The emperors gently rowed down the Nieman River in the summer of 1807: As a guide for courtiers who had celebrated too hard, perhaps, the great white tents on their barge were marked with an ’N’ for Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte of France and an ‘A’ for Aleksandr Pavlovich, Tsar of Russia. King Frederick William III of Prussia, who had lost the battle, didn’t get a tent and had to suffer the sight of Napoleon flirting with his wife, Duchess Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
The grand gathering of world leaders in New Delhi this coming weekend draws its linage from the meeting emperors at Tilsit, among the first modern summits between leaders. Though multilateral leadership summits form an ever-greater part of modern diplomacy, the record of what these gatherings have achieved isn’t inspiring.
Even as Napoleon and Aleksander plotted the division of Europe during long night-time dinner walks, English spies lurked around them, historian J. Holland Rose has revealed. England’s intelligence led the East India Company to strengthen its presence along the northwest borders of India and prepare for Atlantic battles that would give the Prussians their revenge just a few years later.
“Failures”, diplomatic historian Jan Mellisen has ruefully recorded, “did not deter presidents and prime ministers from their unabated love of the summit. The practice of summitry has become an addictive drug for many political principals.”
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The technologies of the summit
The summit meeting is, in some critical senses, an artefact of technology. For generations before the lack of secure roads, reliable maps did not allow heads of State to meet directly. Thus, diplomatic communication was conducted through traders, friars and imperial envoys. Franciscan monks who visited Mongol courts in the 13th century variously pushed for an alliance with the French emperor Louis IX and sought out means to conquer the Golden Horde.
Mughal emperor Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar did not seek a summit meeting after the women of his court were expelled from Mecca in 1580, historian NR Farooqui’s work shows. Instead, he quietly plotted with the Portuguese to harass Turkish-Ottoman shipping in the Indian Ocean.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served as the United States’ president from 1933-1945, used summit diplomacy extensively during the course of the Second World War, scholar Elmer Plischke notes. Five of his predecessors, though, never once set foot on foreign soil. Foreign affairs were the jobs of Generals, adventurers and diplomats—not leaders.
The coming of the steam train and the turboprop engine fuelled the delusion that diplomacy could be more effectively conducted as a kind of meeting between gentlemen at their favourite club. “If you want to settle a thing, you see your opponent and talk it over with him”, said David Lloyd-George, Britain’s prime minister from 1916-1922. “The last thing to do is write him a letter.”
Even though it is clear that many professional diplomats weren’t easily beguiled by charm or force of personality, politicians were often seduced. In 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain infamously held up an agreement with German Führer Adolf Hitler, recording “the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.”
New scholarship suggests Chamberlain was buying time for military preparation—but played his hand without understanding how unprepared Germany was for war, too.
For all the failures, though, the seduction of being seen as the victors of the Second World War led to the great Potsdam Conference of 1945, where leaders of the Soviet Union, the US and Great Britain met to decide on the new world’s fate. That the great power blocs had begun to descend into the Cold War within two years is a cautionary tale about what straight talk can achieve.
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The high noon of multilateralism
Emerging from the carnage of 1939-1945, new multilateral institutions were set up to manage the peace. There was, of course, the United Nations family of organisations: the General Assembly, the Security Council, and the so-called Bretton Woods organisations – the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. From early on, though, Moscow concluded the West sought to create a hostile block in Europe to contain its power, historian Geoffrey Roberts observes.
All the cigar-smoking camaraderie at Potsdam and Yalta had clearly not ironed out fundamental differences of opinion over how geopolitical power ought to be shared and competition managed. The Bretton Woods system itself collapsed in the 1960s, economist Harold James argues, because of the US’ monetary expansion to fund the Vietnam War, leading up to an exchange rate crisis in 1971.
Following the global energy crisis that erupted after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, Western leaders again felt the need for a transnational economic system. That March, the finance ministers of four industrialised economies—the US, France, Britain and Germany, with Japan joining later—created the so-called Library Group. It drew in Italy in 1974 and Canada in 1976, becoming the Group of 7, or G7.
The group also invited newly post-Soviet Russia to join in 1997—only to expel it after the initial invasion of Ukraine.
Leaders of the G7 had common interests, integrated economies, and sheltered under the US’ nuclear weapons security guarantee. To coordinate their actions was relatively easy. As the G7 grew into the G20 in 1999, beginning with a meeting of finance ministers in Berlin, the issues became more complex.
For all practices, international relations scholars Andrew F. Cooper and Vincent Pouliot argue, the G20 became a stage for competing oligarchies—the countries of the West on the one hand and the China-Russia axis on the other. Little could be achieved beyond issuing finely-drafted communiqués swaddled in generalities.
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The narcissism of leadership
Leaders more concerned with outcomes than photo opportunities might have learned some painful lessons from Tilsit. Within weeks of the Tilsit barge party, Napoleon was obstructing Russian interests in the Balkans. For his part, Tsar Alexander ended a blockade meant to choke Britain’s Baltic and Russian trade. Finally, in 1812, Napoleon embarked on a disastrous war with Russia, which ended with Alexander kicking open the gates of Paris two years later.
The hugs and the handshakes and the kisses came to nothing.
All through the Cold War, low-profile professional diplomacy often proved more effective than summitry.
The results were predictable. President John F. Kennedy’s summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961 ended up deepening mutual dislike. Leadership misjudgments and suspicions, historian Serhii Plokhii shows, led both politicians to wake into near-catastrophic traps. Eventually, discreet, behind-the-scenes work allowed a deal to be hammered out, involving the removal of short-range nuclear weapons from both Cuba and Turkey.
British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan’s faith in his own charisma led him to eschew a translator during a summit with French President Charles de Gaulle in 1962. The misunderstandings that followed led France to veto Britain’s first application for entry to the European Economic Community.
And one much-advertised summit success—like US President Richard Nixon’s Cold War-shaping meeting with China’s Mao Zedong in 1972 — came about because of a convergence of strategic interest, hammered out in the course of months of secret diplomacy.
As German diplomatic historian Peter Weilemann has noted, summit-driven diplomacy has sometimes led to “superficial understandings that in the long term could actually aggravate differences”. “Heads of states are not experts in highly complex matters such as arms control, trade, or other issues on summit agendas,” he has written.
In a world where encrypted digital communications enable leaders to speak instantly and securely—and where experts are able to work behind the scenes to resolve complex issues—there is no purpose for the summit except pageantry.
Leaders may like to show their domestic audiences that they have status and prestige with their global peers and are working to resolve intractable problems like climate change or economic crises. This is, however, a kind of ersatz glory, funded by taxpayers and serving few useful ends. The later a summit, the less likely it is to yield any genuinely useful outcomes.
A world without drums and bugles and fancy-dress dinners will, without a doubt, be a duller one. However, it will also be one where something would likely get done.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)