The G8 summit this week in L'Aquila, Italy, set a number of goals, but the harder, less conspicuous work will be in events such as the resumed Doha round of the World Trade Organization and the Copenhagen climate-change conference in December, both of which will try to craft actual treaties.
Most strikingly, the G8 leaders agreed on a goal, for developed countries, of reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions by 80 per cent as of 2050. This remains an indeterminate goal, because there is no base year. In other words, there is no answer to the question, "Eighty per cent of what?" Many enlightened people may favour 1990 as the baseline, but the G8 document is silent on the point.
The eight heads of state and government also recognized that temperatures in both developed and developing countries should not be allowed to rise more than 2 degrees "above pre-industrial levels." That openly imprecise measure may actually lend itself better to reasonable assessment of progress than the pseudo-precise 80-per-cent emissions reduction.
On international trade, the G8 has set next year for the completion of the Doha round. Even better, the eight countries' trade ministers have been directed to meet before the G20's summit in Pittsburgh in September, to move Doha along. But this is a schedule rather than the outline of a new consensus, and amounts to an agreement to agree. Nor does the G8's commitment to "build on the progress already made, including with regard to modalities" add much.
Moreover, the G20's undertaking to refrain from creating new trade barriers during the recession has not been very effective; the buy American clause in the United States is just one example.
Even so, the tightening link between trade and climate-change policy, above all the passage of the Waxman-Markey bill by the U.S. House of Representatives, with its "border adjustments" that would be new trade barriers, creates some urgency for new international treaties with effective frameworks on both fronts. If Copenhagen and the Doha round fail, there will be a frightening prospect of trade war and merely palliative measures on climate change.
It is a long time since the early 1970s, when Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Helmut Schmidt, as finance ministers of France and West Germany, found they had a rapport and started to have regular meetings, which eventually evolved into the G8. No doubt, similarly productive informal contacts are still being made offstage at these summits.
The world should not allow itself to be discouraged by the mostly vague outcomes of the meetings of presidents and prime ministers. If summits give a useful nudge to the formation of binding international agreements that have consequences, they will have served their purpose.