COVER -> DAY ONE
 |
Thirteen years ago as the British General Election Campaign drew to its inevitable end I gloomily watched its victor, Margaret Thatcher, dressing herself in the mantle of international statesman. The occasion was the G7 meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, and the main item on the agenda was, in electoral terms, arcane.
There was a fierce discussion about fiscal tightening and its consequential effect on interest rates. The inevitable outcome, given President Reagan's propensity to borrow, was a rise in the price of US Treasury Bonds which in turn triggered the temporary crash in the world's stock markets in the Fall of 1987. My point, then, might well have been that this summit was worse than a waste of time; its error of judgment caused a temporary macroeconomic panic and ruined the lives of thousands of investors who did not have the courage, or perhaps the liquidity, to hang on until the markets recovered all their lost ground three months later.
My point now is, however, that a British Prime Minister thought it beneficial in the last days of an election campaign to leave the domestic arena and pose for pictures with the world's other great leaders.
It would not happen today. Scanning the coverage of an admittedly shallow and partisan press there was little interest in the summit communique from Okinawa. If anything, there was more interest in what the politicians ate and drank and whether their hosts should have been so lavish. The 'peg' for this story was the failure of the world's most powerful economies to live up to their Cologne commitments a year ago to cancel a substantial portion of the debt of the world's poorest countries. The Japanese, so the canard went, should have given their hospitality budget to the poor.
Had the summit's leaders delivered their promises there would have been less interest in the carte de vin.
Ironically, it is that very interest on the part of many politicians in developing countries which has brought the process of assessment almost to a halt. The unbending rules of a lavish diplomatic corps has imposed bizarre and expensive obligations on poor countries whose leaders are only too happy to fall in with what they cannot reasonably change. As we judge leaders in rich countries according to the number of their private jets and the age of their claret what standard of judgment should we apply to impoverished leaders or, for that matter, to that permanently, taxonomically inconvenient class, those in between?
The steady of recollection will bring to mind the precondition for debt cancellation, that the amounts written off should be channelled into health and education. The only question is whether this condition was recognised for what it is, a recipe for inevitable delay. Not even the most administratively sophisticated societies can absorb massive amounts of new money into health and education systems. So even if the lavishness hoop is jumped through there is the more serious problem of funds transfer absorption capacity.
Before I go any further let me say that I am aware of those lurking in the bushes with their World Health Organisation Primary Health Care manuals. I have read and enjoyed David Werner's Where There is No Doctor (and, indeed, was instrumental in getting it translated into Swahili) but it is an inevitable characteristic of the human condition that the supplicant only values what his gaudy neighbours value.
I remember once trying to persuade trachoma stricken people in West Pokot to wash their faces regularly but they quite rightly pointed out that water was scarce and heavy, it needed to be brought a long way and, on the whole, as missionaries were well disposed towards ointments and tablets they thought they would prefer this method of disease control.
In education, too, we might get some way by tossing a few remaindered textbooks into classroom huts but we would, quite rightly, not be thanked. When we use primary health care methods to control our own egregious obesity and when we are satisfied with textbooks written a decade ago then it will be time for us to give advice to others on the virtues of the simple and the frugal.
What was most striking about Okinawa was that it has sunk so low both in global estimation and in that of its own participants that it spent most of its time discussing the debts of the world's poorest countries and the ravages of communicable diseases.
I expect these matters would all have been handled much more competently by a sub committee of the World Bank with a little help from the CDC in Atlanta. There was, it is true, some grandstanding by Mr. Putin following his extraordinary (not to be confused with remarkable) discussions with the North Koreans, the crux of which seems to have been a deal to the effect that North Korea will reduce its threat of nuclear aggression if the United States pays it to become a central country in space exploration!
Vladimir is also reported to have proposed the efficacy of the e-group for which, no doubt, he will receive a handsome laptop with a free Telecom voucher from a cartel of grateful industrialists, a far cry from the days when they tensely awaited agreements about locomotives of growth and the realignment of currencies.
The key, then, to the jaundice and the conning of menus is that the then G7 and now G8 has come to the end of its useful life but, like all committees, it simply cannot bear to disband itself.
This is a pity because a properly constituted regular meeting of the world's richest countries to discuss global justice would be a fine thing, but it would involve representation from those who have the financial and legislative power to deliver.
Any summit where the USA is represented solely by the executive branch is doomed. It is Congress that has refused to pay its United Nations dues, broken faith with UNESCO and now refused to underwrite President Clinton's Cologne commitments. Even if this were altered, however, we would still need to ask how far any such regular summit would have to include the world's biggest financial interests which not even Mr. Mike Moore - for once allowing myself to be persuaded by his customary false modesty - can represent single handed.
Mr. Clinton would have been better off staying at Camp David and the rest of the bunch would have been better off anywhere than Okinawa.
That is equally true for a press corps whose size is as inflated as its opinion of itself; I only hope that the Accounts Clerks scrutinised its expenses claims as minutely as it scrutinised Japan's hospitality.
Nobody would have minded if Sir Winston Churchill had eaten the world's last lobster, drunk the world's last bottle of 1810 cognac and smoked the world's last Havana on the opening day of the Potsdam Conference but our leaders whose personal and operational powers are more modest would be better off discreetly rifling their own cellars.
