When George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he reportedly said, “Because it is there.” That is about the best answer heads of state and government can give these days for attending all the summits they do. In the bad old days of the Cold War, there was only one summit and at that peak sat the United States and the Soviet Union. The first post-War economic crisis of the 1970s led to the creation of a second summit of significance — the G-7 — which morphed into the G-8 when the Soviet Union collapsed and the West hugged the Russian bear. The post-Cold War world, however, is full of summits. The decline of the West, the rise of China and the emergence of a wide range of middle powers like India, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia have contributed to the creation of multiple platforms that heads of state and government are quite happy to run away to every now and then for a break from domestic headaches. Little wonder then that they often meet in exotic places to discuss esoteric issues and do some good business on the side. So who’s complaining?
Summits, like a lot of household stuff, lie around long after their use-by date. Consider BRIC, for example. A clever marketing idea coming out of the now-distressed Goldman Sachs meant to promote business for some well-heeled Wall Street types in Moscow, Beijing, New Delhi and Sao Paolo. No one paid much attention to it till the Russians felt left out of the global summit mania. The Chinese and the Indians were running around the world attending all manner of summits and the Russians were not even being welcomed with much warmth by the G-7. Worse, an assertive US was pushing Russia around. So, Vladimir Putin very cleverly took a Sachs idea and created a new platform, BRIC. On the other hand, IBSA was supposed to be the grouping of the three developing country democracies lobbying hard for membership of the UN Security Council and for greater clout in the World Trade Organisation. With both UN reform and WTO talks in cold storage, no one knows what IBSA should be doing, especially after China barged into the group at Copenhagen, using climate change to create BASIC. There are now dozens of such summits all around the world. But, when the US created the G-20 and incorporated China, Russia, Brazil, India, South Africa and Indonesia in the global high table, no one quite understood what to do with smaller platforms. So, it is not surprising that China and India did more bilateral business in Sao Paolo and pleased their host President Lula. The Russians and the South Africans were happy to be there and the rest of the world was busy with whatever it was doing. Returning home from all that summitry, each head of government felt like anyone does getting back to work from a good holiday. President Hu Jintao went back to handling the consequences of an earthquake and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came back to handling a political storm.
