International Summitry and Global Governance

The rise of the G7 and the European Council, 1974-1991

Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, Federico Romero, Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, Federico Romero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317913696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This volume is the first detailed study of the emergence of regular and frequent heads of government meetings (summits), covering the period from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s.

Summit meetings of heads of government have become 'banal' in today's world. Yet they are a relatively recent practice that took off only in the mid-1970s. The aim of the book is to explore the origins of this new feature of global governance in its historical context. Why did heads of Western governments decide to regularly meet up in the European Council and the G7? What were they aiming at? How were these meetings run and what consequences did they have? How did other actors of international relations – states as well as non-state and/or transnational actors - react to this transformation?

Based on newly released archival material, International Summitry and Global Governance investigates the rise of regular international summitry and its impact on international relations. The volume brings together the best specialists of this new field of historical enquiry in order to explore those features of global governance in their historical context, and open up an interdisciplinary dialogue with social scientists who have studied summits from their own disciplinary perspectives.

This book will be of much interest to students of international history, Cold War studies, global governance, foreign policy and IR in general.

Part I

New tools for European and international governance

1 Twentieth century summitry and the G7 process

David Reynolds

It was not a pleasant journey. Konrad Adenauer found the prospect of meeting the new French president frankly distasteful and his mood was not improved on 14 November 1958 as his chauffeur drove across the old battlefields of the Ardennes and Champagne – evoking the bitter history of France and Germany through 1939, 1914 and 1870, right back to the days of Napoleon and Louis XIV. Charles de Gaulle had spent two-and-a-half years in a German POW camp in the First World War, he led the Free French military forces after the fall of France in 1940 and in 1945 he wanted to annex the Rhineland. De Gaulle took power in 1958 determined to revive the grandeur of France, and his country was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. All in all, Adenauer reflected, his French host was likely to be a prickly customer.

Since becoming West Germany’s first chancellor in 1949 Adenauer had staked everything on a policy of Westbindung, tying his part of divided Germany into NATO, the EEC and a rapprochement with France. Sensing out the new French leader, who came to power in May 1958, was therefore enormously important, yet Adenauer was reluctant to go to Paris – his countrymen might regard that as going cap-in-hand to the victor of 1945. Eventually de Gaulle proposed an overnight stay in his country home in the remote village of Colombey-les-deux-Églises, several hours southeast of Paris. That was more acceptable but, as Adenauer got into the car that November morning, he still viewed the visit as ‘necessary’ but ‘not very agreeable’.¹

What followed was a revelation. The invitation to Colombey was in fact very significant – no other foreign statesman ever stayed chez de Gaulle at his country home, almost his sanctuary, La Boisserie.² This gesture reflected the French leader’s genuine admiration for Adenauer’s achievements as a strong, democratic leader of West Germany and also his conviction that reconciliation between their two countries was essential. The simple but dignified atmosphere of an almost family occasion was intended to convey these messages. Adenauer, for his part, was pleased to find that de Gaulle spoke some German and understood much more – their interpreter had little to do. And he found de Gaulle’s nationalism to be ‘much less virulent than is usually thought’: the French leader proved ‘well informed about world affairs and particularly aware of the great importance of Franco-German relations’. Adenauer admitted later that ‘my idea of de Gaulle had been quite different from the man I discovered’.³

Here was a summit with far-reaching consequences. Over the next few years the two leaders had regular meetings, culminating in the Franco-German Treaty they signed in Paris in January 1963. This made provision for twice-yearly meetings between the French president and the German chancellor, meetings every three months between the foreign ministers and the defence ministers and – to root all this at the popular level – exchanges between schools and youth groups, as well as intensive teaching of the other’s language. The historic Franco-German reconciliation was sealed symbolically and movingly at a Mass in the great gothic cathedral at Reims, historic coronation place of French kings which had been blasted by German shells in 1914, with the two leaders together at the high altar.

The G7 process was still some years away but its roots were established by de Gaulle and Adenauer. Yet to understand their diplomacy and the G7 itself we need to go back into the longer history of summitry. The term ‘summit’ was coined by Winston Churchill. Speaking in Edinburgh on 14 February 1950, in the dark days of the Cold War, he proposed ‘another talk with the Soviet Union at the highest level’, adding that it was ‘not easy to see how matters could be worsened by a parley at the summit’. Three years later, on 11 May 1953, he called again for ‘a conference on the highest level’, for a will to peace ‘at the summit of the nations’.⁴ What prompted Churchill to apply ‘summit’ to diplomacy is not clear but public fascination with the conquest of Mount Everest in May 1953 explains why his figure of speech captured the public imagination. The meeting of the American, Soviet, British and French leaders in Geneva in July 1955 was billed as a ‘Parley at the Summit’ by Time magazine and ‘summit’ was adopted as an official term by the US State Department.⁵ Cartoonists such as ‘Vicky’ and David Low loved to depict world leaders eyeing a peak or perched uncomfortably on its top. Today ‘summit’ is a routine part of our political vocabulary, with equivalents in many languages.

Although Churchill coined the word in the mid-twentieth century, the practice of summitry has long antecedents.⁶ One can trace it back to the meetings between emperors and barbarian kings in the late Roman Empire. These encounters often took place on an imperial river boundary – the Danube, Rhine or Euphrates – because that was no-man’s-land, confirming the parity of the two leaders by showing that neither had gone to the court of the other. Cold War meetings in neutral capitals such as Vienna and Geneva were the modern equivalent of such practices. The medieval era also saw some dramatic pieces of summitry, such as the Emperor Henry IV’s notorious journey to Canossa in 1077 to abase himself before Pope Gregory VII, and the elaborately choreographed meeting in 1520 between Henry VIII of England and François I of France near Calais on the so-called Field of the Cloth of Gold. Both of these encounters show, in different ways, the centrality of status and symbol in meetings between two heads of state. For the fifteenth century commentator, Philip de Commines, that was why such meetings should be avoided at almost all costs. It was, he said, impossible ‘to hinder the train and equipage of the one from being finer and more magnificent than the other, which produces mockery, and nothing touches any person more sensibly than to be laughed at’. Even when summitry ended without mutual recrimination, Commines believed it rarely produced anything worthwhile, arguing that it was ‘the highest act of imprudence for two great princes, provided there is any equality in their power, to admit of an interview.… It were better that they accommodated their differences by the mediation of wise and faithful Ministers.’⁷

Commines’ advice was adopted after the ‘diplomatic revolution’ of the sixteenth century. Use of resident ambassadors and specialist foreign ministries reduced the need for risky personal encounters between leaders. At times of crisis, however, they still occurred: during the Seven Years War, for instance, Frederick the Great acted as his own Foreign Minister, dealing face-to-face with the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II. In 1807 Napoleon Bonaparte and Alexander I of Russia conducted negotiations on a raft moored in the Niemen River near Tilsit, on the borders of their respective domains. ‘In one hour’, the little Frenchman declared, ‘we shall achieve more than our spokesmen in several days’.⁸

Once the Napoleonic wars were over, however, summitry again took a back seat. Diplomacy reverted to the diplomats, with occasional crises settled by meetings of ambassadors chaired by the foreign minister of the host country. Things began to change with the communications revolution of the late nineteenth century, as telegrams replaced written despatches and steam railways supplanted the horse and carriage. The Congress of Berlin, hosted by Bismarck in 1878 and including the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, was a precursor of modern summitry. Even more important was the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 which, at its heart, was effectively a sustained summit of the leaders of the victor powers – France, Britain, America and, at times, Italy. The horrors of the Great War, which the ‘old diplomacy’ had failed to prevent in 1914, engendered a widespread feeling that diplomacy was too important to be left to the diplomats. Furthermore, after 1918 many political leaders were now chosen on something close to a democratic franchise and they felt that this gave them a special popular mandate to intervene. But although Paris in 1919 pre-figured modern summitry, it was in fact a hybrid affair – a summit of the Big Four grafted onto an old-fashioned peace conference involving hundreds of delegates. In the 1920s, as after the Napoleonic wars, foreign affairs were largely handled by the foreign ministries.

Modern summits, in my opinion, really date from the late 1930s. They were pioneered by a political leader whose name is now something of a sick joke – Neville Chamberlain. His three flying visits to Hitler in 1938 culminated in the notorious Munich agreement to emasculate Czechoslovakia. But they also began a diplomatic revolution. Modern summitry was made possible by air travel, made necessary by weapons of mass destruction, and made into household news by the mass media. Let us consider these features more closely in turn.

Although the Wright brothers had made the first flight in 1903, it was not until after the First World War that air passenger travel really took off. In 1927 the American aviator Charles Lindbergh became a global celebrity when he completed a solo flight across the Atlantic. The first politician to grasp the potential of air travel was Adolf Hitler in his whirlwind Deutschlandflug during the March 1932 election campaign, when his dramatic descents from the air caught the popular imagination. Yet it was Chamberlain, now regarded as a notoriously cautious politician, who seized on the diplomatic significance of air travel. Faced with an apparently imminent European war in September 1938, he decided literally to leap over the diplomats and their tangled negotiations by flying to confront the Führer at the Berghof, his Alpine lair. Thanks to the aeroplane, it took Chamberlain only four hours to get to Munich; 50 years earlier it had taken Disraeli four days to reach Berlin. The fact that Chamberlain had never flown any distance before gave his mission added drama.

The speed of air travel made summitry possible, allowing political leaders to practise personal diplomacy without being away from home for too long (as had happened to Woodrow Wilson during the Paris Peace Conference). But the aeroplane constituted a threat as much as an opportunity. Bombing raids in the First World War rang the alarm bells; in the 1930s the development of faster, single-winged planes opened up the prospect of wholesale destruction. Fearful that the Luftwaffe had the capacity to wipe much of London off the map, Chamberlain took to the air to avert the threat from the air. After the Second World War, of course, weapons of mass destruction would become ever-more appalling with the development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, but the precedent had been set in 1938.

The third precondition for modern summitry – mass media – was also evident in 1938. The first ‘talkie’ films date from 1927, a few months after Lindbergh had flown the Atlantic. By the 1930s films and newsreels captured world events as never before, in an era when cinema-going was the most popular past-time. Even more intimate was the radio, which brought world news and the voices of political leaders into people’s homes. Despite his grey image nowadays, Chamberlain was actually a master of political theatre, as shown after his third and final visit to Germany by his carefully contrived reading to the newsreels of the ‘piece of paper’ that he and the Führer had signed pledging that their two countries would never to go to war again.

Although Chamberlain had the vision to invent modern summitry, he proved a remarkably incompetent practitioner. He failed to think through his ‘bottom line’ – his absolutely final conditions – and he made concessions without securing quid pro quos; for instance indicating to Hitler at their first meeting that he personally had no problem with surrendering Czech territory to the Reich. All this was done in the hope of establishing friendly relations with the unpredictable German dictator, whom Chamberlain had feared before-hand might be clinically mad. On the basis of personal contact, however, he concluded that, although ‘Herr Hitler had a narrow mind and was violently prejudiced on certain subjects’, he would not ‘deliberately deceive a man whom he respected and with whom he had been in negotiation’. Chamberlain told the British cabinet that he was ‘sure that Herr Hitler now felt some respect for him. When Herr Hitler announced that he meant to do something it was certain that he would do it.’⁹

Here is the essence of summitry, the belief that by meeting man-to-man across the conference table it is possible to foster trust and resolve disputes. The problem, of course, was that Chamberlain’s trust was ludicrously misplaced; his ‘piece of paper’ proved pathetically worthless. Hitler broke the agreement over Czechoslovakia and then inv...