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G8 Performance from Birmingham to Evian and Beyond
Nicholas Bayne, KPMG, London School of Economics and Political Science
Draft: May 17, 2003

The Birmingham summit of 1998 introduced some fundamental reforms into the format for this annual event. Russia, which had been involved with the summit process since 1991, was admitted as a full member, making the G7 into the G8. The heads of government, who had been flanked by their foreign and finance ministers since the summits began in 1975, decided to meet on their own. Foreign and finance ministers would henceforth meet separately, a few days in advance. The economic agenda was kept to just three items — employability, international crime and the world financial system — while the political discussions were likewise cut back. In consequence, the documents issued by the heads at Birmingham were less than half the length of what had emerged from Denver the year before.

These reforms were provoked by the mounting frustration of the heads. After political items had been added to economic subjects in the 1980s, the expansion of both agendas during the 1990s was stifling the summits. The preparations had become too bureaucratic, the documents were far too long and the heads had too little opportunity to make any input of their own. The reforms of 1998 were intended to cut the heads loose from this bureaucratisation. The aim was to recreate the original vision of the summits as an opportunity for direct, informal exchanges and as the personal instrument of the heads of government.

The record of the G7/G8 summits shows that they usually change direction every four to six years.[1] The Evian summit, to be chaired by France in June 2003, will be the sixth summit to be held under the reformed regime.[2] So another change of direction is imminent, if it has not begun already. This paper looks at how the summits have developed between Birmingham 1998 and Kananaskis 2002, with a forward look towards Evian 2003. It considers first some wider consequences for the summit process. Then it analyses whether these changes have had a clear impact, for good or ill, on the substantive results from the summit.

The paper concludes that recent summits have enhanced the strengths of the G8 process, but have not corrected some prevailing weaknesses. So both fans and critics of summitry will tend to be reinforced in their views. The latest summits have revived the G8’s capacity for political leadership. But they often fail to overcome domestic resistance to international cooperation. Up to Kananaskis they made some cautious advances in collective management between North America, Europe and Japan. But Evian will submit this summit aim to a severe test: can the G8 recreate a collective spirit after such deep divisions over Iraq?

With the outcome of Evian still in doubt, it is hard to sure if the summits have completed the series started at Birmingham and changed to a new one. But there are grounds for thinking that a new series has begun at Kananaskis. This is focused on the fight against terrorism (broadly defined) after 11 September 2001 and on issues, like Africa and Iraq, which combine economic and political elements. Russia has been fully integrated, while non-G8 leaders have begun to participate in the process.

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The Summit Format

The simplified, ‘heads-only’ format for the summit is now firmly established. There have been a number of later modifications, especially at Kananaskis in 2002. For example:

• Limiting the agenda to three specific items has usually been respected, but not always. The Okinawa summit of 2000 had three themes — prosperity, peace of mind and stability — that were so broad as to encompass almost anything. Italy returned to a more rigorous selection - poverty reduction, conflict prevention and the environment - for Genoa in 2001. For Kananaskis, Canada kept the list to Africa, terrorism and economic growth and successfully ensured that Africa remained a high priority. But France has returned to the Japanese practice of choosing all-embracing themes — solidarity, responsibility, security and democracy.
• A shorter agenda has generally made for shorter documents. But summit communiqués were still full of passages in which the heads endorsed, without discussion, policies on which their governments were already agreed. At Kananaskis the Canadians abandoned a communiqué altogether. Instead, Chretien issued a ‘Chair’s Summary’, just over two pages long, explicitly limited to the issues that the heads had discussed among themselves.[3] This was supported by specific G8 agreements, eg on Africa and transport security. Chirac plans similar documentation for Evian.
• For security reasons, after the violent anti-globalisation riots at Genoa and the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, the Canadian hosts tucked the summit away in a secluded mountain resort in the Rockies. They used this as a means to cut back the huge delegations still being brought to the summit by the US and Japan, because accommodation at Kananaskis was so limited. They housed all the participants close together, which allowed for spontaneous personal encounters — Blair and Bush met in the gym at 6.30 one morning. The French have broadly continued this model in 2003, though Evian is not so remote.

When the heads in Birmingham cut loose from their supporting ministers, this clearly changed their relations with their own governmental apparatus. But it has also affected the heads’ dealings with others involved in summitry, both non-G8 governments and non-state actors, like private firms and NGOs.

The G7/G8 Apparatus. While the summit itself has grown simpler, the supporting apparatus grows ever more complex. The immediate run-up to Evian, as usual, involves meetings of foreign and finance ministers. Earlier in 2003 G8 environment ministers, energy ministers, development ministers and justice and interior ministers (with special emphasis on terrorism) have also met. All these ministerial groups have their own network of specialist official groups.

Originally, these ministerial groups were created to prepare issues for discussion at summit level. But now they enable the heads to delegate issues that would otherwise clutter up their own agenda. Foreign ministers, for example, have taken over almost all conflict prevention issues, except for those falling under the Africa Action Plan. The environment and other ministers likewise pursue most issues on their own initiative; the G8 format often enables them to agree common positions that they can pursue in wider international institutions. Only occasionally is the ministers’ work raised to summit level. For example, the heads gave essential authority to the G7 finance ministers’ work on financial architecture in 1998 and 1999. The finance ministers regularly send forward reports on debt relief to the heads, even when, as at Kananaskis, they had nothing new to say.

Non-G8 Governments. Detaching themselves from their governmental apparatus has given the heads new opportunities to link up with different actors. Since 1998, and especially since the Okinawa summit of 2000, the heads have been ready to meet the leaders of non-G8 countries and of international institutions far more freely than before.

A French proposal in 1989 for the G7 to meet 15 leaders of developing countries was rejected.[4] Another French initiative in 1996 for a meeting with the heads of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, UN and World Trade Organization (WTO) was not repeated. But in 2000 the rest of the G8 endorsed Japanese plans to give a special summit briefing to China, India and South Korea. This came to nothing, as Chinadeclined the invitation, but the idea of involving China and India more closely remains alive.[5] Before Okinawa the Japanese also arranged a dinner where most of the G8 met heads of government representing the G77, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the Organisation for African Unity (OAU) and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), as leading groups of developing countries. At Genoa, whose main item was poverty reduction, the Italians organised a working dinner between the G8 and representatives of poor countries — Bangladesh, El Salvador, Mali and four other African states — plus the heads of development institutions. At Kananaskis the G8 had a joint meeting with the four African leaders most involved in the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) to explain their Africa Action Plan, which was organically linked to it.[6]

This practice of ‘outreach’ to leaders of developing countries is thus well established. But the G8 have varied the composition and the criteria for selection every year, if only slightly. This is to prevent them being trapped into a standard pattern, from which it would be hard to escape. While African leaders have been strongly representedever since Okinawa, it remains open for the G8 to focus on a different continent at future summits. Chirac, as host in 2003, plans to invite both the Africans most involved in NEPAD and a wider group of influential developing countries. He would have liked to institutionalize these contacts, but the Americans, as the hosts in 2004, have insisted on keeping their hands free.

Non-State Actors. Through most of the 1990s the G8 had had only formal contacts with private business and with labour, through the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and no links at all with NGOs, though an ‘alternative summit’ was often held at the same time as the G8. The first shift came in 1998, when Blair received a delegation from the Jubilee 2000 Campaign, who had staged a very large peaceful demonstration in Birmingham calling for generous debt relief. Schroeder did the same in Cologne in 1999.[7]

In 2000 the Japanese sought to integrate both private firms and NGOs in the preparation and follow-up of several summit items. They held a major conference just before Okinawa on how IT could be made more accessible to poor countries. Its findings were incorporated in the summit’s decisions and the task-force created by Okinawa — the Digital Action Task-Force or DOT-Force — included both private firms and NGOs. The task-force on renewable energy created at Okinawa had a similar composition, with a business representative — Mark Moody-Stuart of Shell — as co-chairman. A year later, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria set up at Genoa also explicitly involved private firms, medical foundations and charities and other NGOs in its management.

The progressive involvement of non-state actors has been distracted by the growing violence of anti-globalisation riots, which reached their peak at Genoa, where one protestor was killed. But already the more responsible NGOs, like ‘Drop the Debt’ and Medecins sans Frontieres, were disassociating themselves from violent and obstructive protest. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 reduced public tolerance of street violence and protests have fallen away very sharply since then. Meanwhile, the G8 heads continue to look for opportunities to involve business and NGOs in summit preparations and follow-up, even though this may not fit easily with the practice of entrusting follow-up to existing international institutions.

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Summit Results

This section considers how the changes in summit format, introduced at Birmingham 1998, have affected the results achieved in the summits since then. It begins with the positive signs, followed by more negative ones.

Striking Deals

The heads were concerned that the bureaucratisation of the summit in the 1990s reduced their capacity to strike deals among themselves. Where agreements were reached at these summits, they depended wholly on the preparatory work. The heads gave their authority to these deals, but added little of their own and seldom achieved agreements that went beyond what was available at lower levels.

Last year Kananaskis showed a strong revival of the heads’ deal-making capacity. Three of the main agreements reached there were not available at lower levels and needed the intervention of the heads. These were:

• The G7 finance ministers had already discussed the replenishment of the World Bank’s Trust Fund to finance the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) programme of debt relief, but had failed to fix a figure. The summit agreed to a joint commitment of up to $1billion.
• The summit agreed a G8 Africa Action Plan to underpin NEPAD. Most of this had been agreed in advance by the G8 Africa Group. But there was no agreement on the total aid funds that would support the Plan — this was only settled by the heads. They agreed to allocate half of the extra aid funds they had pledged at the UN meeting at Monterrey to deserving African countries. This produced, in a rather awkward formula, a headline figure of $6 billion.[8]
• The agreement to allocate up to $20 billion to cleaning up nuclear installations and chemical weapons in the former Soviet Union could only have been reached at the G8 summit. The Europeans, Canada and Japan were insisting on guarantees of support on the ground, which the Russians at lower levels refused to give. It was only at the summit, when the other heads, especially Bush, leant on Putin, that the deal was struck. (Subsequent implementation, however, has been disappointing.)

There are other examples of such deals struck at recent summits. For example, he Kosovo agreement endorsed at Cologne 1999 was in doubt until the moment when Yeltsin gave his personal backing. The work done on Africa stemmed from a joint decision by the heads at Genoa in 2001 — see below. But Kananaskis was unusually rich and suggests that the practice of simpler, less cluttered summits is having a cumulative effect on decision-making. So Evian may yield advances on reconstructing Iraq or reviving the WTO Doha Round that go beyond what could be agreed at lower levels.

Innovation

The bureaucratisation of the summits of the 1990s had not prevented the emergence of new ideas in this period. The Halifax summit of 1995 launched reforms to the IMF. Lyon in 1996 introduced the HIPC programme of debt relief. Even so, the summits from Birmingham 1998 onwards show a stronger capacity to innovate, with new initiatives not only coming up through the summit preparations but also emerging at the summit itself.

Birmingham introduced new ideas on debt relief that were finally agreed as the Enhanced HIPC programme at Cologne in 1999. Although the main document was produced by the finance ministers, the heads added some new commitments of their own.[9] The Okinawa summit launched the DOT-Force, to make IT more accessible to poor countries — a new and controversial idea initiated by private firms. Another Okinawa innovation was the task-force on renewable energy, based on an idea that emerged from the NGO community. Okinawa also began a discussion of infectious diseases. The main innovation, however, came at the Genoa summit, which launched the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, with initial financing of about $2 billion. This year Evian may initiate new ideas on the provision of clean water or on technology for sustainable development.

All these innovations, however, came up to the summit through their preparatory work. The heads are now also innovating at the summit itself. For example, although Birmingham transformed G7 into G8, the G7 leaders still held meetings without Russia and there was no provision for Russia itself to host a summit. But the first document to issue from the G8 at Kananaskis was a short statement on the ‘historic decision’ to let Russia host the summit of 2006. The statement gave the precise summit sequence for the rest of the decade, showing that Germany had agreed to wait a year so as to provide space for Russia.[10] This ‘historic decision’ was in fact reached among the heads without any advance preparation. The Sherpas were as surprised as anyone when it emerged.

A more far-reaching innovation took place at Genoa the year before. As noted earlier, the G8 met a group of leaders from developing countries over a working dinner during the summit. These included the Presidents of South Africa, Nigeria, Senegal and Algeria, the prime movers of the ‘New African Initiative’ that became the NEPAD. The G8 heads were so impressed by their presentation that on the following morning, without any advance preparation, they drew up and issued the ‘Genoa Plan for Africa’. This promised to underwrite the African leaders’ programme, if they met their own commitments, and set up the G8 Africa Group to prepare detailed proposals. These bore fruit in the Africa Action Plan issued at Kananaskis.

Yet innovation at the summit itself, without advance preparation, has definite limits. The Genoa Plan for Africa contained a general undertaking of support and some procedural decisions, but it was not backed up by precise commitments in aid, trade or conflict prevention. These had to wait for the full Action Plan a year later. Similarly, the unscripted decision on Russia at Kananaskis covered process only, not substance.

The limits of the heads’ capacity to innovate on their own can be seen in the ‘Chair’s Summary’ issued at Kananaskis. This is admirably brief; but its content is bland and disappointing. It notes the agreements reached on the carefully prepared issues of Africa and cleaning up weapons of mass destruction. A single valuable sentence contains the $1 billion commitment to replenish the HIPC programme. But apart from this, the document simply repeats known positions and does not embody any advances in policy. The conclusion is that while the heads may make unscripted procedural advances, policy innovation requires to be underpinned by detailed preparation.

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Reconciling Economics and Politics

One of the advantages enjoyed by heads of government, as compared to their ministers, is the ability to integrate different aspects of policy. In the earliest days of the summit this capacity was limited to economic issues. But as soon as the summit developed its political agenda in the 1980s, the G7 had the potential to reconcile issues from both economic and foreign policy domains. However, this potential was rarely used. In the early 1990s the economic assistance initiated by the G7 for Central and Eastern European countries, especially Russia, had a strong political motivation, to entrench democracy and prevent a revival of communism. But usually the summit kept economics and politics apart.

This distinction is now being steadily eroded. By Kananaskis 2000 both the main summit topics combined the political and economic strands. The programme to clean up nuclear material and chemical weapons in Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union was clearly meant to reduce the security threat from these items falling into the wrong hands or leading to dangerous pollution. But the obstacles to be overcome were largely economic. The programmes required very substantial financing. They also needed local backing in the form of legal protection, insurance and other practical support analogous to other programmes of economic and technical assistance. The G8 summit was able to bring these two strands together.

In the Africa programme politics and economics were even more closely enmeshed. There were economic and ethical motives for helping Africa to overcome poverty, misery and disease and enjoy some of the benefits of globalisation. But there was also a political motive, reinforced by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The misery and disorder prevailing in much of Africa, where there were many failed or failing states, was seen as fertile ground for terrorist movements. In this sense the G8’s Africa Plan, linked to the NEPAD, is analogous to the Marshall Plan for Europe at the end of World War II. It aims to use economic revival to counter adverse political trends.[11]

The G8 Africa Action Plan combines not only economic and political objectives, but also economic and political measures. The Marshall Plan used only economic instruments. But the G8 Action Plan, like the NEPAD it is supporting, has a strong political component. One chapter of the Plan deals with peace and security and aims to give the Africans the capacity to resolve their own conflicts within set timetables. A second chapter aims to help the Africans meet the objectives set out in NEPAD for improving their standards of government, democracy, legality and human rights.

The combination of politics and economics seen at Kananaskis over Africa could well be replicated this year in the discussion on Iraq, though the content of any deals cannot yet be perceived.

Linkage between Issues

The recent summits thus use the G8’s potential to combine economics and politics in a way seldom realised before. The G8 summit also has the capacity to establish linkages between topics and to strike cross-issue deals, whereby a concession by one country in one topic is rewarded by a move by a different country in another. Cross-issue deals of this kind are regarded as the highest form of cooperation at the summit. The deal integrating macroeconomic stimulus, energy policy and trade liberalisation agreed at the first Bonn summit of 1978 is the classic example.[12] But there have been very few examples since then. Linkage is often used within a broad subject like trade or financial reform. But cross-issue linkage has become almost unknown at the summit.

The Kananaskis summit provides, however, an excellent example of cross-issue linkage, though on a more modest scale than the classic 1978 example. The agreement on cleaning up nuclear material and chemical weapons in Russia was a very high priority for Bush. The US Congress had already earmarked funds up to $10 billion for this purpose; Bush was looking for a matching commitment from the rest of the G7. On the other hand, the Americans were reluctant to set a figure for the replenishment of the HIPC programme and had prevented agreement on this among G7 finance ministers. They feared that this commitment would run into difficulties in Congress.

The Europeans and others strongly backed the HIPC replenishment, as essential to finance the programme. They were also convinced of the need to clean up installations in Russia and had already committed substantial sums for this purpose. Many of these funds remained unspent, however, because of Russian obstruction on the ground. This problem was removed by insisting on firm guarantees from Putin, so that the rest of the G7 were ready for the sort of agreement the Americans wanted. They hesitated, however, to make a firm commitment of $10 billion. They were won over when Bush agreed to the $1 billion figure for the HIPC replenishment. He felt able to do this because he believed Congressional satisfaction at the $20 billion clean-up agreement would offset their reservations about the $1 billion for the HIPC. Such cross-issue deals are not likely to occur at every summit. But the record of Kananaskis shows that the G8, in its new format, is able to identify and strike them.

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Implementation of Commitments

So far the record of the summits since Birmingham 1998 shows an improvement in the G8’s performance. But there are also areas where the summits do not seem to be doing better and may be doing worse. One of the long-standing complaints against the summits has been that they make commitments that they do not fulfil. The summit relies on others for follow-up, especially international institutions like the IMF or the WTO. But in the past G7 members have been guilty of preventing such institutions from carrying out promises that the heads had made at the summit. The most blatant example was when the heads, at their summits of 1990, 1991 and 1992, undertook to complete the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations by the end of the year, only for this aim to be frustrated by their own disputes over agriculture. (A similar pledge made in 1993, however, was successfully honoured.)[13]

The new summit format could affect this problem in both positive and negative ways. Because the heads would be more personally involved in their decisions, this should improve the pattern of implementation. But because they were more detached from the G8 apparatus, that could make follow-up even more unreliable. The initial findings suggest that implementation, on balance, has got worse, just as the capacity for innovation has expanded. The G8 produces more ideas, but does not follow them through.

There are a number of examples from recent summits:

• Okinawa, as noted, launched a task-force on renewable energy, which produced an agreed report for Genoa, based on input from G8 and non-G8 countries, international institutions, private firms and NGOs. But at the summit the United States and Canada refused to accept its findings and the report was shelved.[14]
• Genoa set up a task-force, of officials only, to recommend how to support primary education in developing countries. It worked closely with the World Bank, who identified a group of countries best able to absorb outside assistance. But while the Kananaskis summit backed the recommendations on what poor countries should do to deserve assistance, it made only a weak commitment to provide such assistance, and did not endorse the World Bank’s list of deserving countries.
• The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, launched at Genoa, got under way very fast, as intended. By March 2002 it was ready to allocate funds to projects, with demand far exceeding the supply. But the Global Fund has now committed its initial funds over the next three to five years and urgently needs replenishment.[15] But the G8 members did nothing at Kananaskis, neither putting in more themselves nor getting other governments or private donors to contribute. The Africa Action Plan promised new action on polio, rather than AIDS. This year the US has committed new money to fight AIDS, including an extra $1 billion for the Global Fund, but this depends on matching contributions from the rest of the G8.
• During the 1990s the summit had shown considerable tenacity in its pursuit of debt relief for poor countries, being ready to improve the terms on offer when they were not producing the desired results. The 1999 Cologne summit produced a further substantial improvement — the Enhanced HIPC programme — which encouraged the Jubilee 2000 campaigners. But since then the terms of the programme have remained largely unchanged, though Kananaskis acted to ensure it could be financed. The G8 did not respond to the new debt relief ideas in NEPAD. But development NGOs argue that the Enhanced HIPC programme is not working as generously as intended and the conditions facing poor debtor countries have got worse.

These perceived failures to live up to G8 promises have damaged the summit’s reputation. All these examples relate to development issues that are closely followed by civil society NGOs. These NGOs are discouraged by what they see as the summit’s failure to live up to its pledges and have become increasingly critical of the G8, even though the violent riots have declined since 11 September 2001.[16] This criticism extends to the G8’s work on Africa. The NGO community was already sceptical, if not hostile, as regards NEPAD, which they saw as imposed from the top by African leaders without proper consultation. NGOs have criticised the G8’s Africa Action Plan as being inadequate to the problems, short on precise commitments and unlikely to be implemented, on the G8’s previous record.

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Reconciling Domestic and International Pressures

Another advantage identified for the heads of government is their ability to reconcile divergent domestic and international pressures on policy-making. G8 summits serve to remind the heads of their international responsibilities, so they do not become too inward-looking. They also provide opportunities for them to use international arguments to resolve domestic problems. This ability resides in the heads themselves, by virtue of their political authority and legitimacy, rather than in their bureaucracies. Thus cutting the heads loose from their supporting apparatus should improve their ability to act in this way. But while there are some signs of this at recent summits, the negative examples seem to outweigh them.

The linked agreements reached at Kananaskis on replenishing the HIPC and cleaning up weapons of mass destruction, as already discussed, provide a positive example. They enabled Bush to overcome a potential problem in Congress by showing welcome progress elsewhere. G7 and G8 discussion of trade access for least-developed countries, from the Lyon summit of 1996 onwards, helped to overcome domestic resistance to such measures in the US, the EU and Canada, though the process was very slow.[17]

But there are too many occasions where domestic resistance has frustrated or undermined agreement among the G8 and the heads have not overcome this. For example:

• At Birmingham and Cologne the G7 members failed to resolve their differences over the agenda for a new trade round. The Americans listened too much to lobbying from labour and environmental groups, the Europeans and Japanese to their farmers. The result was the fiasco at the Seattle WTO meeting.
• The task-force on renewable energy created at Okinawa failed because of pressure from the energy industries in the US and Canada. This is only one example of a generally poor record on environmental issues at recent summits. North American attitudes on climate change, biodiversity and food safety, as on renewable energy, are driven by producer interests. In Europe, on the other hand, policy is shaped by pressure from consumers and environmental lobbies.
• Genoa produced a strong G8 consensus on international trade liberalisation, which facilitated the successful launch of the WTO’s ‘Doha Development Agenda’ two years after the failure of Seattle. But this has been undermined by the later actions of G8 members. The US Administration has secured negotiating authority from Congress, but only after imposing new tariffs on steel imports and enacting a Farm Bill that will greatly expand the subsidies paid to farmers. The European Union has not yet agreed on the reform of its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), so that the WTO has been unable to agree on how to negotiate on agriculture in the Doha Round. At Kananaskis, the G8 members were unable to offer any improvement in access for agricultural imports, though the Africans pressed for it. Can they do better at Evian?

In these examples, one would hope to find that the G8 heads were personally leading the search for ways round the domestic resistance. In fact they often turn out to be themselves the source of the obstacles. Clinton contributed to the collapse of the Seattle meeting by incautious remarks to a journalist during his visit there. Bush took the initiative to denounce the Kyoto Protocol and backed the farm subsidies demanded by Congress against the advice of his Secretary for Agriculture. In Europe, Chirac struck a deal with Schroeder that may delay CAP reform and forced it through at the European Council in October 2002, out-flanking Blair in the process. (He had pulled off a very similar manouevre in March 1999.) G8 leaders show a disturbing readiness, on both sides of the Atlantic, to give in to special domestic interests instead of building coalitions to overcome them.

Public Presentation

Initially 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. The G8 heads still attracted journalists in huge numbers, especially from their national media. But the press showed little interest in the issues under discussion at the summit and was easily distracted. It was hoped that the reforms brought in at Birmingham, by making the summits more focused and less ceremonial, with shorter documents, would improve the summits’ public image. This has not happened; if anything, the media take the summits less seriously than before.

Recent summits have not been successful in getting the media to focus on the issues. In 2000 the Japanese had used the summit as the excuse for massive public works in Western Japan and Okinawa itself. The press portrayed this as huge sums being squandered on a summit intended to address the problems of poor countries. A year later the riots in the streets of Genoa monopolised media attention. The press largely ignored the content of the summit in their speculation about whether the summit could go on meeting in such conditions. In 2002 the Canadian hosts were obliged to take exceptional measures to protect the security of the G8 heads. But the media were naturally unhappy at being stuck in Calgary 60 miles away from the summit. While the heads themselves seemed pleased to have this greater privacy, the summit’s reputation will only suffer further if it shuts itself away in an ivory tower. This year the media will at least be closer, but their access to the summit site will be very restricted. They will, however, be so keen to pick up hints of the personal chemistry between Bush and Chirac that they neglect the content of the summit.

The underlying problem is that the G8 has not given enough attention to the way it presents its work to the public. There is still too little joint briefing: most heads give separate briefings that are angled to their national press and play up their own achievements rather than common agreements. Journalists seeking an overall assessment turn to the NGOs present, who have often prepared briefing material that is more accessible than the summit documents. Since these NGOs are increasingly critical of the summits, this is reflected in the media treatment. The G8 members, both at the summit and elsewhere, have still not developed a set of persuasive arguments that spell out the benefits of globalisation in the face of popular uncertainty and opposition.

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Conclusions

This paper has shown that the reform of the summit format begun at Birmingham in 1998 has continued to evolve. Private firms and NGOs are now involved in the summit process. There is outreach to non-G8 countries, though this has not yet found a settled pattern. Summit performance has improved by in some respects: the heads are reaching agreements not available at lower levels; they show greater innovative powers; they are using the summit’s potential to integrate economics and politics; and they are exploiting linkage between issues. But other developments are less positive: the heads are less good at implementation than at innovation; too often they allow domestic obstacles to prevent or undermine agreement; the summit’s public image has not improved. In short, these summits are likely to reinforce the views of those who regard the G8 as useful, which include the heads themselves. But they will deepen the scepticism of the G8’s critics, which include most NGOs and the media.

The summit originally had three objectives, which remain valid:

• To use the political leadership of the heads to overcome bureaucratic deadlock;
• To reconcile the divergent domestic and international pressures generated by growing interdependence — now renamed globalisation;
• To develop collective management among North America, Europe and Japan, to replace original US hegemony.[18]

It is possible to offer an assessment of the performance of the summits from Birmingham onwards against these original objectives and to ascertain whether, six years on from Birmingham, the summit has moved into a new direction.

The first objective was losing ground to the bureaucratisation of the summit process. The recent reforms have sharpened the capacity of the G8 to exert leadership and have clearly improved the G8’s performance under this heading. The summit is now better at innovating and at striking deals. It is reviving techniques where the summit’s potential has not used for many years. It has developed new capacities for combining economic and political factors.

In the second objective of reconciling domestic and international pressures there have been some successes. But overall the performance has been much less satisfactory. The G8 heads are able to make progress with new issues, like infectious diseases or materials of mass destruction, but their initial ideas are not always followed through. They have greater problems with mainstream economic issues like trade, agriculture and the environment. The G8 members, both individually and collectively, need to revive their ability to reconcile domestic and international pressures.

The third objective, of collective management, made advances between Birmingham and Kananaskis, if slowly. The summit process is not now dependent on US initiative, as it was in the past. The Europeans collectively have become just as active, while both Japan and Canada made good use of their time as host. The focus on Africa, like the pressure for debt relief, has been led by the Europeans and Canada; the US is an active participant, but is not the initiator.[19] The change from Clinton to Bush did not lead to a setback to cooperative G8 action at Genoa and Kananaskis. Bush clearly did better than Clinton on international trade, where the US has taken back the lead from the EU, though the gap widened on the environment.

But over the last year, American policy on Iraq has raised serious questions over how far the United States is prepared to take part in a system of collective management. While its initial approach to the international fight against terrorism, after 11 September 2001, was strongly multilateral, on Iraq the United States has seemed determined to play matters their own way. This has produced a sharp division between the G8 members. The United States’ initiative to use force against Iraq is supported by the UK (which has supplied troops) and by Italy and Japan, who are also members of the Coalition against Iraq. But the war was strongly opposed by France, Germany and Russia, while Canada is also in this group.

The Evian summit will provide a test of US intentions and of the effectiveness of the G8 process. Evian could provide a timely opportunity to rebuild cooperation after the divisions on Iraq and to provide evidence of how the G8 can work together again. The summit has been successfully used for this purpose in the past. The 1986 Tokyo summit rebuilt common positions among the G7 on terrorism, after the Europeans (except Britain) had opposed the American bombing of Libya. The 1999 Cologne summit mended the breach between Russia and the G7 over Kosovo. If Evian is used to restore cooperation, both on reconstructing Iraq and on other issues, this will show that collective management is still a shared objective of the G8. But if Evian breaks up without a reconciliation, the role of the summit may have to be rewritten.

A good result from Evian should mean that Iraq could be regarded as an episode in the long-term fight against terrorism inaugurated after 11 September 2001. If so, there are grounds for thinking that the summit series started at Birmingham has closed and that a new one started with Kananaskis. The new series is still concerned with managing globalisation. But it has a more precise priority in mobilizing the fight against terrorism, in its widest definition. This embraces action against poverty, as in Africa, to prevent the emergence of failed states, as well as measures against weapons of mass destruction. The new series also concentrates on issues where economic and political factors are closely combined, such as Africa and Iraq. Its format is marked by a further advance by Russia, which will host its first summit in 2005, while G7 meetings at summit level will lapse. Non-G8 leaders, like the Africans at Kananaskis, are invited to the summit not just as guests, but as participants. All these factors suggest that the summit is now pointing in a different direction.

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Notes

1 For an analysis of the G7 and G8 summits up to 1999 in six series of between four and six summits, see Bayne 2000, especially Table 1.1 on page 4.

2 The full sequence is Birmingham 1998, Cologne 1999, Okinawa 2000, Genoa 2001, Kananaskis 2002 and Evian 2003. For accounts of the previous summits, see Bayne 2000 (Birmingham and Cologne), 2002a (Okinawa), 2002b (Genoa) and 2003 (Kananaskis).

3 This and all other G8 and G7 documents are accessible on the website of the University of Toronto G8 Research Group, www.g8.utoronto.ca. The French Government’s summit website for Evian is www.g8.fr.

4 The details of this episode are in Attali 1995, pp. 213-217 and 277-285.

5 For a full discussion, see Kirton 2001.

6 A useful account of NEPAD is in De Waal 2002.

7 The G8’s contacts with civil society NGOs are well documented in Hajnal 2001 and 2002.

8 At the UN conference on the financing of development, held at Monterrey in March 2002, the US promised to increase its official aid by $5 billion per year over five years. The European Union undertook to raise the percentage of GNP given as aid by a percentage equal to $7 billion per year over five years. This produces, in total, an extra $12 billion per year – though Japan’s aid is falling.

9 Birmingham and Cologne also produced innovative agreements on international financial architecture. But all the innovation came from the G7 finance ministers; the heads only contributed their political authority.

10 German support for full Russian participation and an end to the G7 goes back to Schroeder’s first meeting with Putin at Okinawa. Schroeder’s agreement to move the summit in Germany from 2006 to 2007 will put this summit after the next German elections, so that Schroeder may be out of power.

11 For a comparison of NEPAD and the Africa Action Plan with the Marshall Plan, see Bayne 2003.

12 For a full analysis, see Putnam and Henning 1989.

13 For a history of the Uruguay Round, see Croome 1995.

14 Agreement on a target for renewable energy also eluded the World Summit on Sustainable Development at Johannesburg in September 2002. The opposition was led by the US and the countries of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

15 For details of the Global Fund’s work, see its website, www.globalfundatm.org.

16 For a critical assessment of the Genoa summit, see Zupi 2001.

17 The US measures are in the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, finally adopted early in 2000. The EU provided duty and quota free access to products from least-developed countries from March 2000, with transitions for rice, sugar and bananas. Canada’s measures were announced in June 2002, just after Kananaskis. They match the EU package, but do not cover eggs, poultry and dairy products.

18 For the original definition of these objectives, see Putnam and Bayne 1987, pp. 14-20.

19 Europe is also the leader on the global environment, but here the US resistance is much stronger.

References

Attali, J. (1995), Verbatim III, Fayard, Paris.

Bayne, N. (2000), Hanging In There: the G7 and G8 Summit in Maturity and Renewal, Ashgate, Aldershot.

Bayne, N. (2002a), ‘The G8 Summit and Global Governance: the Message of Okinawa’, in Kirton, J. J. and Takase, J, (eds), New Directions in Global Political Governance, Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 21-34.

Bayne, N. (2002b), ‘Impressions of the Genoa Summit’, in Fratianni, M, Savona, P. and Kirton, J. J. (eds), Governing Global Finance, Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 199-210.

Bayne, N. (2003), ‘The G8 Africa Action Plan and NEPAD: Is this a Marshall Plan for Africa?’ and ‘Impressions of the Kananaskis Summit’ in Fratianni, M, Savona, P. and Kirton, J. J. (eds), Sustaining Global Growth and Development, Ashgate, Aldershot — forthcoming; also accessible on www.g8.utoronto.ca.

Croome, J. (1995), Reshaping the World Trading System: A History of the Uruguay Round, World Trade Organization, Geneva.

De Waal, A. (2002), ‘What’s new in the "New Partnership for Africa’s Development"?’ International Affairs, vol. 78, no. 3, pp. 463-476.

Hajnal, P. (2001), ‘Civil Society at the 2001 Genoa G8 Summit’, Behind the Headlines, vol. 58, no. 1, Canadian Institute of International Affairs, Toronto.

Hajnal, P. (2002), ‘Partners or Adversaries? the G7/8 Encounters Civil Society’, in Kirton, J. J. and Takase, J. (eds), New Directions in Global Political Governance, Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 209-222.

Kirton, J. J. (2001), ‘The G7/8 and China: Toward a Closer Association’, in Kirton, J. J, Daniels, J. P. and Freytag, A. (eds), Guiding Global Order, Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 189-222.

Putnam, R. D. and Bayne, N. (1987), Hanging Together: Cooperation and Conflict in the Seven-Power Summits, Sage, London.

Putnam, R. D. and Henning, C. R. (1989), ‘The Bonn Summit of 1978: A Case Study in Coordination’, in R. N. Cooper and others (eds.), Can Nations Agree? Issues in International Economic Cooperation, the Brookings Institution, Washington.

Zupi, M. (2001), ‘The Genoa G-8 Summit: Great Expectations, Disappointing Results’, International Spectator, vol. XXXVI, no. 3, pp. 57-68.

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