Full Description
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.
Contents
Introduction - Analysing the Rise of Regular Summitry, Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol and Federico Romero Part I: New Tools for International and European Governance 1. Twentieth-Century Summitry and the G7 Process, David Reynolds 2. The Foundations of Summitry, Nicholas Bayne 3. The Road to Rambouillet and the Creation of the Group of Five, Elizabeth Benning 4. Less than a Permanent Secretariat, more than an ad-hoc Preparatory Group: a Prosopography of the G7's Personal Representatives, 1975-1991, Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol 5. Between Political Messages and Public Expectations: G7 Summits in French and US Public Opinions, 1975-1985, Noël Bonhomme Part II: Global and Western Challenges 6. Refashioning the West to Dispel its Fears: the Early G7 Summits, Federico Romero 7. Creating the Expectation of a Collective Response: the Impact of Summitry on Transatlantic Relations, N. Piers Ludlow 8. The Rise of Summitry and EEC-Japan Trade Relations, Hitoshi Suzuki 9. The Road to Cancun: the Life and Death of a North-South Summit, Guia Migani 10. G7s, European Councils and East-West Economic Relations, 1975-1982, Angela Romano Conclusions, Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol and Federico Romero
