With domestic politics dominated by rapid and severe cuts to public services, it is appropriate that David Cameron’s first G8 summit should be in Muskoka, Ontario, to be followed by the G20 in Toronto. Canada, after all, has become the global exemplar of fiscal consolidation. After a week of austerity at home, Mr Cameron now turns his attention to the global economy, to the reform of banks and to trade between nations.
In an article for The Globe and Mail, the Canadian daily, Mr Cameron sounds less than wholly desperate to be there. International summits ought to deliver concrete results, he said. They need to be “more than just grand talking shops”. It is true that the results of G8 and G20 summits usually fall short of the expectations generated by the preceding rhetoric. The great victories proclaimed at Gleneagles in 2005 (money for peacekeeping in Africa, action to combat HIV/Aids, malaria and TB, springing African nations from debt traps) have hardly all been realised. In Hokkaido in 2007, G8 leaders pledged to tackle climate change, something they conspicuously failed to enact in Copenhagen. In L’Aquila last year the G8 turned out not to solve environmental reform, the digital divide or organised crime.
There is also a set of questions that are raised in the prelude to every meeting whose very repetition suggests progress from these summits is, at best, glacial. No G8 summit is complete without a demand for better global governance and for the multilateral institutions to expand their membership. The G13, which includes China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, does at least have the important emerging economies.
Mr Cameron is also right, in his article, to stress that so many of the hopes vested in G8 summits actually require singular action from national governments. The vaulting ambition of the Gleneagles summit in 2005 to make poverty history did, of course, make demands of multilateral trade and aid policy. But no serious progress was ever possible in the absence of sound institutions, enforceable property rights and the writ of law in nation states that have been so poorly governed.
So, even though international summits have achievements to their credit — the G20 meeting in 2009 in London, for example, helped to coordinate action on the global economy — Mr Cameron is right to say that the G8 is usually a talking shop. Where he may be wrong, though, is to imply that this is a bad thing. The opposite may be worse. The G8 has no official secretariat, no permanent staff, no headquarters and no executive power to enforce its conclusions, all undesirable functions it would need if it were to become more than a talking shop. As it is, this year’s hosts are spending C$1.2 billion to stage the event, including construction of an artificial lake with mock canoes.
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Besides, being a location for conversation is a strong justification of international summits. In Canada, Mr Cameron will meet President Obama, President Medvedev of Russia and President Hu Jintao of China. A private conversation with Mr Obama will follow today, Mr Cameron’s first meeting with the US President since taking office. At a moment when the most senior American soldier in Afghanistan has just been sacked, and when a British company is desperately trying to stop the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, having a date in the diary with Mr Obama is no small matter.
The agenda in Canada also returns the G8 to its raison d’être. It began, in 1975, as a place where France, Germany, Britain and the US could discuss common economic issues. It also had a Cold War function — to include Germany and Japan, the two capitalist nations excluded from the UN Security Council. In recent times the G8 has become a forum for idealism. A small measure of progress in fixing the broken economies of the world would make Canada the best G8 of recent years.