A Tired Charade of Words and Wind

CLAREMONT —  Last week’s Group of 8 summit in Okinawa, starring heads of the world’s major industrial democracies (Russia included), convened a quarter-century after the original gathering at French President Valery Giscard d’ Estaing’s Rambouillet chateau in 1975. Although still billed by government flacks as the world’s premier occasion for international leaders to confront the big issues, the Okinawa meeting did nothing of the sort. The only notable thing about it was its expense. Desperate for some good publicity after a decade of muddling through economic stagnation, Japan’s government tossed away nearly $800 million on this and ancillary meetings of finance, foreign and other ministers. That was more than 100 times the cost of last year’s meeting in Cologne, Germany.

The summit’s results were mere words and wind. The usual pledges--boosting education and information-technology spending, reducing the world’s poverty levels, forgiving debts to the developing nations--were echoes of past resolutions. President Bill Clinton even left early to attend to the Middle East summit at Camp David. The one thing that delegates left behind for their constituencies was a question: How long should this out-of-date charade continue?

Nothing more strikingly dramatized the obsolescence of these summits than Japan’s choice of Okinawa as the venue, where the Cold War era is frozen in time. After more than 50 years of occupation, some 26,000 U.S. troops remain on Okinawa, their bases occupying 20% of the island’s choice land. Neither the U.S. nor the Japanese government has shown any signs of lightening the burden. Both sides contend that the bases on Okinawa, comprising three-fourths of U.S. military installations in Japan, are vital to the Japanese-American “alliance” and the region’s stability.

Despite Okinawans’ obvious dissatisfactions with this semi-colonial arrangement, further scarred by sexual misbehavior among U.S. troops, neither Tokyo nor Washington has done anything serious to alleviate it. Japanese on the main islands, who tend to think of Okinawa as a kind of Dogpatch, are happy to keep most of the U.S. bases there. U.S. military planners are comfortable with the old arrangements at the base, which was once the backup for Korea and Vietnam operations. Japan’s late Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, a man spectacularly ignorant of local and international sensitivities, chose Okinawa because the summit would be good for its local business. Apparently, he also saw the site as an opportunity to showcase the U.S.-Japan military alliance. Few Okinawans saw it that way.

In the 1970s, when Cold War pressures were intense and European unity was a work in progress, the summits of the major industrial democracies made abundant sense. The world was still conveniently divided between the well-heeled Euro-American club (plus Japan as the perennial honorary Aryan) and the hordes of technologically unwashed. And the communist threat was very real.

Not only are such hard-and-fast distinctions and threats as moribund as the Trilateral Commission, but the old-time summitry doesn’t reflect the changes of the past 25 years. For example, the Internet has in many ways marginalized national boundaries. Equally significant is the swift rise of China, whose expanding economy cannot be ignored. There is the technologically savvy South Korea, surely classifiable as an industrialized democracy, whose investment in information technology could overtake that of most European countries this year. Indonesia’s political woes apart, the economies of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations have sharply rebounded after their apparent “meltdown” three years ago. Over the horizon lies India, whose experiments with modern capitalism show signs of succeeding.

All these countries want--and deserve--a voice in deciding the world’s economic and technological direction. All to some extent share Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad’s anger at trusting their futures to the largely U.S. and European mandarinate of the World Trade Organization.

If international summitry is to be effective, its representation should be enlarged. Asia enjoys varying forms of democracy, it is true, some of them more familiar to us than others. While Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand can be adjudged “democracies,” the same cannot be said of China or, for that matter, Malaysia. Nonetheless, Asian countries have developed rapidly since 1975. They are inescapably part of the global economy, global technology and global communications networks. The ideas and attitudes of their new generations should not be confused with those of their Confucian or communist parents. Attempts to isolate them or hold them at arms’ length is good for no one.

If we have to have a summit in 2001, let’s have a fresh one, with the leaders of China, South Korea and ASEAN represented. India should also be there. While the band of brothers atmosphere of past gatherings may diminish, discussions will have a far broader reach. They must. Humankind’s problems are too pervasive to be solved on a regional basis. The time has passed when any regional or cultural grouping, Euro-America included, can call the tune and expect the rest of the world to whistle.

But the Okinawa meeting also raised a larger question: What good are summits, anyway? The modern custom arose at a time when national leaders were powerful decision-makers. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met, things happened. And if Josef Stalin, Charles de Gaulle and Chiang Kai-shek joined them, at least you knew where everybody stood. But present-day national leaders are more modest figures. They are more apt to be the creatures, rather than the molders, of their bureaucracies and constituencies. The less they say about policy, the better. At Okinawa, nothing was said that had not been previously worked out in the ministries and departments back home.

Well, it might be argued, it is at least good for world leaders to gather and “get along.” U.S presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton have generally been of this press-the-flesh school of diplomacy. Ironically, however, it was Clinton who underscored the irrelevance of the Okinawa summit when he departed after barely a half day of hasty greetings and photo ops. A Japanese reader of the newspaper Asahi summarized the importance of the meeting this way: “At least the summit made us understand how important the Middle East is.”

The international press was equally skeptical. The Times of London called the summit a “junket.” Even Japanese were critical. Commentators pointed out that none of the big problems--China-Taiwan relations and the U.S. anti-missile defense project, for example--were discussed, not to mention the glaring anachronism of the continued U.S. military presence on the island where they were meeting. For such omissions, Japanese opposition leaders roundly criticized Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori. “Did he think he was just a tour guide?” asked the Democratic Party president Yukio Hatoyama.

The Asahi’s sarcastic headline said it all: “The Summit Bureaucratized; Tough Issues Avoided: Success.” Using some helpful historical perspective, the business newspaper Nihon Keizai recalled Giscard’s imperative to reporters after the first bit of summitry back in 1975: “Investigate what did not come up at the meeting. These are the important issues.”

By any measure, the Group of 8 meeting on Okinawa should serve as a fitting last chapter to the bygone Cold War era.