Summits, Summitry

Summit usually means a meeting of heads of state or of government, at which, in the presence of the media, collective decisions are made on important problems and issues concerning cooperation. During the Cold War, summit meant an ad hoc political meeting between the Soviet Union and the United States, as well as regional economic meetings, such as those held between European and U.S. governments. With increasing globalization, the definition of summit has expanded to include global meetings with a prearranged set of organizational contacts and a growing range of participants from intergovernmental, business, and civil society organizations. Nation-states coordinate their interests at summits and forums within the European Union, the Arab League, the Group of 8 (G-8), the Group of 20 (G-20), or through international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund. These types of arrangements and meetings are unified under the notion summitry.

Contemporary summits are part of a whole series of international consultations and official visits which make up the broader “multi-stakeholder” network process. Meetings are held both before (so-called preparatory meetings or PrepComs) and after actual meetings, promoting a further intensification of activity in the targeted areas. Also included in this process are discussions among different interest groups, the mutual identification of problems, the definition and obtaining of solutions to these problems, agreements on responsibility for further policy development, as well as policy implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. All of these aspects represent a shift of important decision making in civil society from a domestic to a global platform.

Winston Churchill, who popularized such terms in the diplomatic discourse as special relationship[Page 1611]and iron curtain, was the one to coin the usage of the word summit in 1950 in the depths of the Cold War. The meeting of the leading world powers at Geneva in 1955 was already widely referred to in the media as a summit. Thereafter, the term was regularly used to mean face-to-face encounters between heads of the state and plenary meetings of the conclave of world leaders.