The Face of the Summit
There are many different types of summits and it is therefore difficult to discover meaningful generalisation. There is for instance a wide gulf between the intimate tête-à-tête of Allied leaders during the Second World War and the global summits at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Yalta (1945) and the Johannesburg summit on sustainability (2002) are nearly sixty years apart and have little in common. But both are clearly summits. It is not always an easy task to distinguish between summits and other kinds of high-level meeting. In the media many other meeting of some international importance are nowadays labeled as summits including gatherings of WTO Finance Ministers or global meetings of transnational pressure groups. Foreign Ministers’ meetings, however important, are not summit, even though they may be essential for the preparation of summits, as was the case with the meeting of EU Foreign Ministers that cleared the way for the 1997 summit where the Amsterdam Treaty was agreed. The term summit is accurately applied only to meetings between incumbent heads of government and/or head of state, or political leaders and the highest representative of an international organization. In terms of the purposes of summitry, it needs to be borne in mind that international meetings can have more than one purpose. Ceremonial meeting or state visits, even state funerals, may still have diplomatic functions and they are in fact quite a suitable instrument for non-verbal communication or diplomatic signaling. State visits involving royalty of at least one of the parties are not summit meetings, although they may involve a lot of work for diplomats and can be used for diplomatic purposes. The latter was experienced by the sizeable Dutch delegation travelling with Queen Beatrix on a state visit to the former colony of Indonesia in 1995, when, according to observers, Dutch officials were the targets of number of diplomatic signals from their hosts designed to snub them.
The summit should also be distinguished from other forms of direct, personal diplomacy among political leaders such as correspondence, telephone conversations or direct talks by means of video conferencing. George Bush’s and Tony Blair’s offices are now directly linked by video and frequently use this facility. Bush and Blair are not the first President and Prime Minister to make personal diplomacy the hallmark of their ‘ special relationship’, even though modern technology has greatly facilitated their communications. Roosevelt and Churchill corresponded about the tactics of war in minute detail, whereas Eisenhower and Churchill exchanged letters about broader strategic and philosophical questions related to the Cold War. Kennedy’s and Macmillan’s personal diplomacy, at the dawn of the television age in international politics, was probably more intimate than that of any of their predecessors or successors, and Reagan and Thatcher frequently used the phone in order to stay in touch. In more recent periods of international crisis, personal diplomacy is also a preferred mode of contact between American and European leaders, as was perhaps best evidenced by the frequency of private consultation between President Bush senior and European leaders on the eve of the Gulf War at the beginning of the 1990s. Telephone diplomacy is employed particularly frequently for the purposes of alliance diplomacy or within regional international organizations such as the EU.
A summit requires agreement on the time and location of a meeting. The venue of the summit may be uncontroversial and a matter of routine among the participants, This is true for the European Council of EU heads of government and state, which has clear arrangements that are respected by all member states. For the same reason, the location of G8 meetings and a number of other multilateral summits has rarely been a subject of disagreement. At other times however the venue of summits has been a subject of intense controversy because of the practical and symbolic significance of the meeting place. Before the modern era, security considerations were often related to the choice of an appropriate location for a meeting at the highest level. In the Middle Ages it was not uncommon for kings to meet on a raft in the middle of a river, separated by a wooden gate that would make it impossible for either side to inflict physical harm. Such meetings became much less frequent but still occurred in later centuries, as is evidenced by the encounter between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander on the river Niemen near Tilsit, where they divided the spoils of Europe following the defeat of the Holy Roman emperor.