Summits have become anachronisms

James Travers National Affairs Columnist. Star.com Sat May 29 2010

Next month’s G8 and G20 summits are a self-fulfilling prophecy. World leaders make themselves a beckoning target and then shake down taxpayers for $1 billion in protection. Even if meeting face-to-face has merit, gathering presidents and prime ministers in public places no longer makes sense. It isn’t justified by the photo opportunity, the final communiqué drafted before meetings begin or commitments often abandoned before the last press conference ends. Summits are being changed by the changing nature of the threat. Back in those madcap Cold War days of mutual assured destruction, enemies were few, well known and cheap to neuter. In a new millennium of metastasized terrorism, danger is cellular, difficult to detect and exorbitant to counter. So the surprise isn’t that three days in Huntsville and Toronto will cost much just when every penny needs to be pinched. No, the shocker is that it’s taken so long to spot an anachronism that surely can’t be sustained much longer. Common sense says there are better ways. If face time is the guiding purpose then military bases everywhere offer security plus room and board, even if they are short on the luxurious perquisites of power. If deconstructing complex problems is the goal, then its time to re-noodle the curious notion that global governance is a travelling road show.

Sometime between their 1975 founding and current floundering, world summits morphed from potentially sublime to patently ridiculous. The sound idea of getting leaders together informally was lost in the racket created by hundreds of hangers-on, the sherpas, sous-sherpas and sous-sous-sherpas who between meetings trek messages between capitals and by the horde of journalists who fly in mostly to watch the spectacle on television. How crazy is it now? A fleet of Boeing 747s will airlift delegations. Entourages will come and go seeing little of leaders. Journalists will interview each other before reaching the consensus that becomes the news.

Apologists still run sticky fingers down the short list of summit accomplishments. They murmur that Africa benefitted from the last summit Canada hosted. They point to how often serendipitous circumstance brings leaders together just as another international crisis – this year’s hot prospects are a sovereign equity catastrophe or a Korean conflict—tests world resolve. True enough. But was the Kananaskis bun-toss the best or only way to confront the problems of a continent that has no permanent seat at the G8 table? Or is even the broader spectrum G20 an effective forum for defusing specific risk? A new model is urgently needed. Problems without borders – climate change to nuclear proliferation and terrorism – are making reform of international institutions essential. Moving from helter-skelter, break-the-bank summits to something with more utility and less cost will demand the most modest of political sacrifices. Summit hosts will have to muster the inner strength to forego playing to the home audience once every eight years.

Reform is made more certain by the shocked reaction to this week’s news that security costs have spiked from $179 million in March to some $930 million today. Remember, that’s only for protection; the events cost extra. In the shaky aftermath of recession, at a time of belt-tightening, the price of summits is way over the top. As certainly as voters here won’t let politicians hide their expenses from the auditor general, taxpayers everywhere will soon say no to leaders blowing billions turning city centers into security zones. Summits have now reached their peak; the only place left to go is back down to reality.