Summits happen so often now that leaders see more of their foreign colleagues than they do of their cabinet colleagues or even their families. Prime ministerial and presidential entourages criss-cross the skies in their planes. Aides scurry in the wake of world leaders, clutching bulging piles of agenda papers.
Of course, summits have existed as long as leaders have. Think of Henry VIII's Field of the Cloth of Gold, the Congress of Vienna or Yalta. Those were once-in-a-lifetime events that took leaders weeks or months to get to. But in the 1970s a new sort of summitry began, fuelled by easy air travel and an increasing role for leaders in foreign policy, at the expense of diplomats.
The argument for summits is that it is important to build personal trust between leaders so they can do deals with each other. Former foreign secretary David Miliband argues: "If you've got a personal relationship with someone, if you've been able to show that you've respected them, helped them, they'll look to cut you some slack."
But actually putting leaders together doesn't always make things better. Charles Powell, Margaret Thatcher's foreign policy adviser, says that she hated summits, mainly because they were attended by foreigners. "They also spent a lot of time reaching compromises which she hated, or a form of words instead of substance, which she also hated. So really she was not a happy bunny at summits in any way. The only way she found to make them work for her was to be 'battling Maggie takes on all comers'. She was asked: 'What does it feel like to be isolated one against 11?' to which she replied: 'Sorry for the 11.'"
Sometimes close proximity can lead to extraordinary personal rudeness. I remember President Chirac saying after a particularly dull intervention by a Finnish foreign minister at the Nice European summit, which he was chairing, that sometimes people miss a very good opportunity to shut up. He excelled himself at a later summit to discuss the siting of the European Food agency. When the Finns proposed Helsinki he caused great offence by asking: "Why would anybody want to put a food agency where people eat reindeer?"
Once leaders go into the summit room, the TV cameras are thrown out and the doors close, they are on their own. The staff, left hanging around outside, desperately try to find out what is going on in the meeting. Ulli Wilhelm, Angela Merkel's former spokesman, told me that the German chancellor had to resort to texting him with the latest developments inside the room so he could brief the German press.
The underlying concept of a summit is that it is easier to get agreement on difficult issues if you put leaders in a room by themselves rather than allow officials to interfere. That often means you are asking them to negotiate on very detailed texts that they don't understand. John Major had to resort to desperate measures in his negotiations at Maastricht. Officials are allowed to enter the room to deliver messages but must then leave. John Kerr, Major's key European adviser, kept coming in and out of the room during the crucial endgame of the negotiations until Major got fed up and insisted he stay. Kerr had to crouch down under the table and whisper advice to Major as the last arcane points were agreed. That was fine as long as the chair, Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers of the Netherlands, put the amendments in French, German or English. But when he put them in Dutch, Kerr was flummoxed. Major would ask him what he thought of a particular proposal and Kerr would reply that he didn't know since Lubbers was speaking Dutch. Major would look down at Kerr in astonishment. He had understood perfectly since he was hearing the proposals in English through his headphones.
The number of people at summits has grown exponentially. European summits started with six delegates but there are now 27. If they all insist on speaking, and they feel they have to in order to justify their presence, then the whole day is gone in speeches. It certainly makes it impossible to do deals round the table. The key parties have to withdraw to negotiate in private. That can leave those excluded feeling increasingly testy. We had that experience in spades in 1998 when Tony Blair chaired the European Council to agree on the chair of the newly formed European Central Bank. We had been told that Chancellor Kohl and President Chirac had agreed between themselves that the Dutch candidate, Wim Duisenberg, would start and then give way to the French candidate, Jean-Claude Trichet. The meeting started with a lunch and Blair told the leaders around the table what had been agreed and asked to be excused to call Duisenberg to tell him the good news. It turned out to be the longest lunch in history. I accompanied Blair as we crossed the hall into a big empty room and handed him a mobile phone with Duisenberg on the line. I watched as his face fell. No one had told Duisenberg and he didn't accept the decision. The rest of the day was spent in panicked negotiations with Kohl and Chirac and the Dutch, until we cobbled together a deal after midnight. The other participants in the summit were increasingly fed up and Blair took the blame in public.
European deals are nowadays tied up by the unassuming permanent president of the council, Herman Van Rompuy. His chief of staff told me that they apply the lessons they learned in Belgian politics. You have to be creative and inventive to keep people together by building package deals in which everyone gains something. He described it as akin to the caucus race in Alice in Wonderland, where everyone gets a prize.
I often used to ask myself why summits would only conclude at three or four in the morning rather than a more civilised hour. The reason is, of course, that the chair likes to leave the really difficult points until late at night so that the different sides will give up in exhaustion. It also helps those who have to back down; they can tell their national press that they have battled for the point through the night rather than given up at teatime. One of the best levers to bring a negotiation to an end is hunger, particularly when negotiating with Chancellor Kohl. As the lunch hour drifted past he would become increasingly anxious and then rush to conclude a point.
After the deal comes the press conference at four in the morning. There is usually an unseemly race to the microphone to get your spin on what has been agreed first. British prime ministers suffer from a unique disadvantage. Most national presses in Europe tend to write up any outcome as a triumph for their country. The British press on the other hand is always looking for either a defeat and isolation or a sellout. And they often find a good domestic story far more alluring than what is happening in Brussels. At the last European summit David Cameron was trying to talk about his proposals on jobs but the press wanted to ask him about riding Rebekah Brooks's semi-retired police horse.
Summits have changed dramatically in the more than 30 years I have known them. There are more and more of them with more and more people at them. And they have changed shape. We added Russia to the G7 to make it the G8 and then we invited China, India, South Africa and Brazil because you can't make global decisions unless you have the right people there. Now the G20 has taken pride of place because you need a wider group to tackle the global economic crisis.
Has it all become too much? Have "summits reached their summit", as former Nato secretary general Peter Carrington believes? Will face-to-face meetings be replaced by conference calls? I don't think so. Globalisation means that domestic decisions are increasingly constrained by what happens elsewhere in the world and you can't move forward without involving other leaders. European summits are not really foreign policy at all but an extension of domestic policy. And nothing beats seeing the whites of your colleagues' eyes at 3am when making a deal.
So while leaders may complain about summit fatigue, the one thing worse than being invited to too many summits is not being invited at all, or having decisions made at summits from which you have been excluded.
Original Article
Source: guardian
Author: Jonathan Powell
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