Time To End The Summit Tsunami

Conn Carroll / December 18, 2009

Back in September, Heritage fellow James Roberts wrote of the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh:

In the past 10 months, the leaders of the G-8 and G-20 nations have met three times at elaborate and expensive summits to address the world’s financial woes. … Originally a Group of Six–France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States–with Canada added in 1977, the G-7 process attempted to deal with the OPEC oil shock-induced economic crises of the 1970s as well as the need to re-design the post-World War II Bretton Woods international monetary system that had been based on the gold standard.
…
At 20 members, however, the group is starting to approach the size, complexity, and divisiveness of other existing multilateral bodies, such as the economic commissions and councils of the United Nations. … In the past, dramatic high-level meetings had some impact because they were rare. Now, publicity-hungry politicians have gone to the well too often. The seemingly never-ending series of summits and high-level meetings have become almost irrelevant in terms of rallying public opinion.

At NRO, Conrad Black surveys the mess in Copenhagen and comes to a very similar conclusion: (more…)