of security and
has embraced newer security threats. In fact, the first discussion of a
security issue was terrorism in the shape of hijacking and hostage-
taking, prevalent during the 1970s as a result of a number of
high-profile incidents. Being probably the biggest terrorist target in the
world today, the G7/8 has naturally taken an interest in combating
terrorism. Despite recent attention on this issue, the G7/8 has a clearly
traceable track record of initiating anti-terrorist measures (see Box
4.1). The 1978 Bonn Summit was the first summit to address a security
issue – air hijacking – on an ad hoc basis at the initiative of West
German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and resulted in the issue of a
brief (113-word) statement outlining the measures members would
take and encouraging other states to cooperate:

The Heads of State and Government, concerned about terrorism

and the taking of hostages, declare that their governments will
intensify their joint efforts to combat international terrorism. To this
end, in cases where a country refuses extradition or prosecution of
those who have hijacked an aircraft and/or do not return such
aircraft, the Heads of State and Government are jointly resolved
that their governments shall take immediate action to cease all
flights to that country. At the same time, their governments will
initiate action to halt all incoming flights from that country or from
any country by the airlines of the country concerned. They urge
other governments to join them in this commitment.16

The 1980 Venice Summit met at a time of rife hostage-taking in the

Middle East and issued a declaration on the issue in which the G7
condemned hostage-taking and the seizure of embassies, consulates,
70 Achievements and Failures
and their personnel. As a response, the G7 members urged all govern-
ments in rather vague terms to adopt effective policies and promised
assistance and support to each other in the event of any of the above
happening.17 The 1986 Tokyo Summit focussed chiefly on terrorism
and resulted in the creation of an expert group on the subject and a
special statement on international terrorism and states (particularly
Libya) that sponsored and supported it. Specifically, a number of
measures were agreed upon including an embargo on arms exports to
states supporting or sponsoring terrorism, limitations on the size or
even closure of the diplomatic missions of these states, more rigorous
extradition procedures, stricter immigration and visa procedures, and
the encouragement of bilateral and multilateral cooperation between
police and security organizations.18
The most salient reaction of the G8 to the events of 9/11 was to
shift the summit venue to more isolated retreats. With a considerable
history of dealing with terrorism, the first summit to be held after the
terrorist attacks on the US was held in the Canadian Rockies and in
the Chair’s Summary addressed the issue as its first priority:

This was our first meeting since the terrible events of September
11. We discussed the threat posed to innocent citizens and our
societies by terrorists and those who support them. We are
committed to sustained and comprehensive actions to deny
support or sanctuary to terrorists, to bring terrorists to justice, and
to reduce the threat of terrorist attacks. We agreed on a set of six
non-proliferation Principles aimed at preventing terrorists – or
those who harbour them – from acquiring or developing nuclear,
chemical, radiological and biological weapons; missiles; and
related materials, equipment or technologies. We called on other
countries to join us in implementing these Principles. We launched
a new G8 Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and
Materials of Mass Destruction, under which we will undertake
cooperative projects on the basis of agreed guidelines. We
committed to raise up to US $20 billion to support such projects
over the next ten years. We agreed on a new initiative with clear
deadlines – Cooperative G8 Action on Transport Security – to
strengthen the security and efficiency of the global transportation
system.19

It is clear from Box 4.1, that prior to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the
G7/8’s treatment of terrorism was very much conducted on an ad hoc
basis. However, since the attacks, the issue has been dealt with more
Box 4.1 The G7/8 and Terrorism, 1978–2005

1978 Statement on Air Hijacking

1979 Press Release on Air Hijacking
1980 Statement on the Taking of Diplomatic Hostages
Statement on Hijacking
1981 Statement on Terrorism
1984 Declaration on International Terrorism
1986 Statement on International Terrorism
Creation of the Terrorism Experts Group
1987 Statement on Terrorism
1989 Declaration on Terrorism
1990 Statement on Transnational Issues
1995 Ministerial Meeting on Terrorism, Ottawa
Ottawa Ministerial Declaration on Countering Terrorism
1996 Declaration on Terrorism
Ministerial Conference on Terrorism, Paris
Agreement on 25 Measures for Combating Terrorism
Creation of a Counterterrorist Directory of Skills and
Competencies
Announcement of P8 Conference on Land Transportation
Security, Washington
1997 G8 Counterterrorism Experts Meeting, Washington
1998 G8 Counterterrorism Experts Meeting, London
G8 Justice and Interior Ministers’ Virtual Meeting on
Organized Crime and Terrorist Funding
G8 Hostage-Taking Workshop, London
1999 Statement by the Participants of the Moscow Conference
of G8 Ministers on Counteracting Terrorism
G8 Counterterrorism Experts Meeting, Berlin
G8 Counterterrorism Conference, Berlin
2001 G8 Counterterrorism Experts Meeting, Rome
G8 Statement on the Attacks of 11 September
G7 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Action
Plan to Combat the Financing of Terrorism
G8 Foreign Ministers Statement on Afghanistan
G8 Foreign Ministers Statement on India and Pakistan
2002 Statement on Cooperative G8 Action on Transport
Security Progress

(continued on next page)

 G8 Foreign Ministers Progress Report on the Fight
against Terrorism
G8 Foreign Ministers Recommendations on Counter-
Terrorism
G7 Finance Ministers Action Plan: Progress Report
on Combating the Financing of Terrorism
Statement by G8 Foreign Ministers in Connection
with Terrorist Hostage Taking in Moscow
G7 Finance Ministers Press Release: Combating the
Financing of Terrorism: First Year Report
2003 Building International Political Will and Capacity to
Combat Terrorism: A G8 Action Plan
Enhance Transport Security and Control of Man-
Portable Air Defence Systems (MANPADS): A G8
Action Plan
Counter-Terrorism Action Group, Paris
2004 G7 Finance Ministers Statement on Combating Terrorist
Financing, Washington
G8 Justice and Home Ministers Recommendations
for Enhancing the Legal Framework to Prevent
Terrorist Attacks, Washington
G8 Justice and Home Ministers Recommendations
on Special Investigative Techniques and Other Critical
Measures for Combating Organized Crime and Terrorism
G8 Justice and Home Ministers Recommendations
for Sharing and Protecting National Security
Intelligence Information in the Investigation and
Prosecution of Terrorists and Those Who Commit
Associated Offences
G8 Justice and Home Ministers Statement of Principles to
Protect Asylum Processes from Abuse by Persons
Involved in Terrorist Activities
Joint Statement by President Vladimir Putin and Prime
Minister Paul Martin on Co-operation in the Struggle
against Terrorism, Moscow
2005 Statement by Tony Blair on the Terrorist Attacks on
London
Statement by the Leaders on the Terrorist Attacks on
London

(continued on next page)

 Achievements and Failures 73

G8 Statement on Counter-Terrorism
Secure and Facilitated International Travel Initiative
(SAFTI) Summit Progress Report
Based upon Andre Belelieu “The G8 and Terrorism: What Role Can the
G8 Play in the 21st Century?,” G8 Governance 8, June (2002), 10. Available
on-line at: http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/governance/belelieu 2002-gov8.pdf,
visited on 5 September 2005 (updated and slightly adapted).

consistently. The G7/8’s contribution is to be found in its role in

focussing minds and providing political leadership in addressing an
issue like terrorism, which intersects at both the domestic and interna-
tional, the economic and political. To this end, the G7/8’s activities
take place on a number of levels from the summit meeting of leaders,
to regular ministerial meetings, down to the group of experts, as
mentioned later.
At subsequent summits, G8 statements expanded their role in
combating terrorism. At the 2003 Evian Summit, a G8 Action Plan
was announced promising to create a Counter-Terrorism Action
Group that would endeavour to build political will and oversee assistance
in capacity building. Again, the G8 sought to connect its actions to
other mechanisms of global governance by inviting a number of repre-
sentatives from states, regional organizations, and international
financial institutions, in addition to a representative of the United
Nations Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee to the
group’s meetings.20
Although the G8’s role in the “war on terror” has been somewhat
limited by the unilateral nature of the US-led conflict, it has focussed
more specifically on preventing the financing of terrorist groups. The
Financial Action Task Force was mobilized for this task and its activi-
ties peaked by February 2002 when 150 states had ordered the freezing
of terrorist assets totalling US $100 million.21 In addition, its attempts
to address poverty in the developing world are also motivated by a
desire to combat the roots of terrorism. The forum of the G8 also
provided an opportunity at the Evian Summit for reconciliation
amongst the leaders in the aftermath of the war in Iraq of 2003.
Although there were rumours that al-Qaeda was planning to fly a
plane into the Ducal Palace during the 2001 Genoa Summit, the G8
became inextricably tied to the threat of terrorism during the 2005
Gleneagles Summit when a series of bomb attacks on London coin-
74 Achievements and Failures
cided with the summit meeting. The G8 members have all been victims
of terrorism over recent years to one degree or another and it is likely
to remain at the top of the G8’s agenda in the future. This is highly
ironic considering the origins of the G8 as a forum for the discussion
of macroeconomic issues.
Other non-traditional security issues that have been addressed at the
summit have included refugees (the issue was discussed at the 1979
Tokyo Summit and the 1980 Venice Summit; the former was successful
in urging UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to hold a conference
on the subject), energy and nuclear safety. Ultimately, if one were to
take a broad definition of security, as scholars such as Barry Buzan
urge us to do, then most of the summit’s agenda could be regarded as
dealing with security issues.
More traditional security issues were addressed at the G4 “holiday
summit” at Guadeloupe in January 1979 where issues such as détente
with the Soviet Union, the future of the Strategic Arms Limitation
Talks, and arms sales to China were discussed. The deployment of US
missiles in Europe in response to possible Soviet deployment of inter-
mediate-range missiles was decided and became a topic for discussion
at subsequent summits during the 1980s as East–West tensions reinten-
sified. At the 1983 Williamsburg Summit, the G8’s strategy of
matching Soviet deployment with its own and equally responding to
non-deployment in similar fashion was declared in Article 5 of the
Williamsburg Declaration on Security: “Our nations express the strong
wish that a balanced intermediate-range nuclear forces agreement be
reached shortly. Should this occur, the negotiations will determine the
level of deployment. It is well-known that should this not occur, the
countries concerned will proceed with the planned deployment of the
US systems in Europe beginning at the end of 1983.”22 These conse-
quent discussions led to one of the major achievements of the summit
during this period – the integration of Japan into the West’s security
position and the agreement in Article 6 of the same declaration of the
indivisibility of the G8 countries’ security.
More recently, the 1998 Birmingham Summit coincided with the
Indian testing of nuclear weapons and was flexible enough to include
the issue in its discussions and act to prevent its escalation through
exhortation in its political statement on regional issues:

We urge India and other states in the region to refrain from further
tests and the deployment of nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles.
We call upon India to rejoin the mainstream of international
opinion, to adhere unconditionally to the Nuclear Non-
 Achievements and Failures 75
Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban
Treaty and to enter into negotiations on a global treaty to stop the
production of fissile material for nuclear weapons. India’s relation-
ship with each of us has been affected by these developments. We
are making this clear in our own direct exchanges and dealings
with the Indian Government and we call upon other states simi-
larly to address their concerns to India. We call upon and
encourage Pakistan to exercise maximum restraint in the face of
these tests and to adhere to international non-proliferation
norms.23

Equally, the DPRK’s nuclear weapons programme has attracted the

attention of the summit leaders and led to statements expressing concern
and calling for inspectors to be allowed into the DPRK. Over both
these issues, although the G8 may provide another source of possible
constraint, it has not ventured into a more concrete or active role.
These above examples all demonstrate the G8’s ability to respond
to a crisis as it emerges or the particular issue of the day. In contrast,
the G8 has also overseen the resolution of a number of regional
conflicts. The long-running conflict in Cambodia was addressed in
the summit’s declarations at the 1981 Ottawa, 1988 Toronto, and 1989
Paris Summits partly as a result of the Japanese government’s efforts.
One salient example was the 1997 Denver Summit where Prime Minister
Hashimoto Ryūtarō was able to garner the support of his summit
colleagues for a proposal to despatch the special envoys of both France
and Japan to Phnom Penh. What is more, it was the G7 that provided
the framework for the raising of funds within the international
community to support the 1991 Gulf War.
However, Kosovo probably represents the G8’s most high-profile
role in managing conflict resolution, although it was fortunate that the
crisis in Kosovo occurred in 1999 when some of the most important
actors also had one eye on the G8.24 Russia had just joined the G8 the
previous year and was keen to affirm its great power status through the
forum whilst keeping one eye on its national interests in Kosovo.
Germany has had geopolitical interests in the former Yugoslavia and
was chair of the G8 in 1999. Through a series of negotiations amongst
G8 foreign ministers throughout the first half of 1999, UN Resolution
1244 sanctioning a peacekeeping force was drafted and adopted by the
UNSC and an agreement on the resolution of the conflict was agreed
and later confirmed by all the G8 leaders including Russian President
Boris Yeltsin at the Cologne Summit in June. The key role played by
the G8 foreign ministers in the Kosovo crisis was recognized by their
76 Achievements and Failures
leaders and encouraged in future: “ . . . we invite our Foreign Ministers
to review on a regular basis the progress achieved thus far in this
process and to provide further guidance.”25
The case of Kosovo demonstrates that it is possible that conflict
with the UNSC over which is the leading body in the field of security
will emerge in the future. On the one hand, the UNSC is the legitimate
body but has suffered from a degree of overreach and some damaging
failures. On the other hand, the G8 has shown itself to be effective but
is completely lacking in legitimacy. Chapter 5 will return to this issue.

Social Issues
A number of issues have appeared on the G7/8’s agenda that may be
political and economic in nature but firmly intrude into the social
sphere. Amongst these, the most prominent are the environment,
health (in particular, HIV/AIDS), ICT, crime, education, and unem-
ployment.
The environment first appeared as a topic for summit discussion at
the 1985 Bonn Summit as a result of German Chancellor Helmut
Kohl’s initiative and in the brief 217 words given over to it in the
resulting Economic Declaration it was promised to coordinate initia-
tives through existing international organizations such as the OECD.26
Since then it has appeared regularly enough within summit discussions
that it might be termed a traditional summit subject. It appeared
prominently on the summit leader’s agenda as a result of a French
initiative at the 1989 Paris Summit, which resulted in a 1,700-word
section in the Economic Declaration on the environment and saw the
members of the G8 pledge to explore how environmental protection
could be inputted into individual government policies.27 The environ-
ment ministers of the G7 came together in Spring 1992 in Germany
and met annually from 1994 onwards. At the 2005 Gleneagles Summit,
although climate change took second place to African poverty in the
media’s attention, it was the focus for much discussion, although little
progress was made in the face of US intransigence on the Kyoto
Protocol demonstrated in the statement “[t]hose of us who have rati-
fied the Kyoto Protocol remain committed to it, and will continue to
work to make it a success.” The only point of agreement amongst the
summit leaders was that “climate change is happening now, that
human activity is contributing to it, and that it could affect every part
of the globe.”28
Health is another area into which the G8 has ventured and the
health ministers of the G8 members have met irregularly since 2001.
 Achievements and Failures 77
Margaret Thatcher, as chair of the 1984 London Summit, made an
oral statement on cancer. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl made a
similar statement on drugs. The G7/8’s attention has focussed in partic-
ular upon communicable diseases. HIV/AIDS first appeared as an item
for the summit’s attention at the 1987 Venice Summit and it immedi-
ately identified the World Health Organization (WHO) as the most
appropriate body through which its efforts to find a cure and educate
the public should be organized.29 Japanese Prime Minister Hashimoto
Ryūtarō proposed the creation of centres based in Africa and Asia to
promote development and research in Asia and Africa into parasitic
diseases and international cooperation between the WHO and the G8.
These centres were created in Ghana, Kenya, and Thailand and when
organizing the agenda for the 2000 Okinawa Summit the Japanese
government built on this initiative by promoting measures to combat
infectious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis,
through international exchange of information and equipment as well
as through the provision of official development assistance. Thereafter,
considerable donations to the fight against HIV/AIDS have been coor-
dinated through the G8’s Global AIDS and Health Fund that by the
time of the 2001 Genoa Summit totalled US $1.5 billion and included
contributions from a number of G8 and non-G8 member states, inter-
national organizations, and private individuals; with the US leading
the contributions with US $300 million or 20 per cent of the total
fund, and Italy, Japan, and the UK each contributing US $200 million
or 13 per cent.30 Further promises of increased contributions were
made at Gleneagles as part of the emphasis on addressing African
poverty.
In the field of ICT, the 2000 Okinawa Summit resulted in the
Okinawa Charter on Global Information Society that aimed to close
the “digital divide” between developed and developing countries with
the belief that “everyone, everywhere should be enabled to participate
in and no one should be excluded from the benefits of the global infor-
mation society.”31 Its first meeting took place in Tokyo in November
2000, a second meeting in Cape Town in March 2001, and a third in
Siena in April 2001, after which in May a report entitled “Digital
opportunities for all: meeting the challenge” was released.32 At the
Genoa Summit, the “Genoa Plan of Action” was adopted fulfilling the
mandate issued at Okinawa.33 At the Kananaskis Summit progress was
reviewed and it was reported that participation had expanded to
include almost 100 stakeholder organizations in more than thirty
countries, and more than twenty major bilateral and multilateral initia-
tives had been implemented. Across the globe a range of initiatives had
78 Achievements and Failures
been introduced, for example community radio stations in Africa had
begun to provide vital information on extreme weather conditions,
health, nutrition, and HIV/AIDS prevention, in addition internet
centres had been set up in Bolivia to provide farmers with a range of
information related to crop production.34
In the field of crime prevention, at the 1996 Lyon Summit the G8
was responsible for the creation of the Senior Experts Group on
Transnational Organized Crime (eponymously known as the Lyon
Group). In addition, the G8 ministers responsible have met irregularly
since 1999. Discussions at the 1998 Birmingham Summit were mainly
taken up with discussion of this issue, specifically financial crimes such
as money laundering, drugs, trafficking in persons, and the smuggling
of firearms. Tony Blair was once again an innovator in the summit
format as he arranged for the head of the UK national crime squad to
address the leaders – an especially relevant exercise as 80 per cent of
the squad’s investigations were taken up by cases with an international
dimension. This initiative was supported by Yeltsin’s willingness to
host a follow-up ministerial meeting in Moscow in October 1999 and
another meeting in Tokyo in February 2000.
Education is an issue that has appeared occasionally in summit
discussions and resulted in concrete initiatives in the past. At the 1987
Venice Summit, the Human Frontier Science Programme was adopted
in the final communiqué with the goal of promoting international
scientific cooperation in biological research. The same declaration also
took up the issue of bioethics addressed iteratively at previous
summits, and promoted it into the future.35 The protection of intellec-
tual property rights and prevention of piracy have also been the focus
of summit discussion. However, education has more recently been
addressed within the framework of globalization and development. At
the 1999 Cologne Summit it was addressed in its own declaration
under the “Charter on Lifelong Learning,” which declared that educa-
tion was “indispensable to achieving economic success, civic
responsibility and social cohesion,” and that “[t]he challenge every
country faces is how to become a learning society and to ensure that its
citizens are equipped with the knowledge, skills and qualifications they
will need in the next century.”36 G8 education ministers met the
following year in April 2000 in Tokyo to reaffirm the goals of the
Cologne Charter and agreed to encourage the role of ICT in educa-
tion, share best practices, encourage educational exchanges in order to
reduce the “digital divide,” and utilize for such as the OECD and
future G8 meetings as necessary towards achieving these goals. The
Genoa Summit and Kananaskis Summit (which had been billed as the
 Achievements and Failures 79
“education summit” until the events of 9/11 shifted the focus firmly
towards terrorism) both promoted the goals of the Education for All
initiative, whose goals mirror those of the Millennium Development
Goals and whose targets include: 1) securing good quality and free
compulsory education for all children by 2015; 2) achieving an
increase in adult literacy of 50 per cent by the same year; and 3) elimi-
nating gender disparities in primary and secondary education by
2005.
As regards reducing unemployment and other labour issues, the G7
employment ministers met for the first time at a conference on jobs
held in Detroit, US in 1994. Since then, they have met annually since
1996. However, unemployment had appeared as an issue on the G7/8’s
agenda from the 1970s in terms of sustaining economic growth in
members’ own economies. The 1998 Birmingham Summit included
“employability and inclusion” as a topic for discussion but most of the
actual detailed work was done at lower levels in advance of the summit
and approved by the G7 finance ministers before the leaders did the
same.37

An Ever-Expanding Agenda
It is clear that the remit of the G7/8’s discussions has been wide-
ranging and constantly expanding. Despite having been established
with the goal of producing collective decisions to solve essentially
economic issues, it was not long (especially with the bipolar tensions of
the 1980s) before political and security issues came to be included and
even dominate individual summits. With the end of the Cold War and
the intensification of globalization, social issues and the sharing of
best practice in addressing them came to be added to the summit. As
regards the question originally asked at the beginning of this chapter,
the G7/8 is a flexible forum that has registered a number of positive
results by highlighting an issue, reaching a collective agreement, and
then delegating to the relevant international organization. Although
debatable, the most salient amongst these achievements are probably
managing the end of and fallout from the end of the Cold War,
providing a vehicle for highlighting and popularizing the issue of debt
relief and carving out an embryonic role in conflict prevention.
However, it is also evident that the G7/8 can only be as successful as
the participants wish it to be, although it is often the forum and not
these participants that bears the brunt of criticism when decisions
cannot be reached. Some of the summit process’s biggest embarrass-
ments include the failure to conclude the long-running Uruguay
80 Achievements and Failures
Round of trade negotiations earlier and the divisions that emerged in
the 1980s between the US and Europe over East–West trade. This begs
the tricky but necessary question of whether the world is a better or
worse place because of the G7/8 – something the following two chap-
ters will explore in more detail.
5 Criticisms and Challenges

Since the first summit meeting at the château of Rambouillet in

November 1975, a number of criticisms and accusations have been
levelled at the G7/8. Three issues in particular have dogged the G7/8
throughout its history:

• Legitimacy. As an unelected and seemingly unaccountable

grouping of the most powerful states in the global political
economy, without any legal basis or criteria for membership, the
G7/8 has understandably been accused of illegitimacy.
• Overlap. There is an excess of international organizations, institu-
tions, and regimes that possess the legitimacy and capacity to act
in the provision of international public goods. In which case, the
argument follows, as it overlaps with much of the work of these
bodies, what is the G7/8 for?
• Effectiveness. To hold a G7/8 summit costs a great deal of money,
which is highly visible, yet as far as the general public are
concerned, the results often take a long time to be realized and are
difficult to discern. Thus, the G7/8’s effectiveness and value-for-
money are often called into question.

These questions have not only forced the G7/8 over recent years to
justify its existence and expense through a number of initiatives, they
are also core to the very future of the summit process.

Legitimacy
Measured in terms of raw data, the G8 represents a powerful
grouping: “[t]ogether, these eight states account for 48 per cent of the
global economy and 49 per cent of global trade, hold four of the
United Nations’ five Permanent Security Council seats, and boast
82 Criticisms and Challenges
majority shareholder control over the IMF and the World Bank.”1 In
addition, the summit members account for roughly two-thirds of the
world’s gross domestic product. The power, or rather potential power,
is there; however, nobody has elected the G8. Moreover, unlike the
UN, WTO, IMF, and World Bank, it has no constitution or legal foun-
dation. Its meetings take place in plush hotels or resorts far removed
from the protests of civil society or the watchdog of the media.
Nobody knows what goes on around the table apart from those in
attendance and no minutes are kept of their discussions. Admittedly, a
statement or communiqué is released at the end of the summit but very
few members of the general public bother to read it.
It is this lack of legitimacy and transparency that is probably the
most common criticism that has been made of the G8. In turn it has
been described as a “closed club of an obsolescent rich white plutoc-
racy,” which amounts to little more than a “global hot tub party.”2 As
a result, “[m]any people question the right of eight countries . . . to
take decisions affecting the rest of the world.”3 The investigative jour-
nalist, George Monbiot, has captured the undemocratic nature and the
degree of illegitimacy displayed by the above-mentioned mechanisms
of global governance (twice mentioning both the G8 and WTO) in the
following colourful fashion:

While the rulers of the world cloister themselves behind the fences
of Seattle or Genoa, or ascend into the inaccessible eyries of Doha
and Kananaskis, they leave the rest of the world shut out of their
deliberations. We are left to shout abuse, to hurl ourselves against
the lines of police, to seek to smash the fences which stand
between us and the decisions made on our behalf. They reduce us,
in other words, to the mob, and then revile the thing they have
created. When, like the cardinals who have elected a new pope,
they emerge, clothed in the serenity of power, to announce that it
is done, our howls of execration serve only to enhance the
graciousness of their detachment. They are the actors, we the
audience, and for all our cat-calls and imprecations, we can no
more change the script to which they play than the patrons of a
cinema can change the course of the film they watch. They, the
tiniest and most unrepresentative of the world’s minorities, assert a
popular mandate they do not possess, and then accuse us of ille-
gitimacy. Their rule, unauthorized and untested, is sovereign.4

The inherent problem with the summit is that what makes it unique
and potentially effective – an informal, personal encounter of leaders
 Criticisms and Challenges 83
that takes place behind closed doors – is what also leads to the kind of
vehement criticisms outlined above. In fact, one leader stated that the
perfect summit would be one in which “the leaders met in total secrecy,
released an announcement only several weeks after the conclusion of
the meeting, and revealed not what had been discussed or decided, but
only that the meeting had taken place.”5 Although this might meet the
needs of the G7/8 leaders, this would only serve as ammunition to the
accusations of illegitimacy. Rather, it could be argued, the G7/8 needs
to take on board the advice of James Rosenau when he wrote that “[i]n
order to acquire the legitimacy and support they need to endure,
successful mechanisms of governance are more likely to evolve out of
bottom-up than top-down processes.”6
In this light, over recent years the G8 has responded by operating a
policy of outreach to non-G8 governments, business, and civil society.
As regards non-G8 governments, various African countries have been
invited to participate at the most recent G8 summits held in the new
millennium. As for the G8’s engagement with civil society groups, its
relationship with Jubilee 2000 and the Drop the Debt campaign from
the 1998 Birmingham Summit onwards is particularly illustrative.
Finally, as part of the initiative of achieving legitimacy through trans-
parency, the G7/8’s relationship with the media is important.
As regards the inclusion of non-G8 governments in the summit
process, this policy of outreach may be regarded as cosmetic at best,
but in recent years it has represented a distinct trend in the develop-
ment of the G7/8, especially as debt relief and aid have risen up its
agenda. For example, during the 2000 Okinawa Summit, South
African Prime Minister Thabo Mbeki (as chair of the Non-Aligned
Movement), Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo (as chair of the
Group of 77 developing countries), Algerian President Abdelaziz
Bouteflika (as representative of the Organization of African Unity
(OAU)), and Thai Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai (as chair of the
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations Roundtable) were invited to
meet with both G7/8 members and representatives of the World Bank,
WHO, and United Nations Development Programme. On the first day
of the 2001 Genoa Summit, the G8 members met with a number of
African leaders of the developing world for a formal dinner.
Discussions on the second day of the 2002 Kananaskis Summit were
focussed on large-scale aid to Africa in return for anti-corruption and
free-market reforms in the recipient countries and were attended by
leaders of Algeria, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa, and UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan. This trend has continued with leaders
84 Criticisms and Challenges
of developing countries also attending discussions at the 2003 Evian
Summit (including China for the first time), 2004 Sea Island Summit,
and 2005 Gleneagles Summit. Although there is no chance of any of
these countries being invited to become permanent members, they do
have some access to summitry at the highest level.
Recently one particularly salient feature of the G8 summit meetings
has been the protests organized by civil society outside the meeting
place promoting a range of issues from African debt relief to the end
of capitalism, in addition to enhanced transparency and accountability
within the G8 or even its disbandment. Peter Hajnal, long-time
summit-watcher at the University of Toronto, has described the period
from 1975 to 1983 as one of mutual ignorance between the summit
process and civil society.7 However, during the 1990s civil society and
the G7/8 began to pay greater attention to each other, resulting in the
level of activity witnessed today. For the G7/8, engagement with civil
society is one more aspect of its attempt to address the problem that
has haunted it since its inception: legitimacy.
Jubilee 2000 provides a highly illustrative example of the summit’s
positive engagement with civil society.8 Jubilee 2000 acted originally as
an umbrella under which a number of NGOs, such as Christian Aid
and Oxfam, concerned with resolving debt issues in developing coun-
tries, were able to come together. It was founded in the UK in 1996
and expanded rapidly all over the globe by the year 2000 when it
discontinued its activities under that name. It used the slogan “Break
the Chains of Debt” and targeted the year 2000 as the year by which to
have achieved the goal of 100 per cent cancellation of the debts of
developing countries. At the end of 2000, when this goal had not been
achieved, Jubilee 2000 continued its campaign in individual countries.
In the UK, it metamorphosed into the Jubilee Debt Campaign, which
describes itself as “a think-and-do tank: to provide up-to-date accurate
analysis, news and data, and facilitate communication to the north and
south debt relief movement, and promote effective campaigning and
action” and which works closely with two sister organizations – Jubilee
Research and Jubilee Scotland – to continue the campaign.9
Jubilee 2000’s achievement was to keep debt relief on the G8’s
agenda through peaceful means. The techniques of their campaign
focussed upon:

• Demonstrations. A number of large-scale, high-profile demonstra-

tions, including a human chain, mentioned in Chapter 4, were
organized around the Birmingham Summit and continued there-
after. On the weekend before the 1999 G8 Cologne Summit took
 Criticisms and Challenges 85
place, human chains were organized in Edinburgh and in London
around the bridges of the Thames involving 50,000 demonstrators.
The summit itself was then targeted a week later. A smaller protest
was also organized in Okinawa. And, on 16 May 2003, a demon-
stration commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Birmingham
human chain was held.
• The use of high-profile representatives. These representatives
spanned the spectrum of popular and high-brow celebrities and
include popular musicians and bands such as Sean “P. Diddy”
Combs, The Prodigy, and Thom Yorke of Radiohead; actors such
as Ewan McGregor; sportsmen such as former boxer and living
legend Mohammed Ali; writers such as Harold Pinter; Nobel Prize
winners such as Amartya Sen; and pillars of morality such as the
Dalai Lama, the Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, and
the Reverend Jesse Jackson. As a result, it became a very media-
savvy campaign with wide appeal.
• Letter-writing campaigns. Before the 1999 Cologne Summit waves
of 15,000 postcards urging debt relief were sent to German
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the finance ministry and the socialist
rival for the chancellorship Gerhard Schröder. After replacing
Kohl as German Chancellor, Schröder placed debt relief on the
agenda for the summit. An example of these postcards can be seen
in the card Prime Minister Blair received from a 10-year-old
English girl who asked “Please lower the debt to the bottom.
Please keep your promise like you said at the meeting last year.
Congratulations on your baby Leo. Please think about the babies
in other countries too.”10 In the three weeks before he arrived at
Okinawa, Blair received 150,000 postcards and 100,000 e-mail
messages on the issue and travelled to Okinawa eager to discuss
these issues.
• The extensive use of ICT, the favourite tool of NGOs, to coordi-
nate activities such as those mentioned above, in addition to selling
merchandise (including T-shirts and CDs), lobbying MPs, and
encouraging schools to organize assemblies on the theme of debt
in developing countries.

A World Bank spokesman has referred to Jubilee 2000 as “one of the

most effective global lobbying campaigns I have ever seen.”11
However, the sincerity on the part of the G7/8 towards this policy of
“outreach” to civil society has been questioned. For example, at the
2000 Okinawa Summit, the Japanese government was the first govern-
ment to provide the necessary facilities and establish a physical base
86 Criticisms and Challenges
for a number of NGOs to conduct their activities. However, the
management of this centre was characterized as coercive. The centre
was under-used possibly because it was a considerable distance from
the press centre, from which the NGOs were barred, cost US $91 per
NGO to use, and involved registration procedures such as submitting
individual photographs and registering individuals’ details such as
address and height, implying surveillance of civil society by the
Japanese government.
More recently, the Make Poverty History campaign (the natural
successor to Jubilee 2000) and the Live 8 concerts have played a similar
role in seeking to make the G8 accountable. This mission can be seen
in the words of MTV, the mouthpiece of the generation to which this
campaign is directed:

The G8 summits differs [sic] from other political meetings

because of their informality; there are no formal rules of proce-
dure, and the leaders usually meet in a relaxed setting away from
the media. Because of that, critics say the G8 hasn’t gotten as
much exposure to the public as is needed to instigate proper
change. Enter Live 8.12

This leads us to another actor whose relationship with the G8 has

often been overlooked – the media. To a large degree, the public’s
understanding (or rather misunderstanding) of the G8 and the legiti-
macy of its role is a result of the media’s coverage. As Nicholas Bayne
has stated: “[i]nitially the summits were treated with respect by the
media. But as their communiqués got longer and they became occasions
for public display, the media became cynical.”13 Most news reports
tend to focus upon certain media-friendly issues, such as Africa and
environmental issues rather than multilateral trade negotiations or
education, the minority of violent protest rather than the majority of
peaceful protest, and the position of leaders in the final summit photo
or the lavishness of the summit venue and proceedings rather than the
substance of the declarations and communiqués. In this light, one
former sherpa has stated that the media in his own country do not
digest summit documentation.14 In the UK, the media have tended to
exaggerate the violence accompanying protests at the summit. Before
the Gleneagles Summit, one Scottish newspaper erroneously carried a
story with the headline “G8 protests spark blood supply crisis”
concerning fears over the lack of blood donations and the possible
need to import English blood in response to anticipated rioting at
Gleneagles.15
 Criticisms and Challenges 87
G7/8 leaders have been keen to hold press conferences after the
summit in order to justify the decisions reached and the solidarity of
the eight. Thus, the media centre has become a regular installation at
summits although its proximity to the summit has changed consider-
ably depending on the venue. At the 2002 Kananaskis Summit and the
2004 Sea Island Summit, the media were kept at arm’s length (fifty-six
and eight miles away respectively). However, at the 2005 Gleneagles
Summit, the media centre was included within the cordon around the
summit venue. Finally, another of the media’s impressions of the
summit is that it is nothing more than a three-day junket. For example,
the media centre at the 2000 Okinawa Summit provided free food and
alcohol, prompting one local journalist to wish that there could be a
G8 summit every day.
In a sense, the G8’s future challenge is one of spin-doctoring to ensure
that the correct impression of the work and achievements of this unique
form of global governance is communicated to the public at large.

Overlap
Although a meeting held behind closed doors, the G7/8 summit has
never operated as if hermetically sealed. Rather, it has located itself
within the other mechanisms of global governance and sought to dele-
gate the task of implementation to them when necessary. However, an
abundance of international organizations and global institutions has
led to a degree of overlap in their agendas. In the case of a flexible
grouping like the G7/8, this has resulted in its remit extending to
include all issues under the sun, and as a result in the eyes of some it
has become a “forum without a purpose.”16 This replication in the
work of the mechanisms of global governance has been pointed to by
a number of summit participants, most noticeably UK Prime Ministers
Harold Wilson in 1975 and John Major in 1994. As a result, a number
of efforts have been introduced to streamline the duties and remit of
these global institutions through the G7/8, some more effective than
others.
Although much larger in scale, the World Economic Forum (WEF)
might provide a template for what the G8 could become. The WEF
brings together a wide range of representatives from chiefly the busi-
ness world, but also government, academia, civil society, and religious
groups. It describes itself as:

an independent international organization committed to improving

the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape
88 Criticisms and Challenges
global, regional and industry agendas. Incorporated as a founda-
tion in 1971, and based in Geneva, Switzerland, the World
Economic Forum is impartial and not-for-profit; it is tied to no
political, partisan or national interests.17

The WEF certainly echoes the G8’s emphasis upon informality and
flexibility. In this light and in reaction to the crisis of legitimacy, the
creation of a Group of Twenty Leaders (L20), based upon the success
of the G20, might well provide a solution. With the goal of promoting
“open and constructive dialogues on key global issues, with clear
focuses on how to meet the globalization challenges, how to facilitate
balanced and orderly development of the world economy, and how
to accelerate reforms in the international financial architecture,” the
G20 has been widely praised over recent years.18 It might well provide
the stimulation to create a new forum at the leaders’ level in the same
way that the G5 did prior to the Rambouillet Summit. The G20
accounts for approximately 90 per cent of the world’s economy and an
L20 would be a forum that could parry criticisms of irrelevance by
including China and a number of important regional powers, whilst
also addressing questions of its accountability. However, the ques-
tion is not one of replacing the G8, but rather complementing its
work. Thus, fears associated with the L20 proposal are that ques-
tions of membership will persist and that it would serve, in whatever
form it might take, to eventually create a body similar to the UN.
Furthermore, the issue of civil society’s participation would continue
to demand attention. In short, the creation of the L20 should not be
regarded as a magical cure for the problems in the architecture of
global governance. The G8’s unique characteristic of exclusivity ought
not to be forgotten as it can only continue to contribute as it has done
by preserving this.
At this point in time the G8 is an example of both “nested” and
“overlapping” arrangements of global governance and to a much lesser
degree an example of “competing” arrangements.19 On the one hand,
this can be seen in the increasing number of global governance
arrangements to which it has acted as midwife, in similar fashion to the
UN family of agencies and organizations. On the other hand, with the
expansion of its agenda, the G8 has intruded into areas of global
governance for which it was not designed and in which institutions
already exist. The G8’s goal has not been to usurp these pre-existing
arrangements but rather to provide leadership and direction. Some
have suggested there is a more competitive relationship with the UN as
to which will provide the central focus of global governance, especially
 Criticisms and Challenges 89
after the 2003 Iraq War.20 However, this is little more than speculation
that ignores the concessions the G7/8 makes to the legitimacy of the
UN. Rather than providing a concrete locus of global governance, the
G7/8 continues to provide a talking shop for issues of global gover-
nance.
Today and for the immediate future, the G7/8 is demonstrating its
flexibility and ability to adapt to a specific issue of the day, and there-
after its readiness to delegate to a more appropriate body. In this way,
although it may tread on the toes of other organizations and institu-
tions, it never actually seeks to do their jobs for them. Rather, it seeks
to encourage them into action on the basis of the consensus reached at
the summit table. This reinforces the G7/8’s image as a plate-spinner
and the UN, WTO, IMF, and World Bank as the plates that it endeav-
ours to keep spinning.

Effectiveness
In The English Constitution, Walter Bagehot distinguished between the
efficient (the Cabinet and the House of Commons) and the dignified
(the Monarchy and the House of Lords) aspects of British govern-
ment. Whereas the former holds actual power, the latter “delights the
eye, stirs the imagination, supplies motive power to the whole political
system, and yet never strains the intellectual resources of the most
ignorant or the most stupid.”21 A similar distinction (or rather accusa-
tion) could be made in the case of the G7/8. Summit meetings are
often given a very high profile by the media but then rapidly disappear
from our consciousness. As a result, the G7/8 often appears to lack
concrete results, despite the initial expectations and the considerable
expense. These accusations of ineffectiveness have been repeated over
the years. In turn, the summits have been regarded as an “evanescent
public relations spectacle, increasingly irrelevant to the serious business
of national policymaking.”22 By the 1990s, it had become little more
than a “ritualized photo opportunity.”23 In 1997, French Foreign
Minister Hubert Vedrine claimed that the summits had become “media
circuses [that] only formulate resolutions full of empty rhetoric and
stripped of decision.”24
One of the reasons the G8 has often been accused of being ineffec-
tive is that expectations of the summit process have often been too
high. This was especially the case in the run-up to the 2005 Gleneagles
Summit as a result of the high-profile Make Poverty History campaign
and series of Live 8 concerts, as a result of which the adage that “eight
men in one room can change the world” became widely accepted
90 Criticisms and Challenges
amongst the media and public. Not only was this an erroneous under-
standing of the way in which the G8 functions, it also raised
expectations to an unsustainably high level and invited almost
inevitable disappointment. This rather simplistic portrayal of the G8
can be seen in the following statement by Jamie Drummond, executive
director of Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa, an NGO created by rock musi-
cian Bono of the band U2: “[w]hen these eight men sit in that room
and look each other in the eye, they must decide, ‘What kind of man
am I? Am I going to listen to the people?’ It doesn’t have to get fancy.
They just need to decide to do it.”25
This thinking is symptomatic of a tendency to accord too much
power and influence to the G7/8. A more extreme example of this
trend is the claim that “[l]ike a phalanx they [the G7/8] march across
the globe, pushing into the gutter anyone or anything that stands in
their way.”26 Certainly, the G7/8 can be very influential and effective
on occasions but only when a consensus is reached amongst its
members and then acted upon by states, international organizations or
NGO groups. The G7/8 is far from being an unthinking, single-minded
behemoth of global capitalism. Rather, the role of the G7/8 for the
most part is to provide a forum for discussion and the mooting of
ideas. To ask the question “[h]ow much longer should we let them
decide the fate of our planet?” is not only to miss the point, it is also to
misunderstand the nature of the G8.27 In the words of the late Michael
Hodges:

If one expects, even with regard to just one issue, that some form
of draft treaty will emerge at the end of 48 hours of leader’s [sic]
deliberations, even if these follow ten months of sherpa meetings,
one will inevitably be disappointed . . . One cannot expect a “just
add water” approach to provide instant G8 solutions to serious
problems.28

Nevertheless, to return to the original question, a number of problems

exist in measuring the effectiveness of a concert arrangement like the
G7/8. Although the G7/8 has no ability to enforce its decisions and
relies upon the moral weight of its numerous statements and commu-
niqués, compliance with the G7/8’s pronouncements might provide one
index. In addition, various attempts to improve the functioning and
effectiveness of the summit process can be pointed to, in particular
UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s reforms introduced at the 1998
Birmingham Summit that separated the leaders’ meetings from the
ministerial meetings and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s
 Criticisms and Challenges 91
initiative to limit the size of delegations, the length of the summit, and
its documentation at the 2002 Kananaskis Summit. However, these
reforms are premised on the idea of returning the G7/8 to its roots as
an informal meeting of leaders conducted behind closed doors and
have concomitantly been impacted upon by 9/11 and the protests at the
2001 Genoa Summit, which have led to the summit now being held in
remote, heavily-policed venues such as Kananaskis (2002), Sea Island
(2004), and Gleneagles (2005). As a result, it is open to debate as to
whether the long-standing criticism of the summit process –
legitimacy – has been addressed.
One way of measuring the G7/8’s effectiveness would be to judge it
by its own standards and return to its original objectives in order to
explore the degree to which they have been realized. Bayne and
Putnam have pointed to three structural features of the international
system that encouraged the founding of the G6 in 1975: the decline in
US hegemony and the necessity of collective management among
European, North American and Japanese leaders; ever-deepening
interdependence and the problems in which it resulted; and the
increasing dominance of bureaucracies in resolving global problems
and the perceived preference for political leadership and solutions.29
Judged by these three objectives, the G7/8 can be deemed in light
of the information provided in the preceding chapters to have been
successful. What is more, these goals are still relevant to the world
today (simply replace the word “interdependence” with “globaliza-
tion”). The G7/8 is essentially a political process that is not
dominated by the US and where all participants can bring something
to the table.
As regards the G7/8’s reliance upon moral pressure to ensure
compliance with its decisions, this can serve to influence the
behaviour of prime ministers and presidents between summits, over
time, and on specific issues, as was discussed in Chapter 2. In addi-
tion, an approaching summit has often served as a deadline for the
resolution of a particular issue. This was the case with multilateral
trade negotiations, in addition to the 1988 agreement on Japanese
imports of US beef and citrus fruits hammered out before the
Toronto Summit of the same year providing a pertinent example. It
was also suggested by some that Okinawa was chosen as the 2000
summit venue in order to provide a deadline (althought unsuccessful)
for the resolution of a troublesome dispute over the relocation of a
US military base within the islands. Whether or not UK Prime
Minister Tony Blair’s initiative of each leader personally signing the
summit statement will be effective or not remains to be seen.
92 Criticisms and Challenges
What the G7/8 has come to do very well over recent years is high-
light a specific issue. To a large extent, paring down the summit
meetings, reducing the size of the agenda and the length of statements
and communiqués, and returning it to the original idea of an informal
and personal meeting of like-minded leaders, were all intended to
combat atrophy, facilitate the effective working of the summit, and
increase the direct input from the leaders. Much of the preparation
and consensus-building can be worked out at the ministerial meetings
and then rubber-stamped by the leaders – this is what happened with
the issue of conflict resolution in Kosovo in 1999. Equally, the personal
input of leaders can be seen in issues such as ICT and African debt
relief being placed on the G8’s agenda at the instigation of an indi-
vidual leader. This is an initiative that has been welcomed by the
leaders in the fostering of direct discussion at the summit table.
As was demonstrated in the previous chapter, the G7/8 can claim a
number of successes in a number of fields – pushing forward the multi-
lateral rounds of trade negotiations, bringing Russia into the fold of
international society, conflict resolution in Kosovo – as well as having
suffered a number of failures. Whether or not the G8 is effective
depends on a number of issues both within and beyond its control –
the leadership of the host prime minister or president, the ability to
reach consensus, whether or not an election coincides with a summit.
However, when assessing the effectiveness of the G7/8, it is important
to take a long-term viewpoint. To reiterate, the G7/8 is an informal gath-
ering that deals with issues over years and even decades. Issues may
appear, disappear, and then reappear. For example, the G7/8 has been
dealing with the issue of terrorism on an ad hoc basis since hijacking
first appeared on its agenda at the 1978 Bonn Summit but more consis-
tently since the 1996 Lyon Summit created the expert group and
especially since the events of 9/11. Similarly, pressure was applied
annually upon the conclusions of both the Tokyo and Uruguay rounds
of trade negotiations.
Another way of thinking about the effectiveness of the G8 is by
looking at the costs associated with hosting the summit in comparison
to other mechanisms of global governance. In other words, how much
global governance does the world get for its dollar? As mentioned in
Chapter 2, the most expensive summit was the 2000 Okinawa Summit
at US $750 million. The 2001 Genoa Summit was thought to cost US
$225 million in total, and the 2002 Kananaskis Summit cost US $200
million. Before security costs exploded after 9/11, the 1999 Cologne
Summit cost approximately US $7.5 million. In comparison, the UN
budget for 2004–5 was just over US $3 billion. The WTO’s budget is
 Criticisms and Challenges 93
approximately US $83 million. The OECD’s budget for 2005 totalled
roughly US $410 million. Thus, in comparison to its fellow mecha-
nisms of global governance, the G8’s costs fluctuate wildly but can, on
occasions, provide value for money, especially compared to the UN.
To an extent, as a result of the media’s profiling of the G7/8 and the
general public’s acceptance of this portrayal, the G7/8 is damned if it
does and damned if it doesn’t. Nevertheless, whether it is successful or
not and identifying the circumstances that facilitate or deny this are
important for the future of the forum and will ensure that it can act in
an efficient manner and does not become an undignified mechanism of
global governance.
6 Future Directions

This final chapter will act as a conclusion by looking ahead to the G8’s
future, which at the time of writing appears to be unusually rosy. A
number of key issues and roles that it can play will be highlighted in
turn: its potential to provide leadership in setting the agenda of global
governance; its function as a forum for like-minded leaders to come
together in a spirit of unity that emphasizes its role as a Concert;
possible future directions in light of Russia’s full membership since
2003 and the hosting of its first summit in 2006, in addition to the
much-touted addition of China to form a G9; and the future of the
policy of outreach to non-G8 members and civil society, seemingly
delivered a setback after the 2004 Sea Island Summit and in doubt at
the 2006 St Petersburg Summit.

Leadership
In the early years of the twenty-first century, it appears that there is a
paucity of leadership in global governance and the traditional interna-
tional organizations that spring to mind as active or potential leaders
appear to be in a state of disarray. Over recent years, the UN’s credi-
bility has been rocked by a series of events. The administration of US
President George W. Bush went to war with Iraq in 2003 without
acquiring a UN resolution that would satisfy its critics and the long-
standing impression that the UN was impotent in preventing conflict
was compounded. Moreover, accusations surrounding the oil-for-food
programme in Iraq administered by the UN have also damaged its
reputation. This scandal was based upon accusations that UN officials
were profiting from illegal sales of Iraqi oil between 1996 and 2003 and
at one point implicated Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s son Kojo. In
the end, a number of UN officials ultimately lost their jobs, Annan
admitted lapses in the UN’s responsibility, and the reputation of the
 Future Directions 95
organization suffered. Finally, and despite numerous opportunities, the
UN has singularly failed to reform itself and develop beyond simply
reflecting the power configurations of the immediate post-WWII inter-
national system.
Equally, the EU and the process of European integration has stalled
over recent years. In May and June 2005, both French and Dutch elec-
torates rejected the EU Constitution, effectively killing off the
document as the ratification of all twenty-five member states – some
usually much more suspicious of the European project than these two
original members – is required. The rejection of this core document,
which was intended to provide a blueprint for future EU deepening
and widening, led to an immediate decline in the value of the Euro and
calls for a period of “reflection” on the very direction of Europe. It
also demonstrated profound differences of opinion on what the EU
should be and a gulf between the opinions of the peoples of Europe
and EU mandarins. What is more, the expansion of the EU to embrace
Turkey, potentially the first Moslem member of the EU family, has
revealed doubts over Turkey’s record on human rights and some
unsavoury racist attitudes at the heart of the union. Finally, the elabo-
rate procedures for deciding the EU’s budget have led to paralysis at
times and in the future require radical restructuring. The other mecha-
nisms of global governance are also plagued by similar problems that
strike at their very raison d’être.
In this situation, it appears that the G8 could be become the mecha-
nism of choice for the promotion of effective global governance. It is
well-positioned to fill the gap and provide leadership on specific issues
in keeping with its role as a forum akin to the Concert of Europe, as
discussed in Chapter 1. The G8 emerged from the war in Iraq with its
reputation in better shape than the UN’s and it has demonstrated a
level of self-reflectivity and willingness to reform that is lacking in
other mechanisms of global governance. Yet, for the G8 to successfully
play this role, the leaders need to achieve a consensus and act in unity
or else it will fail to act in a prompt and effective manner.
What is more, to shift the analysis down a level, the G8 provides a
forum for an individual prime minister or president when acting as
chair and host of the summit to demonstrate leadership by promoting
a “pet” issue. There are a number of examples of this that can be cited
at each individual summit but one regularly cited throughout this book
has been UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s placing of African issues
very high on the G8’s agenda, to the degree that the forum has now
become inextricably linked to the issue in people’s minds. Recently, as a
result of attempts to streamline the summit process and contain its
96 Future Directions
ever-expanding agenda, the summits themselves have tended to touch
on a range of important issues but highlight a single issue at their core.
For example, the Middle East at Sea Island, Africa at Gleneagles, and
energy security at St Petersburg. This ensures that each summit reflects
the host’s specific interests and desire to innovate but also serves to
engage leaders on a single issue.
Another important aspect of leadership has been knowing when to
delegate. It has been a characteristic of the G8 since its creation that it
has discussed issues, reached conclusions, and then delegated to a more
appropriate institution, or has created that institution when necessary.
As a result of the reforms introduced at the 1998 Birmingham Summit,
this trend has been compounded. In terms of personnel and organiza-
tion, the leaders have devolved a lot of the preparation and follow-up
to their sherpas, sous-sherpas, international organizations, and have
even created new posts to deal with specific issues: the Africa Personal
Representatives who played a key and independent role after the 2001
Genoa Summit in promoting the G8 Africa Group.1 At the ministerial
level, a schedule of regular meetings has developed with G7 finance
ministers meeting throughout the year (usually four times) including
immediately before the leaders’ meeting (as the G8 including Russia)
and at IMF meetings. G8 foreign ministers also meet before the
leaders’ meeting and have held ad hoc meetings as required. Thus, as it
has done throughout its history, the G8 has continued to demonstrate
leadership and direction in the deepening and widening of its activities.
According to Nicholas Bayne, the improvement in political leader-
ship as a result of the Birmingham reforms can be seen in three areas:
1) innovation, such as debt relief at Birmingham and Gleneagles,
attempts to address the “digital divide” at Okinawa, and a new
approach to the Middle East at Sea Island; 2) the trend to striking
deals amongst the leaders themselves rather than rubber-stamping
agreements reached at lower levels, such as the 2001 Genoa Plan for
Africa and according Russia the right to host its first summit in 2006;
and 3) the establishment of links between issues, such as agreement at
Kananasksis to tie together the treatment of nuclear material and
chemical weapons and the replenishment of the Highly Indebted Poor
Countries fund in order to facilitate US and European contributions
to both in a quid pro quo fashion.2

Solidarity
The extant literature on the G8 regularly emphasizes that the goal of
the G7/8 summit process was originally to foster collective management
 Future Directions 97
of global issues and the success of any summit initiatives depends upon
a sense of community and solidarity amongst its supposedly like-
minded leaders. However, as a result of the admission of Russia and the
US-led “war on terrorism,” tensions have begun to arise within the
family of G8 members.
The 2003 war in Iraq demonstrated the personal nature of the G8
and its role in fostering solidarity amongst these like-minded leaders.
Whereas the UN was the scene of argument and division, the 2003
Evian Summit managed to produce a fragile consensus amongst the
G8 leaders, who had been so recently divided over the war in Iraq,
largely by avoiding such controversial topics and spending only eight
minutes of the second day’s working lunch discussing Iraq. As a result,
Bush and Chirac were on first-name terms, declared friendship and
displayed a tactile relationship to the world’s media.3 This alone was
no small achievement and as Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien
stated “[i]t was a good meeting – it could have been a disaster.”4
Equally, on a smaller scale, the 2005 Gleneagles Summit provided an
opportunity to heal the divide between the UK and French leaders.
Prior to the summit, Blair and Chirac had come to blows over the EU
budget, prompting a jibe made against the UK by Chirac to Schröder
and Putin that “you can’t trust people who cook as badly as that. After
Finland, it’s the country with the worst food”; a comment that led
many to anticipate a clash at Gleneagles over more important issues
such as Iraq. However, within the atmosphere of the summit meetings
Anglo-French animosity never came into relief and Chirac was even
impressed by the food served.5
It could be argued that the media attention on the discord between
summit leaders in the run-up to summit meetings creates an unrealistic
impression of tensions. After all, the leaders who attended Gleneagles
were (with one exception, see Box 2.2) the same leaders who had
attended the previous four summits. This represents a level of consis-
tency and intimacy amongst the leaders never witnessed before in the
history of the summit process. One possible fly in the ointment that
has been pointed at is the unilateralism of the administration of US
President George W. Bush. However, in actual fact, the Bush adminis-
tration has shown a willingness to work within the format of the G8,
despite suspicions towards other mechanisms of multilateral diplo-
macy, perhaps in recognition of the power that the G8 possesses.6 In
any case, this serves as another example of the summit’s ability to
foster solidarity.
However, this period of relative stability in the G8’s personnel has
already begun to disappear. At the 2006 St Petersburg Summit, three
98 Future Directions
new leaders attended after elections in their countries: Canadian Prime
Minister Stephen Harper, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and
Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi (the only leader of these three
with experience of the G8). What is more, Koizumi attended his last
summit at St Petersburg, Bush will attend his last summit in 2008 in
Japan, and Blair has already announced his intention to stand down in
the intervening period. With problems of succession evident in many
G8 countries, the G8 could well be entering a period of instability in
the near future.
Although there are certainly issues that are divisive within the G8,
none of them appear for the time being to have the potential to short-
circuit the summit process. In short, it is highly unlikely that the
summit will be abandoned any time soon. It already has a history of
over thirty years behind it, making it a longer-lasting body than more
well-known and widely written about groups like the League of
Nations.

From G7 to G8 to G9?
Membership has been and will continue to be one of the most widely
debated issues as regards the future of the G8, as discussed in Chapter
3. For example, India has recently been touted as a possible member in
the future and in terms of its growing economy, scale of pollution,
regional importance and central role in many of the issues core to the
G8’s concerns, it could make a convincing case. In addition, it is
currently a member of the G20, has participated in outreach meetings
with dialogue members and has been invited to the G7 finance meet-
ings. However, China is understandably the most regularly touted
potential member owing to its growing regional and global economic
influence and its steady integration into the other mechanisms of
global governance. However, it is unlikely to join in the foreseeable
future and this is not only because it does not subscribe to the same
norms as the current G8 member states. Rather, there is no consensus
within the G8 as regards allowing China into this exclusive club. Once
a consensus is reached, it should not take long to action the decision.
However, as the example of Russia demonstrates, this could take a
decade, from initially mooting the idea through to its realization.
Since the first summit in 1975, the original leaders have only
admitted three new members – Canada (1976), the EU (1977) and,
twenty years later, Russia (1998). The accommodation of Russia has
been controversial in itself and the G8 will most likely seek a period of
consolidation of the forum, with a learning curve for Russia, rather
 Future Directions 99
than hurry to include other members with little or no experience of
summitry at the highest level. Essentially, the summiteers have agreed a
summit cycle amongst the eight that will continue until 2010. It is
highly unlikely that there will be any disruption to this plan and there
is a strong desire amongst the summiteers to retain the personal nature
of the summit and the exclusivity of this elite club. To expand the
membership would be to dilute the G8’s status and effectiveness.
As regards Russia’s status within the G8, despite calls for its expul-
sion, largely from the US, it will almost certainly continue to be a G8
member. Not only are there no procedures or precedences in place to
follow in the case of stripping a G8 member of its status, it would
cause enormous offence to the Russians who have consistently placed
the onus on the prestige to be gained from joining the G8. More
importantly possibly, there is no consensus within the G8 and, what is
more, Russia is chair of the G8 during 2006 and little is likely to be
done to jeopardize this.7

Outreach
Rather than expanding the actual membership, the G8 has latched
onto the perfect palliative – invite other participants as the necessity
arises. Not only does this deflect criticisms of exclusivity and unrepre-
sentativeness, it keeps the G8 relevant whilst maintaining its core.
On the one hand, a number of important participants can be invited
on an ad hoc basis to participate in either the main leaders’ summit or
ministerial meetings. The ministerial meetings have demonstrated a
high degree of flexibility in this regard, although the leaders’ meeting
has also demonstrated there is a willingness to make meetings with
specially invited participants a regular part of the summit timetable.
However, it is the individual summit host that will determine who gets
invited to a particular summit. Those invited have included govern-
mental representatives, heads of international organizations, and
leaders of business groups.
On the other hand, civil society’s focussing of its activities on the
G8 is not likely to disappear soon. As two activists have written, “[t]he
Annual G8 meeting, like the meetings of the WTO, the World
Economic Forum and the rest, cannot now take place without the
presence of demonstrators. We have driven them away from open poli-
tics to the ‘retreats of the rich.’”8
Rather than hiding away in the “retreats of the rich,” the G8 will be
best served by continuing to engage with the NGOs that constitute
civil society. The Japanese government’s initiative at the 2000 Okinawa
100 Future Directions
Summit that created an NGO centre was admirable but flawed. The
Russian hosts made some limited attempts to incorporate civil society’s
opinions into the summit proceedings during its first year as chair of
the G8 in 2006. Despite the recent lurch towards authoritarianism,
Russia’s chief concern was to act as a responsible host. Thus, on 20
December 2005, the creation of Civil G8 2006 was announced. This
consultative council of a wide range of NGOs alongside academics
and journalists was intended to become “a platform for a real dialogue
and interaction between the Russian NGOs and G8 leaders, as well as
provide a civic environment for the G8 2006 summit, a strong impetus
for the development of civil society and rehabilitation of the notion of
democracy in Russia.” As is often the case, this council operated on
two levels. On the one hand, at the global level, it continued the
process of outreach to civil society and transparency that has been so
evident in recent years but stalled at the 2004 Sea Island Summit. On
the other hand, it played a domestic role by providing Russian NGOs
with an opportunity to petition the G8 leaders and world’s media in
order to highlight the shift towards authoritarianism in Putin’s Russia.9
Whether or not the remaining hosts in this fifth cycle of summitry –
Germany, Japan, Italy, and Canada – will make more credible and
concerted efforts to continue the trend of embracing civil society in
future summits remains to be seen, although past behaviour would
suggest that they will.

The Continuing Relevance of the G8

Ironically, after decades of criticisms and introspection, its future
appears in 2006 to be more secure than ever. Although what shape it
will assume is unknown at this point in time, the G8 is likely to remain
central to global governance for a number of years to come. Even if
the much-touted L20 is realized, this is unlikely to be at the expense of
the G8. Rather, the L20 will provide another example of the flexibility
of the G8 and the deepening and widening of the summit process. In
the simplest terms, the world needs the G8 for the unique forum it
provides as the only date in the annual calendar of international poli-
tics for the leaders of the most influential countries in the world to
gather and discuss issues in a frank and unfettered fashion.
Remarkably, for once in its history it appears as if the merits of the
G8 have been generally recognized. Although it may play the role of
both a dignified and efficient mechanism of global governance, it can be
distinguished from the “usual suspects” of global governance – the UN,
World Bank, IMF, and WTO – by its unique method of functioning and
 Future Directions 101
the huge potential that lies with these contemporary great powers. The
accusation that the G8 is nothing more than a No Action, Talk Only-
type of international forum is at the same time wide of the mark and yet
captures its essence. At its worst, the G8 does provide nothing more than
an annual junket for the world’s leading presidents and prime ministers.
However, faced by the failure of more traditional and established mech-
anisms of global governance such as the UN and the EU, opportunities
for the leading countries of the world to come into direct contact are
rare and when well-prepared and properly organized can provide guid-
ance on how to plug the gaps in the network of global governance. This
can disparagingly be labelled a “talking shop” but by so doing would
overlook the utility of such a forum.
However, for this to occur a number of conditions must be met – a
consensus must exist and legitimacy must be enhanced whilst retaining
the intimacy fostered by this kind of grouping. This is not an easy
undertaking. Pressure will be exerted for the G7/8 to change in the
future from both within and outside of the forum. Although the G7/8
must be responsive to constructive criticisms and structural changes in
the international system, it should not lose sight of its heritage of over
four decades of international relations, aware of what has worked in
the past and what has not. At the same time, activists, politicians, and
academics should engage with the G8 process but without the peren-
nial over-expectation that has plagued the summit. Rather, they should
be aware of the uniqueness of the forum, its limitations, and its latent
potential.
Notes

Preface
1 The Economist, 29 July 2000, 19.
2 The series currently stands at thirteen volumes. More information can be
found at: http://www.ashgate.com/subject_area/politics/g8_series.htm.

Introduction
1 Michael R. Hodges, “The G8 and the New Political Economy,” in Michael
R. Hodges, John J. Kirton and Joseph P. Daniels (eds) The G8’s Role in the
New Millennium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 69.
2 Hodges, “The G8 and the New Political Economy,” 69.
3 More recently, the accolade of least written about and least understood
entity in international relations has probably been transferred to the
OECD. See Richard Woodward, “Global Governance and the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development”, in Glenn D. Hook and
Hugo Dodson (eds) Global Governance and Japan: The Institutional
Architecture (London: Routledge Curzon, 2007).
4 Rorden Wilkinson, “Global governance: a preliminary interrogation,” in
Rorden Wilkinson and Steve Hughes (eds) Global Governance: Critical
Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2002), 2.

1 History and Development

1 “Gaggle of Gs” is a term coined by Roy Culpeper, “Systemic Reform at a
Standstill: A Flock of ‘Gs’ in Search of Global Financial Stability,”
Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/scholar/culpeper2000/
index.html, visited on 3 August 2005.
2 Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 395, vii.
3 John J. Kirton, “Guess Who is Coming to Kananaskis? Civil Society and
the G8 in Canada’s Year as Host,” International Journal, 57, 1 (2001–2).
Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/scholar/kirton2002/020507.
pdf, visited on 7 May 2003.
4 John Hunt and Henry Owen, “Taking Stock of the Seven-Power Summits:
Two Views,” International Affairs 60, 4 (1984), 658.
 Notes 103
5 Nicholas Bayne, Staying Together: The G8 Summit Confronts the 21st
Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 194.
6 “Declaration of Rambouillet,” 17 November 1975. Available online at:
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/1975rambouillet/communique.html,
visited on 3 August 2005.
7 “Statement on Air Hijacking,” 17 July 1978. Available online at:
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/1978bonn/hijacking.html, visited on 3
August 2005.
8 Bayne, Staying Together, 18.
9 Robert D. Putnam, “Summit Sense,” Foreign Policy 55, Summer (1984), 73.
10 W. R. Smyser, “Goodbye, G7,” Washington Quarterly 16: 1 (1993), 19.
11 “Political Declaration,” 29 May 1983. Available online at:
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/1983williamsburg/security.html, visited
on 3 August 2005.
12 Bayne, Staying Together, 24.
13 “Bonn Economic Declaration: Towards Sustained Growth and Higher
Employment,” 4 May 1985. Available online at: http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/
summit/1985bonn/communique/trade.html, visited on 3 August 2005.
14 “Political Declaration on the 40th Anniversary of the End of the Second
World War,” 3 May 1985. Available online at: http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/
summit/1985bonn/political.html, visited on 3 August 2005.
15 Bayne, Staying Together, 18.
16 “Naples Summit Communiqué,” 9 July 1994. Available online at:
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/1994naples/communique/introduc-
tion.html, visited on 27 July 2005.
17 Watanabe Kōji, “Rondon samitto no seika to Nihon,” Sekai Keizai Hyōron
35, 10 (1991), 10.
18 “Naples Summit Communiqué,” 9 July 1994. Available online at:
http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/1994naples/communique/introduc-
tion.html, visited on 4 August 2005.
19 Bayne, Staying Together, 18.
20 Bayne, Staying Together, 18.
21 See Mikhail Savostiyanov, “Presentation at the Pre-G8 Summit academic
conference University of Glasgow,” 30 June 2005. Available online at:
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/conferences/2005/conf/savostiyanov.html,
visited on 27 July 2005.
22 Bayne, Staying Together, 18. Nicholas Bayne, “Overcoming Evil with
Good: Impressions of the Gleneagles Summit, 6–8 July 2005,” 18 July
2005. Available online at: http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/evaluations/
2005gleneagles/bayne2005–0718.html#assessment, visited on 27 July
2005.

2 Organization and Functioning

1 Robert D. Putnam, “Summit Sense,” Foreign Policy 55, Summer (1984), 80.
2 Despite accommodation within the other G8 meetings, Russia has little to
contribute to the finance ministers’ discussion and continues to be
excluded.
3 Nicholas Bayne, Staying Together: The G8 Summit Confronts the 21st
Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 195.
104 Notes
4 John Kirton and Janel Smith, “Summit Costs, 1995–2004,” 12 August
2003. Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/evaluations/factsheet/
factsheet_costs.html, visited on 2 August 2005.
5 Hugo Dobson, Japan and the G7/8, 1975–2002 (London: RoutledgeCurzon,
2004), 35–36.
6 Tatsuo Akaneya, “The View from Japan: Tasks for the G8 Kyushu-
Okinawa Summit,” NIRA Review 7, 2 (2000), 12.
7 Peter I. Hajnal, The G7/G8 System: Evolution, Role and Documentation
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 94.
8 John J. Kirton, “Introduction: The Significance of the Seven-Power
Summit,” in Peter I. Hajnal (ed.) The Seven-Power Summit: Documents
from the Summit of Industrialized Countries, 1975–1989 (Millwood, New
York: Kraus International Publications, 1989), xl-xli.
9 Kirton, “Introduction,” xli.
10 Quoted in Hajnal, The G7/G8 System, 75.
11 Eleonore Kokotsis, Keeping International Commitments: Compliance,
Credibility and the G7, 1988–1995 (New York: Garland, 1999); Ella
Kokotsis and Joseph P. Daniels, “G8 Summits and Compliance,” in
Michael R. Hodges, John J. Kirton and Joseph P. Daniels (eds) The G8’s
Role in the New Millennium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 75–91. A
detailed explanation of the methodology used in defining a “commitment”
and calculating the level of compliance can be found at “Background on
Compliance Assessments: Methodology.” Available online at:
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/evaluations/methodology/g7c2.htm, visited on
25 March 2006.
12 John J. Kirton, Ella Kokotsis and Diana Juricevic, “Okinawa’s Promises
Kept: The 2001 G8 Compliance Report,” in John J. Kirton and Junichi
Takase (eds) New Directions in Global Political Governance: The G8 and
International Order in the Twenty-first Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002),
272.
13 Matthew Tempest, “G8 leaders Agree U.S. $50bn Africa Package,” The
Guardian 8 July 2005. Available online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/inter-
national/story/0,1524304,00.html, visited on 5 August 2005.
14 Nicholas Bayne, “International Economic Relations after the Cold War,”
Government and Opposition 29, 1 (1994), 20.
15 Risto E. J. Penttilä, The Role of the G8 in International Peace and Security
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 46–50, 91–5; Francesco Sisci,
“China Goes Down with UN defeat,” On-line Asia Times 21 March 2003.
Available online at: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/EC21Ad01.html,
visited on 22 March 2003.
16 Robert D. Putnam and Nicholas Bayne, Hanging Together: The Seven-
Power Summits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 141.
17 John Hunt and Henry Owen, “Taking Stock of the Seven-Power Summits:
Two Views,” International Affairs 60, 4 (1984), 659.
18 Richard Falk, On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 216–17.
 Notes 105
3 Perspectives of Member States
1 François Roberge, “French Foreign Policy and Seven-Power Summits,”
Country Study No. 3 (University of Toronto: Centre for International
Studies, May 1988), 3. Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/
scholar/roberge1988/index.html, visited on 9 August 2005.
2 Phillipe Moreau Defarges, “The French Viewpoint on the Future of the
G7,” The International Spectator 29, April/June (1994), 177–85. Available
online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/scholar/defarges1994/index.html, visited
on 9 August 2005.
3 John J. Kirton, Ella Kokotsis and Diana Juricevic, “Okinawa’s Promises
Kept: The 2001 G8 Compliance Report,” in John J. Kirton and Junichi
Takase (eds) New Directions in Global Political Governance: The G8 and
International Order in the Twenty-First Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002),
272.
4 Defarges, “The French Viewpoint.”
5 “Declaration on Human Rights,” 15 July 1989. Available online at:
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/1989paris/human.html, visited on 9
August 2005.
6 Cited in G8 Research Group, “G8 Reform: Expanding the Dialogue,” June
2005. Available online at: http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/evaluations/csed/
ed_050707.pdf, visited on 9 August 2005.
7 Nicholas Bayne, Staying Together: The G8 Summit Confronts the 21st
Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 199.
8 Robert Hornung, “Sharing Economic Responsibility: The United States
and the Seven-Power Summits,” Country Study No. 4 (University of
Toronto: Centre for International Studies, May 1988), 67.
9 William Antholis, “Pragmatic Engagement or Photo Op: What Will the
G8 Become?,” Washington Quarterly 24, 3 (2001), 220.
10 Kirton, Kokotsis and Juricevic, “Okinawa’s Promises Kept,” 272.
11 See “Response by the Presidency on Behalf of the G8 to the Jubilee 2000
Petition,” 16 May 1998. Available online at: http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/
summit/1998birmingham/2000.htm, visited on 9 August 2005.
12 G8 Research Group, “G8 Reform,” 48.
13 Jeffrey E. Garten, “Should This Man Lead the G8?,” Newsweek 25 April
2005.
14 Risto E. J. Penttilä, The Role of the G8 in International Peace and Security
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 54.
15 Kirton, Kokotsis and Juricevic, “Okinawa’s Promises Kept,” 272.
16 The sincerity of this position has been questioned and New Labour’s belief
in neoliberalism and desire to break into new markets has been put
forward as its chief motivating factor. See Mark Curtis, “Britain and the
G8: A Champion of the World’s Poor?” in Gill Hubbard and David Miller
(eds) Arguments Against G8 (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 44–56.
17 Penttilä, The Role of the G8 in International Peace and Security, 55.
18 Robert D. Putnam and Nicholas Bayne, Hanging Together: The Seven-
Power Summits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 141.
19 Michael Hodges, “More Efficiency, Less Dignity: British Perspectives on
the Future Role and Working of the G7,” The International Spectator 29,
106 Notes
April/June, 141–59. Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/scholar/
hodges1994/hod2.htm, visited on 10 August 2005.
20 Cited in G8 Research Group, “G8 Reform,” 42.
21 “Response by the Presidency on Behalf of the G8 to the Jubilee 2000
Petition.”
22 The Japan Times, 2 June 1983, 1.
23 René Albrecht-Carrié (ed.), The Concert of Europe (London: Macmillan,
1968), 12.
24 Kirton, Kokotsis and Juricevic, “Okinawa’s Promises Kept,” 272.
25 Cited in G8 Research Group, “G8 Reform,” 32.
26 Hanns W. Maull, “Germany at the Summit,” The International Spectator 29,
April/June (1994), 112–39. Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/
scholar/maull1994/index.html, visited on 10 August 2005.
27 “Political Declaration on the 40th Anniversary of the End of the Second
World War.”
28 Kirton, Kokotsis and Juricevic, “Okinawa’s Promises Kept,” 272.
29 Penttilä, The Role of the G8 in International Peace and Security, 59.
30 “Final Press Conference by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder,” 10
June 2005. Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/
2004seaisland/schroeder040610.html, visited on 10 August 2005.
31 Yoshino Bunroku, “Oral History Interview Conducted by Tanaka
Akihiko,” 30 June. Available online at: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
japan/yoshinoohinterview.htm (English), or: http://www.gwu.edu/
~nsarchiv/japan/yoshino.pdf (Japanese), visited on 13 July 2005.
32 See Hugo Dobson, Japan and the G7/8, 1975–2002 (London:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2004).
33 Ultimately a compromise was reached whereby Suharto met with US
President Bill Clinton at a pre-summit meeting.
34 By 1975, Japan had become the second largest contributor to the UN
regular budget, a position it has maintained to the present day. See Glenn
D. Hook et al., Japan’s International Relations: Politics, Economics and
Security (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 377–78.
35 The Japan Times, 16 January 1979, 5.
36 Kirton, Kokotsis and Juricevic, “Okinawa’s Promises Kept,” 272.
37 See Dobson, Japan and the G7/8, 156–64.
38 W. Blair Dimock, “The Benefits of Teamplay: Italy and the Seven Power
Summits,” Country Study No. 5 (University of Toronto: Centre for
International Studies, May 1988), 1–2.
39 Penttilä, The Role of the G8 in International Peace and Security, 66–67.
40 G8 Research Group, “G8 Reform,” 23.
41 Cited in G8 Research Group, “G8 Reform,” 23
42 Penttilä, The Role of the G8 in International Peace and Security, 64.
43 Kirton, Kokotsis and Juricevic, “Okinawa’s Promises Kept,” 272.
44 John J. Kirton, “The Diplomacy of Concert: Canada, the G-7 and the
Halifax Summit.” Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/scholar/
kirton199501/index.html, visited on 12 August 2005.
45 The Japan Times, 28 June 2002, 5.
46 The Japan Times, 28 June 2002, 5.
47 G8 Research Group, “G8 Reform,” 8.
 Notes 107
48 Cited in Heidi Ullrich and Alan Donnelly, “The Group of Eight and the
European Union: The Evolving Partnership,” G8 Governance 5, November
(1998). Available online at: http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/governance/gov5/
index.html, visited on 11 August 2005.
49 Klemens Fischer, “The G7/8 and the European Union,” in John J. Kirton,
Joseph P. Daniels and Andreas Freytag (eds) Guiding Global Order: G8
Governance in the Twenty-First Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 129–30.
50 Penttilä, The Role of the G8 in International Peace and Security, 72–75.
51 “Declaration on East-West Relations,” 15 July 1989. Available online at:
http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/1989paris/east.html, visited on 11
August 2005.
52 For an overview of the G8’s evolving relations with China, see John J.
Kirton, “The G7/8 and China: Toward a Closer Relationship,” in Kirton,
Daniels and Freytag, Guiding Global Governance, 189–222.
53 For a more detailed discussion, see John J. Kirton, “The G20:
Representativeness, Effectiveness, and Leadership in Global Governance,”
in Kirton, Daniels and Freytag, Guiding Global Governance, 143–72.
54 “G7 Statement,” 18 June 1999. Available online at: http://www.g7.
utoronto.ca/summit/1999koln/g7statement_june18.htm, visited on 11
August 2005.

4 Achievements and Failures

1 Nicholas Bayne, Staying Together: The G8 Summit Confronts the 21st
Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 20.
2 Bayne, Staying Together, 21.
3 “Declaration,” 23 June 1980. Available online at: http://www.g8.
utoronto.ca/summit/1980venice/communique/index.html, visited on 31
August 2005.
4 “The Bonn Economic Declaration: Towards Sustained Growth and Higher
Employment,” 4 May 1985. Available online at: http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/
summit/1985bonn/communique/trade.html, visited on 3 August 2005.
5 “Response by the Presidency on Behalf of the G8 to the Jubilee 2000
Petition,” 16 May 1998. Available online at: http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/
summit/1998birmingham/2000.htm, visited on 9 August 2005.
6 The Guardian, 12 July 2005.
7 Nicholas Bayne, “Overcoming Evil with Good: Impressions of the
Gleneagles Summit, 6–8 July 2005,” 18 July 2005. Available online at: http://
www.g8.utoronto.ca/evaluations/2005gleneagles/bayne2005–718.html#
assessment, visited on 27 July 2005.
8 Risto E. J. Penttilä, The Role of the G8 in International Peace and Security
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 35.
9 “Declaration of Rambouillet,” 17 November 1975. Available online at:
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/1975rambouillet/communique.html,
visited on 3 August 2005.
10 “Chairman’s Summary of Political Issues,” 21 July 1981. Available online
at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/1981ottawa/chairman.html, visited
on 30 August 2005.
11 “Political Declaration on the 40th Anniversary of the End of the Second
World War.”
108 Notes
12 “Naples Summit Communiqué,” 9 July 1994. Available online at:
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/1994naples/communique/introdution.ht
ml, visited on 27 July 2005.
13 “Naples Summit Communiqué.”
14 Penttilä, The Role of the G8 in International Peace and Security, 37.
15 David M. Malone, “The G8 and Conflict Prevention: From Promise to
Practice,” in John J. Kirton and Radoslava N. Stefanova (eds) The G8, the
United Nations, and Conflict Prevention (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 43.
16 “Statement on Air Hijacking,” 17 July 1978. Available online at:
http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/1978bonn/hijacking.html, visited on 30
August 2005.
17 “Statement on the Taking of Diplomatic Hostages,” 22 June 1980.
Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/1980venice/hostage.
html, visited on 30 August 2005.
18 “Statement on International Terrorism,” 5 May 1986. Available online at:
http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/1986tokyo/terrorism.html, visited on 30
August 2005.
19 “The Kananaskis Chair’s Summary,” 27 June 2002. Available online at:
http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/2002kananaskis/summary.html, visited
on 30 August 2005.
20 “Building International Political Will and Capacity to Combat Terrorism –
a G8 Action Plan,” 2 June 2005. Available online at: http://www.g7.
utoronto.ca/summit/2003evian/will_action_en.html, visited on 30 August
2005.
21 Bayne, Staying Together, 178.
22 “Political Declaration,” 29 May 1983. Available online at:
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/1983williamsburg/security.html, visited
on 30 August 2005.
23 “Political Statement – Regional Issues,” 15 May 1998. Available online at:
http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/1998birmingham/regional.htm, visited
on 30 August 2005.
24 Penttilä, The Role of the G8 in International Peace and Security, 44–46.
25 “G8 Statement on Regional Issues,” 20 June 1999. Available online at:
http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/1999koln/regional.htm, visited on 30
August 2005.
26 “The Bonn Economic Declaration: Towards Sustained Growth and Higher
Employment.”
27 “Economic Declaration,” 16 July 1989. Available online at:
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/1989paris/communique/index.html,
visited on 16 August 2005.
28 “Chair’s Summary,” 8 July 2005. Available online at:
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/2005gleneagles/summary.html, visited
on 16 August 2005.
29 “Chairman’s Statement on AIDS,” 10 June 1987. Available online at:
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/1987venice/aids.html, visited on 16
August 2005.
30 “Fact Sheet: Donations to Global AIDS and Health Fund,” 22 July 2001.
Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/evaluations/2001genoa/fact-
sheet_health_2001.html, visited on 16 August 2005.
 Notes 109
31 “Okinawa Charter on Global Information Society,” 22 July 2005. Available
online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/2000okinawa/gis.htm, visited
on 16 August 2005.
32 “Digital Opportunities for All: Meeting the Challenge. Report of the
Digital Opportunity Task Force (DOT Force) including a Proposal for a
Genoa Plan of Action,” 11 May 2001. Available online at: http://www.g7.
utoronto.ca/summit/2001genoa/dotforce1.html, visited on 16 August 2005.
3 “Issue Objectives for the Genoa Summit Meeting 2001: DOT force,” June
2001. Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/evaluations/2001genoa/
objectives/dotforce.html, visited on 16 August 2005.
34 “DOT Force Report Card: Digital Opportunities for All,” June 2001.
Available online at: http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/2002kananaskis/
dotforce_reportcard.pdf, visited on 16 August 2005.
35 “Venice Economic Declaration,” 10 June 1987. Available online at:
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/1987venice/communique/index.html,
visited on 16 August 2005.
36 “Cologne Charter: Aims and Ambitions for Lifelong Learning,” 18 June
1999. Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/1999koln/
charter.htm, visited on 16 August 2005.
37 Bayne, Staying Together, 41.

5 Criticisms and Challenges

1 G8 Research Group, “G8 Reform: Expanding the Dialogue,” June 2005, 3.
Available online at: http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/evaluations/csed/ed_050707.
pdf, visited on 9 August 2005.
2 John J. Kirton, “Explaining G8 Effectiveness,” in Michael R. Hodges,
John J. Kirton and Joseph P. Daniels (eds) The G8’s Role in the New
Millennium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 45.
3 Quoted in Heikki Patomäki, “Good Governance of the World Economy,”
Alternatives 24, 1 (1999), 132.
4 George Monbiot, The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order
(London: Flamingo, 2003), 84.
5 John J. Kirton, “Introduction: The Significance of the Seven-Power
Summit,” in Peter I. Hajnal (ed.) The Seven-Power Summit: Documents
from the Summit of Industrialized Countries, 1975–1989 (Millwood, New
York: Kraus International Publications, 1989), xxxvi.
6 James N. Rosenau, “Governance in the Twenty-First Century,” Global
Governance 1, 1 (1995), 17.
7 Peter I. Hajnal, “Partners or Adversaries? The G7/8 Encounters Civil
Society,” in John J. Kirton and Junichi Takase (eds) New Directions in
Global Political Governance: The G8 and International Order in the Twenty-
First Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 209–22.
8 This following discussion draws heavily upon and updates Hajnal,
“Partners or Adversaries?”; Peter I. Hajnal, “Civil Society Encounters the
G7/8,” in Peter I. Hajnal (ed.) Civil Society in the Information Age
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 215–42.
9 See its official webpages at: http://www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk
10 Cited in Hajnal, “Partners or Adversaries?,” 214.
11 Cited in Hajnal, “Partners or Adversaries?,” 215.
110 Notes
12 MTV News (2005) “What is the G8, anyway?,” 28 June. Available online at:
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1504853/20050628/index.jhtml, visited on
3 September 2005.
13 Nicholas Bayne, Staying Together: The G8 Summit Confronts the 21st
Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 227.
14 Nogami Yoshiji, “Okinawa samitto no seika to Nihon,” Sekai Keizai
Hyōron 44, 10 (2000), 8–9.
15 Private Eye, 8–21 July 2005, 5.
16 W. R. Smyser, “Goodbye, G7,” Washington Quarterly 16, 1 (1993), 23.
17 See the WEF’s homepage: http://www.weforum.org
18 G8 Research Group, “G8 Reform: Expanding the Dialogue,” 6. See also
John J. Kirton, “Toward Multilateral Reform: the G20’s contribution,” in
John English, Ramesh Thakur and Andrew F. Cooper (eds) Reforming
from the Top: A Leaders’ 20 Summit (New York: UNU Press, 2005), 141–
68.
19 Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, “Mapping Global Governance,” in David
Held and Anthony McGrew (eds) Governing Globalization: Power
Authority and Global Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 46–69.
20 Risto E. J. Penttilä, The Role of the G8 in International Peace and Security
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 46–50, 91–95; Francesco Sisci,
“China goes down with UN Defeat,” On-line Asia Times 21 March 2003.
Available on-line at: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/EC21Ad01.
html, visited on 22 March 2003.
21 Walter Bagehot (1963) The English Constitution (London: Oxford
University Press), xviii. Many thanks to Andrew Gamble who first pointed
out this similarity.
22 Robert D. Putnam, “Summit sense,” Foreign Policy 55, Summer (1984), 73.
23 John G. Ikenberry, “Salvaging the G7,” Foreign Affairs 72, 2 (1993), 132.
24 The Japan Times, 29 June 1997, 6.
25 MTV News, “What is the G8, anyway?”
26 Gill Hubbard and David Miller, “Introduction: Barbarism Inc.,” in Gill
Hubbard and David Miller (eds) Arguments Against G8 (London: Pluto
Press, 2005), 7.
27 Hubbard and Miller, “Introduction: Barbarism Inc.,” 3.
28 Michael R. Hodges, “The G8 and the New Political Economy,” in Hodges,
Kirton and Daniels, The G8’s Role in the New Millennium, 72.
29 Robert D. Putnam and Nicholas Bayne, Hanging Together: Cooperation
and Conflict in the the Seven-Power Summits (London: Sage, 1987), 14.

6 Future Directions
1 Nicholas Bayne, Staying Together: The G8 Summit Confronts the 21st
Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 199–200.
2 Bayne, Staying Together, 216–19.
3 John J. Kirton and Ella Kokotsis, “Impressions of the G8 Evian Summit,”
3 June 2003. Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/evaluations/
2003evian/assess_kirton_kokotsis.html, visited on 4 September 2005.
4 Nicholas Bayne, “Impressions of the Evian summit, June 1–3, 2003.”
Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/evaluations/2003evian/
assess_bayne030603.html, visited on 4 September 2005.
 Notes 111
5 The Guardian, 13 July 2005.
6 For a more detailed and thematic discussion of this issue, see Michele
Fratianni, Paolo Savona, Alan M. Rugman and John J. Kirton (eds) New
Perspectives on Global Governance: Why America Needs the G8 (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2005).
7 Developments surrounding the first Russian summit can be followed at the
official St Petersburg Summit homepage: http://en.g8russia.ru.
8 David Miller and Gill Hubbard, “Conclusion: Naming the Problem,” in
Gill Hubbard and David Miller (eds) Arguments Against G8 (London:
Pluto Press, 2005), 230.
9 Peter Teslenko, “Press Conference on Cooperation between Civil Society
and the Group of Eight during Russia’s Presidency,” 20 December 2005.
Available online at: http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/whatsnew/cs051220.html,
visited on 21 December 2005. Civil 8’s webpages can be found at
http://en.civilg8.ru.
Select Bibliography and
Electronic Resources

Baker, Andrew (2006) The Group of Seven: Finance Ministries, Central Banks
and Global Financial Governance (London: Routledge). A detailed research
monograph informed by theories of international political economy, which
consequently may not be so user-friendly to undergraduate students. Specif-
ically, the book explores critically the role of the meetings of the G7 finance
ministers – “the most important transgovernmental coalition of our day” –
and their influence upon global financial governance.
Bayne, Nicholas (2000) Hanging in There: The G7 and G8 Summit in Maturity
and Renewal (Aldershot: Ashgate). A core point of reference for under-
standing the summit process and developments from its origins through to
the 1999 Cologne Summit by one of the longest-serving observers of the
summit.
—— (2005) Staying Together: The G8 Summit Confronts the 21st Century
(Aldershot: Ashgate). Continuing the story from Hanging in There, Bayne
explores the G8 summit process from the 1998 Birmingham Summit to the
2005 Gleneagles Summit; an up-to-date description and analysis of the
most recent developments in summitry.
Cohn, Theodore H. (2002) Governing Global Trade: International Institutions in
Conflict and Convergence (Aldershot: Ashgate). With the goal of under-
standing the nuances of the global trade regime, this single-authored
volume expands the traditional analysis beyond the GATT/WTO to include
a range of other organizations, institutions and groupings, including the
G7/8.
Dobson, Hugo (2004) Japan and the G7/8, 1975–2002 (London: Routledge-
Curzon). An analysis of Japan’s role in the G7/8 summit and the position of
the summit in Japan’s foreign policy based on numerous interviews and
English and Japanese language sources.
English, John, Thakur, Ramesh and Cooper, Andrew F. (eds) (2005) Reforming
from the Top: A Leaders’ 20 Summit (New York: UNU Press). An edited
volume that explores the concept of the L20, arguing with a number of
caveats that the creation of such an institution would be both timely and
beneficial to the architecture of global governance.
Fratianni, Michele, Savona, Paolo and Kirton, John J. (eds) (2002) Governing
Global Finance: New Challenges, G7 and IMF Contributions (Aldershot:
Ashgate). Although published in the Global Finance series and not the G8
and Global Governance series, the 2001 Genoa Summit was the catalyst for
 Select Bibliography and Electronic Resources 113
this volume that investigates the G8’s role in the creation of a new interna-
tional financial architecture after a series of global shocks and its
coordinating role with long-standing international institutions in this
undertaking.
Fratianni, Michele, Kirton, John J., Rugman, Alan M. and Savona, Paolo (eds)
(2005) New Perspectives on Global Governance: Why America Needs the G8
(Aldershot: Ashgate). Published after the 2004 Sea Island Summit, this
collection of essays focusses upon the continued relevance of the G8 and its
potential importance to the US, in addition to the role of Russia and the
issues of trade and terrorism.
G8 Information Centre homepage: http://www.g8.utoronto.ca. Maintained by
the G8 Research Group at Toronto University, this is an invaluable source
of information for the novice and the expert alike. Everything you could
ever wish to know about the G8 in one place.
Hajnal, Peter I. (ed.) (1989) The Seven-Power Summit: Documents from the
Summit of Industrialized Countries, 1975–1989 (Millwood, New York:
Kraus International Publications). Before the G8 Information Centre’s
homepage became the central resource of G8 documentation (see above),
this volume provided a useful reference point for summit delegations and
documentation from 1975 to 1988, with an introduction by John Kirton.
Hajnal, Peter I. (1999) The G7/G8 System: Evolution, Role and Documentation
(Aldershot: Ashgate). An introductory text that makes sense of the G7/8
summit, its history, membership, structure and copious documentation.
Hodges, Michael R., Kirton, John J. and Daniels, Joseph P. (eds) (1999) The
G8’s Role in the New Millennium (Aldershot: Ashgate). One of the earliest
publications in Ashgate’s G8 and Global Governance series. The diverse
chapters provide an exploration of the G8’s effectiveness at a crucial period
in its history after the reforms of the 1998 Birmingham Summit.
Hubbard, Gill and Miller, David (eds) (2005) Arguments Against the G8
(London: Pluto Press). A collection of essays by leading activists, politi-
cians and academics published in the run-up to the 2005 Gleneagles
Summit. Although inaccurate in places, alongside Jonathan Neale’s contri-
bution (see below) it still provides a provocative example of the anti-G8
literature.
Kaiser, Karl, Kirton, John J. and Daniels, Joseph P. (eds) (2000) Shaping a New
International Financial System: Challenges of Governance in a Globalizing
World (Aldershot: Ashgate). Focussing upon international finance after the
global crises of the 1990s, the chapters in this volume highlight the major
obstacles to creating a new financial architecture and the role of the G7/8 in
this process.
Kirton, John J. and Stefanova, Radoslava N. (eds) (2004) The G8, United
Nations, and Conflict Prevention (Aldershot: Ashgate). Especially (but not
exclusively) after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the “war on terror,” the
G8’s agenda has shifted towards security issues. This edited volume exam-
ines the G8’s contribution to conflict prevention in collaboration with
international organizations and institutions – a role that can be expected to
expand in the future.
Kirton, John J. and Takase, Junichi (eds) (2002) New Directions in Global Polit-
ical Governance: The G8 and International Order in the Twenty-First Century
(Aldershot: Ashgate). The eighth contribution to the G8 and Global
114 Select Bibliography and Electronic Resources
Governance series, this edited volume was a product of the 2000 Okinawa
Summit and sheds light on the impact of globalization in its broadest sense
and highlights Japan’s role as host of the summit and the domestic reaction.
Kirton, John J. and Von Furstenberg, George M. (eds) (2001) New Directions
in Global Economic Governance: Managing Globalisation in the Twenty-First
Century (Aldershot: Ashgate). In keeping with this series’ tradition of using
the annual summit as a catalyst, this edited volume was the product of
various conferences held around the time of the 2000 Okinawa Summit and
focuses upon changes in the global economic order prevailing at that time,
such as the fall-out from the Asian financial crisis and continuing trade
liberalization negotiations.
Kirton, John J., Daniels, Joseph P. and Freytag, Andreas (eds) (2001) Guiding
Global Order: G8 Governance in the Twenty-First Century (Aldershot:
Ashgate). A product of the 1999 Cologne Summit, this collection of essays
focusses upon the core economic issues at the heart of the G8’s work and
explores the institutions it has spawned and its relations with a range of
other institutions and non-G8 members.
Kokotsis, Eleonore (1999) Keeping International Commitments: Compliance,
Credibility and the G7, 1988–1995 (New York: Garland). Covering the
summits from 1989 to 1995, this detailed volume (based on the author’s
doctoral thesis) explores the level of summiteers’ commitment to G7
pledges.
Neale, Jonathan (2002) You are G8, We are 6 Billion: The Truth Behind the
Genoa Protests (London: Vision). An anti-capitalist campaigner’s account
of the protests and policing at the 2001 Genoa Summit that led to the death
of an Italian protester, Carlo Giuliani.
Penttilä, Risto E. J. (2003) The Role of the G8 in International Peace and Secu-
rity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). The only volume in the Adelphi
Paper series published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Interna-
tional Institute for Strategic Studies dedicated to the G8. The focus is
placed upon the G8’s contribution to international security – an issue that
was originally outside of its remit but was soon added to its agenda.
Putnam, Robert D. and Bayne, Nicholas (1984) Hanging Together: The Seven-
Power Summits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Authored by a US
political scientist and a former UK diplomat, this classic book was for a
long time (until the Ashgate G8 and Global Governance Series) the main
text for exploring the role of the G8 in fostering international cooperation
in an interdependent world.
—— (1987) Hanging Together: Cooperation and Conflict in the Seven-Power
Summits (London: Sage). This revised edition was published only three
years after the publication of the original work and updates the develop-
ments and refines the theoretical implications introduced in the first
edition.
Index
Boxed text is shown by italic page numbers. Main treatments are indicated by
bold.
ad hoc meetings 25
Afghanistan, Soviet invasion of 5, 6
Africa Action Plan 14
Africa: assistance for 13–14; debt relief
15, 22, 63–5; development partner-
ship 54; outreach policy 83–4
Africa Group 96
Africa Personal Representatives 96
al-Qaeda 12
Annan, Kofi 94
anti-globalization protests 30
Argentina 59
assessment 16
Assistance for Africa 13
Association of Southeast Asian
Nations 35
Attali, Jacques 39
attendance 18–26
attendance overlap 23–4
Australia 57, 59
Bagehot, Walter 89
Baker, James 61
Balladur, Edouard 39–40
Bayne, Nicholas: first cycle assess-
ment 7; second cycle assessment 9;
third cycle assessment 12; fourth
cycle assessment 14; fifth cycle
assessment 16; effectiveness 91;
first summit 2–3; future approach
34; leadership 96; media 86
beer 26
Berlusconi, Silvio 19, 53, 55
bioethics 78
Birmingham Summit (1998): assess-
ment 43; crime prevention 78; debt
relief 64; reforms 13, 22, 41–2, 44–
5; Russian goals 47; security issues
74–5; unemployment issues 79
Blair, Tony: agendas 43–4; attendance
98; communiqués 34; debt relief
63–4; Jubilee 2000 response 32;
outreach policy 45; reforms 13, 41,
44, 90; separation of ministers’
meetings 22, 25
Blunkett, David 30
Bonn Summit (1978): assessment 49;
Declaration on Highjacking 5, 6;
leaders 60
Bonn Summit (1985): assessment 8,
49; Economic Declaration 8, 62;
environmental issues 76; political
issues 66–7; terrorism 69; WWII
anniversary 48
Bono 45, 63, 90
Brady Plan 63
Brazil 58, 59
“Break the Chains of Debt” 84
Brown, Gordon 45
Bush, George H. W. 41
Bush, George W.: agendas 42; atten-
dance 98; outreach policy 15;
116 Index
promotion of democracy 66;
protectionism 22; sherpas 41;
unilateralism 12
Business and Industry Advisory
Committee 35
Cambodian conflict 75
Campbell, Kim 54
Canada 54–5; agendas 54–5; assess-
ment 54; attendance 54;
compliance 54; as member xviii, 54
Carter, Jimmy 41
Central Europe, assistance for 12
chairman’s statements 32–3
Charter on Lifelong Learning 78
Chernobyl nuclear accident 9
China: attendance 58; attitudes after
Tianamen Square 10; attitudes of
58; first dialogue meeting 15;
future membership xviii, 98; G20
59; outreach policy 15; support for
49–50, 53
Chirac, Jacques 22, 25, 38, 58, 97
Chrétien, Jean 54, 90–1, 97
Civil G8 2006 100
civil society: engagement with 84;
first mentioned 10; future direc-
tions 99–100; outreach policy and
25, 83
climate change 76
Clinton, Bill 41
Cold War: end of 9, 66–7; re-emer-
gence of 4
Cologne Summit (1999): assessment
49; Cologne Debt Initiative 64,
65; costs 30; debt relief 13, 48;
education issues 78; finance
ministers 59; Kosovo conflict 75–
6 energy issues 15
communiqués 31–2
compliance: Canada 33–4, 54;
France 38–9; Germany 33, 48–9;
Italy 34; Japan 52; mechanisms
of 33–4, 91; Russia 39, 47;
United Kingdom 33–4, 43; USA
34, 41
Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban
Treaty 13
Concert of Europe 2, 46
concerts 26, 29
costs 30, 92–3
Counter-Terrorism Action Group 71,
73
crime prevention 78
cycles of summitry 1; see also first
cycle of summitry etc
dates and venues 3–4
Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa 90
debt relief 9, 15, 45, 63–5, 84
declarations 32–3
delegation 96
Delors, Jacques 56, 57
democracy, strengthening 5
Denver Summit (1997) 13, 40, 46, 75
Dhahran military base 12
Digital Opportunities Taskforce
(DOT force) 14
diseases 77
documentation 31–4
Doha Round 53
drugs 77
East Asian financial crisis 12
East–West tensions 4, 8–9
East–West trade 9
economic issues: declarations 31;
history of 4–6; locomotive
theory 6, 50, 61; success and fail-
ures 60–5
Education for All 79
education issues 15, 29, 78–9
education summit: see Kananaskis
Summit (2002)
EEC Commission 56
effectiveness 81, 89–93
employment issues 79
employment ministers’ meetings 25
energy ministers’ meetings 25
The English Constitution (Bagehot) 89
environment ministers’ meetings 25, 76
environmental issues 76
EU 55–7
EU Constitution 95
euromissiles 9
European Council 56, 61
Evian Summit (2003): bridge-
building 15; Iraq War 97; outreach
policy 40, 58; terrorism 71, 73

exchange rate stability 4
expectations 89–90
families 26
festivities 26
fifth cycle of summitry 14–17, 16
finance ministers: attendance
discontinued 19, 22; as leaders
60–1
finance ministers’ meetings:
frequency of 25, 36; Group of 20
55; non-G8 members 45; Russian
exclusion 47; set up 9
Financial Action Task Force 73
first cycle of summitry 4–7, 16
fora xvii
Ford, Gerald 5, 22, 40
foreign ministers, attendance discon-
tinued 22
foreign ministers’ meetings 25, 36,
96
fourth cycle of summitry 12–14, 16
France 37–40; assessment 38; atten-
dance 19, 38; compliance 38–9
French Revolution 39–40
future membership 98–9
G4 2
G5 2, 9, 61
G6 xviii, 91
G7, first meeting xviii
G8, first mentioned 13
G8 Research Group 55
G9 49–50, 58, 98–9
G10 53
G20 55, 58–9, 88
G24 10, 36, 67
Geldof, Bob 45, 63
General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT) 4, 35, 61–3
Genoa Summit (2001): assessment
53; costs 30; education issues 78–
9; ICT 77; outreach policy 83;
protests 14, 30; terrorism 73–4
Germany 48–50; attendance 19, 48;
compliance 48–9; great power
status 48
Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry xviii, 38,
39, 48, 57
glastnost 46
Index 117
Gleneagles Summit (2005): agendas
44; assessment 43; debt relief 15,
64–5; environmental issues 76;
health issues 77; media 87; soli-
darity 97; terrorism 74; US
attitudes 41; venue 31; working
schedule 27–9
Global AIDS and Health Fund 77
global governance: leadership 94–6;
overlap 81, 87–9; position in 34–6;
US attitudes 40
Global Information Society 77
globalization: anti-globalization
protests 30; challenges of 67–8;
first mentioned 10
goals 96–7
Gorbachev, Mikhail 7, 10–11, 39, 46
grading system 16
great power status 48
Group of Twenty Leaders (L20) 88
Guadeloupe meeting (1979) 39, 43,
51, 74
Gulf War (1990–91) 34
Hajnal, Peter 84
Halifax Summit (1995): communiqué
32; global governance 35; reforms
11–12, 55; tourism 30
Harper, Stephen 98
Hashimoto Ryūtarō 75, 77
health issues 76–7
health ministers’ meetings 25
Heavily Indebted Poor Countries 64
hegemony 40
highjacking 5, 6, 69
Highly Indebted Poor Countries
programme 13, 96
hijacking 5
HIV/AIDS 9, 77
Hodges, Michael xvii, 90
Home and Justice Ministers’ meet-
ings 30
hostage taking 69–70
hotels 29
Houston Summit (1990): agendas 10;
assessment 40; communiqué 31–2;
trade negotiations 63
Hu Jintao 58
Human Frontiers Science Programme
50, 78
118 Index
ICT 14, 77–8
IMF reform 35
India: future membership 58, 98; G20
59; nuclear weapons tests 74–5;
support for 53
Indonesia 51, 57
industrialization, development and
xvii
infectious diseases 15
informality 26
institutions: explanation of xvii;
overlap 81, 87–9; review of 11–12
intellectual property rights 78
International Atomic Agency 11
International Chamber of Commerce
35
Iraq War (2003) 34, 94, 97
Italy 52–4; agendas 53; assessment
53; attendance 19, 53
Japan 50–2; agendas 50; assessment
52; attendance 19, 51–2; attitude
to China 58; compliance 52
Japanese Communist and Anarchist
groups 30
Jenkins, Roy 6
Jubilee 2000 13–14, 22, 32, 63–4, 84–5
Kananaskis Summit (2002): agendas
12; costs 30; education issues 78–
9; ICT 77; media 87; outreach
policy 83; reforms 55, 90–1;
Russia and 46, 55; terrorism 14,
70; venue 31
Kim Il-Sung 11
Kissinger, Henry 2, 40
Kohl, Helmut 19, 48, 76, 77
Koizumi, Junichirō 19, 50, 52, 98
Korea (DPRK) 11, 75
Kosovo conflict (1999) 34, 75–6, 92
Kyoto Protocol 76
L20 88, 100
labor issues 79
labor ministers’ meetings 25
Lamy, Pascal 56
leaders 18–26; attendance 19–22
leaders-only summits 13, 22
leadership 94–6
legitimacy 81–7
length of summits 26, 55
Live 8 2005 32, 65, 86
locomotive theory 6, 50, 61
London Summit (1977): agendas 5;
assessment 43; leaders 60; trade
negotiations 62
London Summit (1984): agendas 8;
assessment 43; health issues 77
London Summit (1991): assessment
43; GATT 63; Soviet Union 11
London terrorist attacks 15, 74
Louvre Accord 61
Lyon Group 36, 78, 92
Lyon Summit (1996): agendas 39;
crime prevention 78; reforms 13
Major, John 44, 49, 87
Make Poverty History 65, 86, 89
Martin, Paul 14, 55
media 25–6, 86–7, 89
membership criteria 1, 57
Merkel, Angela 49, 98
Mexico 59, 63
Miki, Takeo 51
Millennium Development Goals 79
Mitterrand, François 19, 38, 39
Miyazawa Plan 63
Monbiot, George 82
multilateralism, as principle 48
Munich Summit (1992) 11, 44
Nakasone, Yasuhiro 7, 8, 19, 50, 52
Naples Summit (1994): global gover-
nance 11, 35; globalization 10, 67–
8; outreach policy 53
Napoleonic Wars 2
new members 57–9
New Partnership for Africa’s
Development 54
NGOs (Non-Governmental
Organizations) 10, 64, 86, 90, 100
non-G8 members: inclusion of 25,
40, 57, 83–4; Italian attitudes 53–
4; US attitudes 42
Northern Territories dispute 50
Norton, Richard 65
Nuclear Safety and Security Summit
(1996) 46
nuclear testing ban 13
nuclear weapons 74–5

Obuchi, Keizō 58
OECD 35
oil: crises 5, 61–2; import targets 6;
oil-for-food 94–95
Okinawa Summit (2000): China and
51; civil society 85–6, 99–100;
costs 30; health issues 77; ICT 77;
infectious diseases 15; media 26,
87; outreach policy 58, 83; venue
29
Organization of American States 35
Ottawa Summit (1981) 6, 54, 66
outreach policy: China and 15; first
introduced 13; future directions
99–100; US attitudes 42
overlap 81, 87–9
Pakistan 75
Paris Summit (1989): agendas 10, 39;
environmental issues 76; human
rights declaration 39; tourism 29
participants 18–26; attendance
overlap 23–4
Penttilä, Risto 68–9
perestroika 46
photo opportunities 89
piracy 78
Plaza Accord 61
pledges 33–4
“Poland and Hungary: Aid for
Restructuring of the Economies”
57
policing 30
political issues 65–8
post-industrialization xvii
post-summit developments 34–6
powerful countries, most xvii
pre-history 2–3
preparations for summits 26–31
press conferences 87
Prodi, Romano 98
protests 30–1, 84
Puerto Rico protests 30
Putnam, Robert D. 91
Quad 6, 25, 35, 62
Rambouillet Summit (1975): agendas
5, 39; Canada and 54; commu-
niqué 31; Declaration 5, 65–6;
Index 119
global governance 35; origins of
2–3; trade negotiations 62
Reagan, Ronald 7, 41
recession theory 50
refugees 74
relevance 100–1
richest countries xvii
riots 30
Rosenau, James 83
Russia 46–47; assistance for 11, 67;
authoritarianism 100; compliance
39, 47; formal integration 14; G20
59; joins xviii; richest countries
and xvii; status of 47, 99; US atti-
tudes 42
San Juan Summit (1976): assessment
5, 7, 40; protests 30; “tailwind” 22
Saudi Arabia 59
schedules 26
Schmidt, Helmut xviii, 38, 48
Schröder, Gerhard 13, 22, 48, 49, 64
Sea Island Summit (2004): agendas
42; assessment 40; communiqué
32; Middle East 96; non-G8
members 40; outreach policy 15;
promotion of democracy 66;
venue 31
Seattle protests 30
second cycle of summitry 7–9, 16
security issues: French concerns 39;
protests 30–1; success and failures
68–76
September 11 terrorist attacks 70
sherpas 5, 25
Short, Clare 64
social issues 76–9
solidarity 96–8
South Africa 58, 59
South Korea 59
Southeast Asia 50–1
Soviet Union: assistance for 10–11;
attitudes of 46; collapse of 9–10;
request participation 10
St Petersburg Summit (2006) 15, 46,
47, 97–8
Sting 32
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks 74
success and failures of summits 16
Suharto 11, 51, 57
120 Index
Summit of the Eight 46
surveillance 9
tailwind 22
Teheran embassy 5
terrorism: anti-Us attacks 12;
Declaration on Highjacking 6;
discussions about 5, 15–16; effec-
tiveness 92; financing of 73;
measures to counteract 9, 31, 69–
74, 71–3
Thatcher, Margaret 7, 19, 43, 77
third cycle of summitry 9–12, 16
Tianamen Square massacre 10
Tokyo Round 62
Tokyo Summit (1979) 6, 30, 57, 61
Tokyo Summit (1986) 8–9, 70
Tokyo Summit (1993) 11, 51, 57, 63
Toronto Summit (1988) 9
Trade Ministers’ Quadrilateral 6, 25,
35, 62
trade negotiations 62, 91
Transnational Organized Crime 78
transport security 70
Treaty of Rome (1957) 56
Turkey 59, 95
unemployment issues 79
United Kingdom 42–5; assessment
43; attendance 19, 43–4; compli-
ance 43; debt relief 63–4; non-G8
members 45; sherpas 44
United Nations: budget 92; call for
reform 34–5; oil-for-food 94–5;
overlap 88–9
United Nations Security Council 34–
5, 36, 51, 81
United States Trade Representative
(USTR) 6
Uruguay Round 49, 62–3, 79–80
USA 40–2; attendance 19; compli-
ance 41; missile deployment in
Europe 74; oil consumption 61;
sherpas 41; solidarity 97
Venice Summit (1980): oil consump-
tion 6, 62; political issues 66;
secret meetings 43; security issues
53; terrorism 69–70
Venice Summit (1987) 9, 53, 77, 78
venues 23–4, 29–30, 91
Versailles Summit (1982) 8, 39
Warsaw Pact countries 36
Wilkinson, Rorden xviii
Williamsburg Summit (1983): assess-
ment 40; debt relief 63;
Declaration 8, 74; security issues
74
Wilson, Harold 35, 44, 87
WMD 14, 70
World Bank, reform of 35
World Economic Forum (WEF) 87–8
A World Restored (Kissinger) 2
World Trade Organization 35, 92–3
World Trade Organization protests 30
World War Two anniversary 8, 66–7
Yeltsin, Boris 11, 13, 46
Yoshino, Bunroku 50–1