Introduction: Why the G8 Matters for America

On June 8–10, 2004, the United States will host the 30th annual Summit of the Group of Eight major market democracies. The event will bring to Sea Island, Georgia, the nine leaders of the world’s most powerful countries — the U.S., Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia — and of the semi-sovereign European Union as well. With the leaders will come a retinue of a few thousand officials, a few thousand journalists and several thousand security personnel. Also arriving will be tens of thousands, potentially even hundreds of thousands, civil society protestors as well.

“What does this G8 gathering mean for Georgia?” is the immediate question on everyone’s minds. This one is easy to answer. It is already clear the G8 will bring unrivalled benefits to Georgia in global recognition and economic stimulus, and no real disruption or damage from any demonstrators who might get out of hand. The G8 is the globe’s great geopolitical Olympics, assembling and attracting the attention — not of the world’s leading athletes and sports fans — but of the world’s most powerful economic, financial and business decision makers.

The far bigger, broader question is “Why does the Georgia G8 matter for America as a whole?” This question remains much more difficult to answer definitively at this time. For one thing, the U.S. does not formally take the chair of the G8 until January 1, 2004. Until then, the G8 remains firmly in the hands of France, which has had a difficult relationship with America of late. Even when the U.S. gets the chair, as host it has always been the slowest of the G8 powers to focus on what to do with “its” hometown summit, if only because America has so many other institutions and instruments available to exercise its influence in the world. Moreover, for the first time since America first hosted the summit in 1976, in another sumptuous resort hotel on the Atlantic seaboard, the 2004 Summit will take place in the immediate lead-up to a presidential election (see Appendix A). The U.S. G8 game plan will thus have to wait until President George Bush, Karl Rove and their colleagues determine the re-election campaign strategy. Most important, there is a battle still raging in the White House between those who say America does not need, and should thus dispense with, the G8 Summit and those who argue that as long as America has it, it should make it work for President Bush and the United States.

Today I will argue that America needs the G8, and needs it far more than even its advocates in the White House acknowledge or argue for at the present time. America needs it because the G8 is emerging as the effective centre of global governance — as the one international institution able and willing to deliver what America now needs. The G8 is emerging at a time when an increasingly vulnerable America requires the far-reaching, innovative co-operation of the major open-market, democratic powers that gather with it as equals in the G8. It is thus good news that the prospects for the Georgia G8 Summit seem promising at present. It is also good news that the U.S. has a distinguished record of making the G8 work for America in the past. The current challenge — for all Americans, North Americans and their allies — is making Georgia’s G8 Summit work for America in 2004.

To provide a foundation for thinking about how to make this happen, I will address five questions in turn: first, what this G8 is that is coming to Georgia; second, why, as an international institution, it works so well; third, why America needs it; fourth, whether Georgia will G8 give America what it needs now; and, finally, how it can be made to work best for America next year.

1. What Is the G8?

Just what is this G8 that is coming to Georgia next June? At first glance, it is merely a weekend conversation and “photo op” among nine leaders: America’s George Bush, Japan’s Junichiro Koizumi, Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder, Britain’s Tony Blair, France’s Jacques Chirac, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Canada’s new prime minister Paul Martin, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the European Union’s Romano Prodi. But a closer look at its 30-year history shows that the G8 summit is much more than that. This once-a-year encounter was created by six crises, through three processes, in order to perform a single mission — a mission that remains central to America’s purpose in the world to this day.

Take your mind back to the early 1970s. These were very bad times for the United States, and for the world. The grim mood was captured well by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who in America’s bicentennial year wrote that “liberal democracy on the American model increasingly tends to the condition of monarchy in the 19th century; a holdover form of government, one which persists in isolated or peculiar places here and there, and may even serve well enough for special circumstances, but which has simply no relevance for the future. It is where the world was, not where it is going … increasingly, democracy is seen as an arrangement peculiar to a handful of North Atlantic countries.”

The Six Crises of the Creation

It was clear why Moynihan was so pessimistic. America had been assaulted by a cascading series of six crises during the preceding five years. The first was about finance. August 15th, 1971, saw the brutal destruction of the system of fixed and adjustable exchange rates that had reigned since the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was founded at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 — a system that was now punishing America by forcing it to have an overvalued dollar. The second crisis was about trade. It came in 1973, when a new round of multilateral trade liberalization was launched but was immediately paralyzed by the deep north-south divisions and global recession that erupted that year. The third crisis was about energy, for these divisions and recession were the result of the October 1973 oil shock, which cut off oil supplies and raised oil prices for Americans and most of the rest of the world. The fourth crisis was about war in the Middle East. The oil shock was, in turn, the result of the October 1973 war, where a democratic Israel almost went under while virtually all North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies refused to allow America to deliver the supplies that Israel needed to survive. The fifth crisis was about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In May 1974, using American and Canadian technology, India exploded a nuclear bomb it claimed was for peaceful purposes; this ended a full decade during which horizontal nuclear proliferation had been successfully stopped. The sixth crisis was about a long, losing, land war in Asia, which ended in April 1975, when the last American helicopters lifted off from the roof of the embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam fell to the communist North and America “came home” in defeat.

These cascading crises fuelled two ominous trends. Across the Atlantic, democracy became imperilled, as “Euro-communism” threatened to bring 1940s-style communist governments to power in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy itself. And terrorism tore through the west, as angry young men hijacked civilian airliners, killed their innocent victims and went unpunished, as many countries accepted their claim to be “freedom fighters” for the downtrodden of the world.

The Three Founding Processes

What was to be done, to stave off defeat for America and for its animating ideal of democracy in the world? One group of G8 founding fathers, the “librarians” led by France’s Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Germany’s Helmut Schmidt, as finance ministers had gathered in the White House Library for private chats about how to replace a broken Bretton Woods. They wanted to continue their discussions at a higher level, now that they had the top political job back home. A second group, the “trilateralists,” had been meeting together as business and policy leaders in North America, Europe and Japan. Now many of their members had gone into government and wanted to put their new ideas about collective management into action from the top. A third group, the “concerteers,” were led by America’s new Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. He saw his much-loved Atlantic alliance in disarray and on the verge of defeat. So Kissinger reached back to his Ph.D. thesis on the 19th-century Concert of Europe for a different formula for how America could co-operate with its democratic allies to survive in this crisis-ridden world.

The One Core Mission

Like its 19th-century precursor, Kissinger’s new, late 20th-century concert would gather together all, and only, the major powers to govern the world collectively. But unlike the original, this new version would be an all-democratic club. The centrality of the democratic principle was clear from the G8’s membership. Only — and almost all of — the democratic major powers were invited to the first summit, held at Rambouillet, France, in November 1975. It was also clear from the concluding communiqué at Rambouillet. It boldly began: “We came together because of shared beliefs and shared responsibilities. We are each responsible for the government of an open, democratic society, dedicated to individual liberty and social advancement. Our success will strengthen, indeed is essential to, democratic societies everywhere.” Making the world democracy is what the G8 is all about.

The Summit Achievements

How well has it done in achieving this ambitious mission? During its first 29 years, the annual summit has sometimes succeeded spectacularly, and sometimes failed miserably, in bringing its proud and powerful members together to pursue this quest (see Appendix B). But over these three decades, some basic trends stand out. The summit has dealt with an ever broadening agenda, encompassing economic, global-transnational and political-security issues, and expanding from issues of common interest only to the G8 to those of the full global community, and to those long considered the core of domestic political life. The G8 has pioneered far-reaching new principles, including the need to intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign states to preserve democracy and liberty and to have globalization promote social cohesion and the natural environment, and even the need for preventive, if not quite pre-emptive, action in order to ensure that weapons of mass destruction stay out of terrorists’ hands. The G8 has produced ever more specific, collective, publicly encoded commitments, with the 14 at Rambouillet in 1975, and the seven at San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1976, exploding to 206 at Evian, France, in June 2003. Compliance with these commitments has almost always been in the positive range, with the level of compliance rising during the post–cold war years. The G8 has generated a system of supporting ministerial and official-level institutions, to the point where a majority of cabinet secretaries in its member countries now have a G8 institution of their own (see Appendix C). And the G8 summit has come to serve as the great global fundraiser, mobilizing US$26 billion for Russia in 1992, US$43 billion for Russia in 1993 and billions to relieve the debt of the poorest in the late 1990s. It added another US$1 billion for debt relief of the poorest, plus US$20 billion to safely eliminate weapons of mass destruction, plus US$12 billion a year for global poverty reduction, all at Kananaskis in 2002.

Above all, the G8 has fulfilled its mission, by producing the big breakthroughs in world politics in the past 30 years. The most important is what can be called “the second Russian revolution” — the surprisingly successful end of the cold war, through a largely, peaceful process, with the democratic world victorious, the Soviet empire ended and the remnant Russia transformed into a democratic polity that is now a full member of the G8 club. Another was the liberation of Kosovo, starting on March 24, 1999, when the G7 decided to intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign Yugoslavia by initiating a war that successfully prevented an emerging genocide, produced a democratic Serbia and put Slobodan Milosevic on trial for war crimes in the Hague.

2. Why Does It Work So Well?

Why has the G8 summit system worked so effectively, especially in a world where the heavy, hard law international organizations of the United Nations are the kind that many think are necessary for effective global governance in the world? One cause is the G8’s collective predominance, which gives it the weight to shape global order as a whole. Another is its effective internal equality, which induces each member to co-operate with the others to make its own individual weight felt in the world. Another cause is its constricted participation, which makes it easier and faster to arrive at ambitious, timely, well-tailored agreements to respond to a fast-moving world. And another cause is common principles — of democracy, liberty and social advancement, in a sharp contrast to the deeply divided Permanent Five (P5) veto powers of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Yet another is political control by democratically and popularly elected leaders, who personally deliver and dominate an institution in which they are free to do what the world needs at any time.

3. Why Does America Need It?

Does America still need the G8? After all, we are a long way from the dismal days, just “before defeat” in the 1970s, when the group sprung to life at Rambouillet. With the G8, America has now won the cold war, unleashed a process of rapid globalization and become what many see as the only remaining superpower, or even the “hyper hegemon” in the world.

Yet those six crises of the early 1970s are still with us, if not in acute form, at least close enough at hand to require constant co-operation among the democratic major powers of the world. In the field of finance, the G7 (the G8 without Russia) has recently forced the IMF to bail out Argentina once again, and has prompted markets to adjust exchange rates to help Americans find badly needed jobs. In trade, after the September 2003 failure of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Cancun, it will be up to the G8 to revive the Doha development round, or find a trade-liberalizing alternative, so that America can get the access it needs to find markets in — and get jobs from — the big, important countries in the world. In energy, as Bush highlighted when he first ran for the presidency, America needs the G8 to help solve its energy security problem, now made more acute by the virtual shutdown of supplies in Iraq and by production cuts and prices recently announced by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). In the Middle East, war has become chronic, with the President’s Road Map to Peace on the ropes in Palestine, the suicide bombers back in Israel, and the body bags coming home from Iraq, this time containing Americans. The problem with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is now being solved, expensively, in Russia and Iraq, but still exists poignantly in neighbouring Ukraine and Iran and in North Korea as well. In Asia, a long, possibly losing land war is looming in Afghanistan, where the allies control little more than the capital city and where their “search and destroy” missions have failed to find an Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar still on the loose.

The two broader challenges caused by these crises also remain. The democratic revolution, begun so strongly at the start of the 1990s has now stalled. It still needs to be defended in Venezuela, and extended to Afghanistan, to most of the Middle East and to much of the East Asian mainland as well. And the long, costly war against terrorism continues, not just in distant theatre but also inside America, in Lackawana, New York, and now in Guantanamo Bay as well.

Can America conquer these many challenges all by itself, or does it require the active assistance from its major G8 partners? In the domain of raw military power, America may soon start to need, rather than merely want, the combat capabilities of its G8 partners, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in potentially patrolling a line between Israel and Palestine. The need is growing as ever more American national guards and reservists are called up and sent to the deadly front lines.

Beyond the military challenges lies the task of mobilizing the money needed to secure the democratic reconstruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and, possibly, Palestine. Who has the money to do it, and how should the burden be shared? Today, in a global economy with a gross domestic product (GDP) currently valued at about US$32 trillion, the G7 together commands a convincing two-thirds majority of US$21 billion. America alone, at US$11 trillion dollars, has only a minority one-third share. The simple arithmetic suggests that if America acts in partnership with its collectively equal G7 partners, it dominates and wins. If it acts alone, it is bound to lose. Not surprisingly, Bush has chosen, as have presidents Bill Clinton and George H. Bush before him during the past decade, to act together through the G8 as the great global fundraiser to mobilize the money needed to deliver the big victories in the world.

In the coming weeks, American, G8 and other officials will be attending pledging conferences to mobilize as much as a quarter of a trillion new dollars needed to secure the democratic reconstruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. It would be nice if the whole world would bear that burden equally and raise the money through the UN. But that happy outcome will not happen. One solution is for American taxpayers to do it all alone — to pay three times as much as they otherwise would. The superior solution is for America to share the burden equally with its G8 partners, to raise enough to get the job done and to cut the American taxpayers’ bill in half.

Whether it be the military or the money challenges America now confronts, one thing is clear. The sense of victory that Americans felt during the 1990s and for a brief moment in Iraq last spring is now fading fast. It is being replaced by a feeling of vulnerability, for all Americans at home after September 11th, and for Americans today in Iraq. “America the victorious” is gone. “America the vulnerable” has arrived.

4. Will Georgia’s G8 Give America What It Needs Now?

Can Georgia’s G8 help America move from vulnerability to victory again, just as the G7 did from its 1975 start to its 1990 triumph in the cold war? Even at this early stage, the prospects are promising that the Sea Island Summit will produce what America now needs.

First, summits succeed when all members know that they are equally in this great game of global governance together. Today’s trends in overall capabilities are currently bringing this shared sense of equality strongly home to all. The leaders, their citizens and summit scholars count these capabilities by examining the overall GDP growth rates of each country and then seeing what this GDP is actually worth in the real world, at market-driven flexible exchange rates. Already, several consequential G8 powers, led by second-ranked Japan, are challenging the United States for the status of G8 growth leaders for the 2003–4 summit year. More importantly, every single G8 partner has a currency soaring in value against the plummeting dollar of the United States. In short, a strong, swift equalization in overall capabilities is already underway. Joining it is an even more dramatic equalization of vulnerability. It is reflected in the post–September 11th fact that the largest G8 member, the United States, has suffered the largest number of civilian deaths from terrorism on its soil, while the smallest G8 member, Canada, has suffered the least — indeed, none at all.

Second, summits succeed when they keep their participation constricted, which allows for frank talk and for big bargains to be forged quickly and efficiently in a few days of intense, sustained, undisturbed face-to-face talks. Thus far, President Bush has invited only his full G8 partners to come to Sea Island, where they will all stay at a single, secluded site that allows maximum uninterrupted quality time together to do real work. While it is virtually certain that President Bush, following recent precedents and political calculations, will invite outside leaders to meet the G8 at the Sea Island Summit, he has scheduled a relatively long, three-day Summit with enough time for the guests to be greeted and engaged and for the real work of the “big eight” still to get done.

Third, summits succeed when they focus on, and thus foster, the common principles that unite the partners, rather than the difficult, divisive items that the UN machinery is designed to bring to the fore. Judging by the “built in” agenda the leaders set for Sea Island at the end of their Evian Summit in June 2003, by Evian’s institutionalized legacy and by President Bush’s September speech to the UN, the 2004 agenda is likely to highlight issues where the common commitment to open democracy, individual liberty and social advancement is at the fore (see Appendix D and Appendix E). Combating the common enemies of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will head the list. If America’s jobless or “job-loss” recovery continues, economic co-operation, including improved corporate governance, will also likely take pride of place. Securing the democratic reconstruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East will also be on the list. And the President’s great social initiatives, to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa and human trafficking for sexual slavery everywhere, will probably be on the agenda as well. The spring 2003 UN-bred divisions — over how much time G8 countries should take before they conducted decisive enforcement action against Iraq — will be a long-forgotten memory by the time the Sea Island Summit arrives. The G8 leaders will not make the mistake of going down that path again.

Fourth, summits succeed when they are not just delivered, but dominated, by popularly elected leaders with the experience, electoral mandate, popularity, and personal desire to succeed. The Sea Island summiteers will be almost exactly the same group that have attending summits for the past three years, with Canada’s former finance minister Paul Martin, replacing Jean Chrétien, almost certainly the only new face. The election calendar and polls also suggest that all are likely to come with a great deal of domestic political capital, and thus free to make the domestic adjustments required to co-operate for the greater G8 and global good.

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5. How Can It Be Made to Work for America?

The only exception — and thus the one big outstanding question mark — is the G8 host, President Bush himself. At present, he is the least popular of the G8 leaders with his own voters, along with his best ally in Iraq, Britain’s Tony Blair. And at Sea Island in June, President Bush will be facing a presidential election only six months away. Only once before has America faced such a situation — at its first, and only other Atlantic Seaboard summit, at San Juan in the spring of 1976. On that occasion, the U.S. Republican President produced an internationally successful, but domestically inadequate Summit, and lost the presidential election to the Democratic challenger from Georgia in the fall.

Success at Sea Island will thus depend heavily on how the G8’s globally oriented agenda meshes with the American domestic political agenda that Bush will highlight, or have highlighted for him, for the presidential re-election campaign. It is still too early to identify what the latter agenda will be. All that is clear is that the two agendas at two levels can come together in mutually supportive ways. For example, inviting Mexican president Vincente Fox to meet with the G8 at the Sea Island will respond well to the recent thrust toward outreach in G8 and global governance, and to the many million of Americans of Mexican origin who will go to the polls in November on election day. A substantive Summit agenda focused on generating jobs, strengthening corporate governance, sharing the burden for democratic nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, combating terrorism, and dismantling weapons of mass destruction safely will also work well on both fronts.

The current challenge is for President Bush and his colleagues in the White House to realize the potential of these Summit–re-election synergies, to identify the Summit format and agenda that will best capture them, and to tailor Summit initiatives that will represent not just the incremental improvements so evident at Evian, but also the big bold breakthroughs that American voters will become aware of and applaud. It is very likely that the President’s G8 partners will work with him eagerly to deliver such a Summit package, for they too badly need an America that co-operates within the G8. All that is needed now is for the President to signal that he wants to pursue this path.

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Appendix A: Annual G7/8 Summit: Location, Date, Duration

Location	Date	Duration
Rambouillet, France	15–17 November 1975	3 days
San Juan, Puerto Rico, U.S.	27–28 June 1976	2 days
London, United Kingdom	7–8 May 1977	2 days
Bonn, West Germany	16–17 July 1978	2 days
Tokyo, Japan	28–29 June 1979	2 days
Venice, Italy	22–23 June 1980	2 days
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada	20–21 July 1981	2 days
Versailles, France	4–6 June 1982	3 days
Williamsburg, Virginia, U.S.	28–30 May 1983	3 days
London, United Kingdom	7–9 June 1984	3 days
Bonn, West Germany	2–4 May 1985	3 days
New York City, U.S. (France absent)	September 1985	1 day
Tokyo, Japan	4–6 May 1986	3 days
Venice, Italy	8-10 June 1987	3 days
Toronto, Ontario, Canada	19-21 June 1988	3 days
Paris, France	14–16 July 1989	3 days
Houston, Texas, U.S.	9–11 July 1990	3 days
London, United Kingdom	15–17 July 1991	3 days
Munich, Germany	6–8 July 1992	3 days
Tokyo, Japan	7–9 July 1993	3 days
Naples, Italy	8–10 July 1994	3 days
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada	15–17 June 1995	3 days
Moscow Nuclear Safety Summit	19–20 April 1996	2 days
Lyon, France	27–29 June 1996	3 days
Denver, Colorado, U.S.	20–22 June 1997	3 days
Birmingham, United Kingdom	15–17 May 1998	3 days
Cologne, Germany	18–20 June 1999	3 days
Okinawa, Japan	21–23 July 2000	3 days
Genoa, Italy	20–22 July 2001	3 days
Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada	26–27 June 2002	2 days
Evian, France	1–3 June 2003	3 days
Sea Island, Georgia, U.S.	8–10 June, 2004	3 days

 Note: U.S.-hosted summits are listed in bold. Ad hoc intersessional summits are listed in italics. In addition, the G7/8 leaders have issued collective communications, without an actual face-to-face meeting.

Compiled by John Kirton

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Appendix B: Summit Performance, 1975–2003

Year	Bayne Grade	Number of Commitments	Compliance Score
1975	A–	14	+57.1
1976	D	07	+08.9
1977	B–	29	+08.4
1978	A	35	+36.3
1979	B+	34	+82.3
1980	C+	55	+07.6
1981	C	40	+26.6
1982	C	23	+84.0
1983	B	38	–10.9
1984	C–	31	+48.8
1985	E	24	+01.0
1986	B+	39	+58.3
1987	D	53	+93.3
1988	C–	27	–47.8
1989	B+	61	+07.8
1990	D	78	–14.0*
1991	B–	53	00.0*
1992	D	41	+64.0*
1993	C+	29	+75.0*
1994	C	53	100.0*
1995	B+	78	100.0*
1996	B	128	+36.2**
1997	C–	145	+12.8**
1998	B+	73	+31.8**
1999	B+	46	+38.2**
2000	B	105	+81.4**
2001	B+	58	+49.5**
2002	B+	187	+35.0**
2003	TBA	206	TBA

 Notes: Compliance scores for 1975 to 1989 (on all economic and energy commitments) are taken from George von Furstenberg and Joseph Daniels (“Economic Summit Declarations, 1975–1989: Examining the Written Record of International Co-operation,” Princeton Studies in International Finance No. 72, 1992). Commitments for 1990 to 1995 (on four issue sustainable development and Russian assistance areas) are taken from Ella Kokotsis (Keeping International Commitments: Compliance, Credibility, and the G7, 1988–1995, Garland, New York, 1999). Commitments for 1996–2002 (on priority commitments across all issue areas) are taken from the G8 Research Group (www.g8.utoronto.ca).

Compiled by John Kirton

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Appendix C: G7/8 Ministerial Institutions and Meetings, 1975–2003

G7/8 Regular Ministerial-Level Institutions (by date of first meeting)

1975	Foreign (at summit, pre-summit as of 1998)
1975	Finance (at summit, pre-summit as of 1998)
1981	Trade Quadrilateral
1984	Foreign (stand-alone, annual United Nations General Assembly dinner)
1986	Finance (G7 stand-alone)
1992	Environment: 1992, 1994, annual thereafter
1994	Employment: 1996, 1997, 1998
1995	Information: 1996
1995	Terrorism: 1996, 1996, 1997, 1998. 1998, 1999, 1999, 2001, 2001, 2002, 2003
1997	Crime: 2000, 2001
1998	Energy: March 1998, May 2002, April 2003
1999	Labour: February 1999, November 2000, April 2002
2001	Health: November 2001, March 2002
2002	Development: September 2002, April 2003

Note: Ministerial meetings are held more than once, either as part of or separate from the annual summit meeting, and usually attended by the ministers themselves. Some meetings have non-G8 members in attendance. Some meetings are attended by ministers other than those in the core portfolio.

G7/8 Ad Hoc Ministerial Meetings

1993	Russian Financial Assistance
1994	Ukraine Financial Assistance
1997	Small and Medium Enterprise
1998	Finance and Foreign Ministers
1998	Foreign Ministers on Nuclear Proliferation (Summer)
1999	Foreign Ministers on Conflict Prevention (December)
2000	Education Ministers (April 2000, Japan)
2002	Research Ministers (June 2002, Moscow)

Note: Ministerial meetings are held only once, or in a particular configuration of combined ministers, separate from the annual summit meeting. Some meetings have non-G8 members in attendance.

Compiled by John Kirton.

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Appendix D: G8 Summit Remit Mandates, 2003 for 2004 and Beyond

2003–4

“We will review progress on our [Africa] Action Plan no later than 2005 on the basis of a report.” (Chair’s Summary)

“We agree to exchange information on national measures related to the implementation of these steps on MANPADS] by December 2003. We will review progress at our next meeting in 2004.” (Enhanced Transport Security and Control of Man-Portable Air Defence Systems [MANPADS]: A G8 Action Plan)

“The G8 Presidency will produce a report for the 2004 Summit.” (Building International Political Will and Capacity to Combat Terrorism: A G8 Action Plan)

“CTAG will … by … Seeking to increase counter-terrorism capacity building assistance and coordination by the 2004 Summit … Encouraging regional assistance programmes including delivery through regional and donor sponsored training centres by the 2004 Summit … Seeking to address unmet regional assistance needs by the 2004 Summit.” (Building International Political Will and Capacity to Combat Terrorism: A G8 Action Plan)

“The G8 Presidency will produce a report [on terrorism] for the 2004 Summit.” (Building International Political Will and Capacity to Combat Terrorism: A G8 Action Plan)

Note: Excludes deadlines and bodies to report to other than the next or subsequent G8 Summits themselves. Includes injunction to complete action “by the 2004 Summit” even if no actual report “to” the Summit is demanded, as this implies that G8 leaders will be watching and will if necessary take up the item again.

Compiled by Antara Haldar.

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Appendix E: G8 Summit Institutionalization 2003 Evian

G7/8 Institutions Created (3)

“We … created a Counter-Terrorism Action Group (CTAG)” (Chair’s Summary) … “To this end the G8 will create a Counter-Terrorism Action Group (CTAG).” (Building International Political Will and Capacity to Combat Terrorism: A G8 Action Plan)

“The G8 will direct a working group to identify those elements in the IAEA Code of Conduct that are of greatest relevance to prevent terrorists from gaining access to radioactive sources…” (Non Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Securing Radioactive Sources, A G8 Action Plan)

“We will convene senior G8 policy and research officials and their research institutions to compare and to link programmes and priorities…” (Science and Technology for Sustainable Development: A G8 Action Plan)

G7/8 Institutions Adjusted (11)

“We agreed to widen our dialogue to other African Leaders on NEPAD and the G8 Africa Action Plan. We invite interested countries and relevant international institutions to appoint senior representatives to join this partnership.” (Chair’s Summary)

“We invite them [our finance ministers] to report back to us in September on the issues raised by the financing instruments, including the proposal for a new International Finance Facility.” (Chair’s Summary)

“In this context [HIPC exogenous shocks] we have asked our Finance Ministers to review by September mechanisms to encourage good governance and the methodology for calculating the amount of ‘topping-up’ debt relief available to countries at completion point based on updated cost estimates.” (Chair’s Summary)

“In accordance with our statement at Kananaskis, we established the G8 Nuclear Safety and Security Group and adopted its mandate and the Core Principles shared by each of us…” (Chair’s Summary)

“We direct Finance Ministers to assess progress and identify next steps [on terrorist finance].” (Chair’s Summary, Building International Political Will and Capacity to Combat Terrorism: A G8 Action Plan)

“To develop strengthened co-operation, we also ask Ministers to initiate a dialogue with counterparts in other countries [on terrorist finance]” (Chair’s Summary)

“We tasked our relevant ministers to examine as soon as possible the measures necessary to support a plan for the revitalisation and reconstruction of the Palestinian economy, including the leveraging of private investment, within the framework of the Middle East Peace Process.” (Chair’s Summary)

“We are providing urgent humanitarian aid and, to address the financial consequences of this situation, we are instructing our relevant Ministers to report within one months on how best to help Algeria recover.” (Chair’s Summary)

“We will jointly ask … FSF … to work with us on these issues (corruption and transparency)…” (Fostering Growth and Promoting a Responsible Market Economy: A G8 Declaration)

“Building on the work of the G8 Contact Group on famine, we will work actively to take this Action Plan forward in all relevant international fora.” (Action against Famine, Especially in Africa: A G8 Action Plan)

“We direct our ministers and officials, working urgently with WTO partners, to establish a multilateral solution in the WTO to address the problems faced by these countries, rebuilding the confidence of all parties, before the Cancun Ministerial.” (Health: A G8 Action Plan)

G7/8 Institutions Approved and Continued (4)

“We endorsed the report prepared by our Africa Personal Representatives. (Chair’s Summary)

“We welcomed the report of the Finance Ministers’ discussions on our increased resources and on financing instruments.” (Chair’s Summary)

“We endorse the “G8 Roma and Lyon Groups Statement on Biometric Applications for International Travel…” (Enhanced Transport Security and Control of Man-Portable Air Defence Systems [MANPADS]: A G8 Action Plan)

“We … support issuance in June by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) of a revised 40 recommendations that includes strong customer and due diligence provisions, enhanced security for politically exposed persons and a requirement to make corruption and bribery a predicate offence for money laundering.” (Fighting Corruption and Improving Transparency: A G8 Declaration)

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