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The Summit Meeting:The Role and Agenda of Diplomacy at its

Highest Level

Spring 2000 16
In July this year the heads of states andgovernments ofCanada,France,Germany,Great Britain,Italy,Japan,the United States,and Russia and the president of the EuropeanUnion will come to Japan for thethworldeconomic summit,also known as the G7/G8meeting.They will be accompanied byhundreds of bureaucrats https://www.51lunwen.org/and othergovernmentofficials.Thousands of journalistswill cover the event,and the entire world willwatch the proceedings and debate the results.However,there is an ever-growing number ofcritics who ask what such an event is good for.Summit meetings have become an ordinary
fact of life in modern international politics.They are not a new invention but as old ashuman history.Most history textbooks tell of
events where emperors,kings,or chiefs cametogether,in bilateral meetings or within theframework of multilateral conferences orconventions,to settle disputes or make peace.Summits were also sadly noted in the past formissed opportunities to reach agreements.
The expression“summit”to characterizesuch meetings,however,was first used only in1955 to describe one of the failed cold warconferences of the four powers(the UnitedStates,Great Britain,France,and the Soviet
Union)in Geneva.And it is only in morerecent times that such meetings are no longerextraordinary events.They have insteadbecome a common pattern in internationalpolitics,in which non-participation by a leader
makes more headlines than participation does.But what is a summit?Some might recall themeeting at Potsdam where Josef Stalin,Harry
S.Truman,and Winston Churchill came
together to agree on a new European order
after WW2.Others will cite the superpower
summits between US presidents and Sovietleaders during the cold war.By a treaty ratifiedin 1963,France and Germany establishedbilateral meetings of the heads of governmenton a regular basis twice a year,an idea that
was the precursor of many similar institutionalarrangements among other Europeancountries.Since the mid-1970s,heads of statesand governments of the European Union(orwhat was then called the EuropeanCommunity),have come together two or threeThe Summit Meeting:The Role and Agenda of Diplomacy at itsHighest Levelby Peter R.Weilemann17 NIRA Review
times a year,an arrangement that has becomeinstitutionalized in the Maastricht Treaty.Other regional summits come to mind,such asthe African summits,the APEC summits andthe meetings of the Heads of Commonwealth
states.Global or world summits,including theEarth Summit in Rio and
the World Social Summit inCopenhagen,also began to cropup in the early 1990s.
But what appears to be asummit may not always be so.Like the emperors and kings ofthe past,today’s presidents andheads of states or government
might meet at the occasion of afuneral when one of their equals
has passed away.Or they mightcome together during theUnited Nations GeneralAssembly sessions or see eachother during state visits.So-called privatemeetings of leading politicians are today ascommon as they were when ruling dynastieswere linked through marriage and otherfamilial bonds.Although journalists tend to berather free in labeling such meetings“summits”,poli本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。