Disarray in Genoa

Reuters

They stole the limelight

WHAT was the point of it all? That must be the question many of Genoa's residents were asking themselves as the leaders of the world's richest nations left the old northern Italian port city on July 22nd. There was a time when playing host to the G8 (and, formerly, the G7) summit was a matter of local pride. But although Genoa enjoyed a state-funded sprucing-up ahead of the summit (reports suggest the Italian government spent more than $100m), it left the city's residents with a massive clean-up operation, the result of three days of violent clashes between the Italian police and tens of thousands of protesters from around the world.

One protester, a young Italian man, was shot dead by police on July 20th, within hours of the summit's opening. This did not stop the relatively small group of radical protesters determined to cause trouble; nor did it halt peaceful anti-globalisation protests by thousands of people. It did not stop the summit discussions either: but it has raised questions about the future of such meetings.

Genoa was not the first summit meeting to be disrupted by violent protest. Since the protesters at the world trade negotiations in Seattle in 1999 caught the authorities by surprise and caused mayhem, almost every similar gathering of world leaders has experienced trouble to some degree—Washington DC, Prague, Davos, Gothenburg and now Genoa. World trade negotiations in Doha, Qatar in November and next year's G8 summit in Canada seem likely, on current trends, to face similar challenges.

The protesters may have let the Genoa summit participants off the hook

Ironically, the protesters may have let the Genoa summit participants off the hook. The leaders were clearly shocked both by the violence of the protests going on beyond the security zone which protected them and by the death of a protester. Unusually for such occasions, they issued a statement expressing their dismay on July 21st, in the middle of the summit discussions. But the communiqué issued at the end of the meeting suggests little in the way of concrete progress on most of the issues on the agenda. By stealing the limelight, the protesters distracted attention away from much of the fudging which is characteristic of such discussions.

Summits actually have a poor track record in terms of specific agreements and achievements. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, several G7 communiqués committed the rich countries to making progress on the Uruguay round of world trade negotiations then underway. That did not stop the negotiations dragging on until 1994, long after they were due to be completed. Much of the delay reflected bitter disagreements among the G7 countries, particularly Europe and America. In Genoa, the leaders have—as expected—committed themselves firmly to the launch of a new round of trade negotiations. They want this round, aimed at liberalising trade, to be launched at the Doha meeting in Qatar.

A new trade round involves many more countries than those represented at Genoa. But the G8 hold the key: without their resolving important differences among themselves, on issues such as agriculture, there is no hope of a new round starting this year.

The same is true of climate change. About 180 countries are meeting in Bonn to try to break the deadlock on the Kyoto protocol which aims to cut greenhouse-gas emissions over the next 10-12 years. But central to progress is the position of George Bush, the American president. In March, Mr Bush announced that America would not go ahead with its Kyoto commitments, because implementing them threatened America's economic wellbeing. Some kind of compromise at Genoa seemed the best hope of a breakthrough in Bonn.

Reuters

Bush didn't give in

Some hope. The best the G8 leaders could come up with was an agreement on the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. But they remain split on the Kyoto protocol—Mr Bush, in other words, stood firm. Instead of announcing a deal, the leaders said they were “committed to working intensively” to meet their common objective. They endorsed a Russian proposal for a climate change conference there in 2003, which some interpret as an attempt to buy time.

Lack of specificity was one of the common threads running through the summit's conclusions. The leaders said they were determined to make globalisation work and to continue progress on debt relief for the poorest countries. In a rare specific commitment they jointly committed $1.3 billion to a new global health fund proposed by the United Nations to help the fight against AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

Summit leaders are often criticised for the vague language in which they couch their conclusions. Those who object to such gatherings believe such opacity is a cover for inaction. Sometimes this is probably true—the lowest-common-denominator approach can mean few commitments are made, and those that are signed up to are difficult to interpret. But vagueness isn't the preserve of the summit participants. Many of those protesting in Genoa were equally vague about why they were quite so angry. They do not like capitalism; they oppose globalisation; and they see summits as a rich men's club. Yet they seem themselves to expect the G8 to produce global answers to global problems such as poor-country debt and AIDS.

Expecting very much of substance to emerge from G8 summits is probably to misunderstand their principal purpose. These occasions started in 1975—on the initiative of the then French president, Giscard D'Estaing, as an opportunity for a small group of leaders (five in those days) to meet informally, to discuss some common and global problems, and above all, to get to know each other better. Expectations that they would achieve anything much beyond that were played down.

Over the years, the summits have grown, with thousands of officials and journalists now part of the summit entourage. The system of rotating hosts has given national leaders an excuse to show off and offer lavish hospitality to their guests—all counted to inflame protesters concerned about the plight of developing countries. There are already signs that Genoa might be the last of such summits, and that a return to the fireside chat approach will be favoured by the Canadian government for next year's gathering. It might not be enough to satisfy the protesters, though.