HANGING IN THERE
In Memoriam: Charlie Bayne 1965-1990
Ghia Ionescu 1913-1996
Mike Hodges 1945-1998
The G8 and Global Governance Series
The G8 and Global Governance Series explores the issues, the institutions and the strategies of participants in the G8 network of global governance, as they address the challenges of shaping global order in the new millennium. Intensifying globalization is moving many once domestic issues into the international arena, requiring constant international co-operation, and demanding new collective leadership to direct the galaxy of multilateral institutions created in 1945. In response, the Group of Eight, composed of the world's major market democracies, including Russia and the European Union, is emerging as the effective source of global governance in the new era. This series focuses on the new issues at the centre of global governance, from finance, investment, and trade, through transnational threats to human security, to traditional political and security challenges. It examines the often invisible network of G8 and G7 institutions as they operate within and outside established international organizations to generate desired outcomes. It analyzes how individual G7 members and other international actors, including multinational firms and those from civil society, devise and implement strategies to secure their preferred global order.
Also in the series
The G7/G8 System Evolution, role and documentation
Peter I. Hajnal
ISBN 1 84014 776 8
The G8's Role in the New Millennium
Edited by
Michael R. Hodges, John J. Kirton and Joseph P. Daniels
ISBN 1 84014 774 1
Hanging In There
The G7 and G8 Summit in Maturity and Renewal
Nicholas Bayne
The London School of Economics and Political Science
First published 2000 by Ashgate Publishing
Reissued 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright Sir Nicholas Bayne, KCMG 2000
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A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 99085920
ISBN 13:978-1-138-70131-1 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-20418-5 (ebk)
By John J. Kirton
Hanging Together, the classic book written by Nicholas Bayne and Robert Putnam, has stood for decades as the master work for all scholars and practitioners seeking to understand and shape the G7's contribution to the process of international cooperation. Since its most recent edition was published in 1987, however, the major transformations the world has experienced have called for a fresh look at the G7's role and even continuing relevance, amidst the end of the Cold War, the onset of globalisation, and the revival and rise of a host of new international institutions.
No-one is better placed to address this fundamental question than Sir Nicholas Bayne. As a participant in many G7 summits and a close observer of most, he is uniquely positioned to explore the dynamics of continuity and change, in both the G7 itself and in the wide world in which it operates. To this task he brings the sensitive insights of the accomplished insider and the independent vision of a caring but critical outsider. Moreover as one whose scholarly interests and policymaking involvement have extended well beyond the G7 to embrace an array of major international institutions in the economic and political domain, he is able to assess the G7's work against, and see it in relation to, the formidable array of bodies contributing to global governance. Above all, as one of the leading interpreters of the G7 during the period of its birth and early growth, he can distinguish between the ephemeral and the fundamental, and reflect with precision and authority on the degree, form and adequacy of the changes the G7 has undergone.
Hanging In There is the product of his reflections. Developed over the past decade they are now integrated into a major new analysis of the Group of Seven and, with the successful incorporation of Russia, the Group of Eight major industrial democracies. As with its co-authored predecessor, this book provides a close, chronological account of the calculations and contribution of the annual G7 summits. This account is set here within the broader interpretive context of the phases the G7 has passed through in its decade of maturity and renewal from 1987 to 1999. For the first time this book places the work of the G7 and G8 fully in the context of the activity of the other major, but still poorly understood, international organisations, such as the OECD and WTO. Moreover, it does so within a broader, critical examination of the major forces-the end of the Cold War and the onset of intensifying globalisation-that have so changed the world during the 1990s.
In doing so, Nicholas Bayne offers an innovative and compelling examination of the G7 and G8's performance as the twenty first century opens. He emphasises how the end of the Cold War and ensuing advent of globalisation have strengthened international organisations by moving them toward genuine multilateral membership and influence, but at the same time have brought a host of new global human security and once domestic issues that threaten to overwhelm their limited capabilities. In this new world, the G8, through successful experimentation and dogged persistence, has found an enhanced role and relevance in directly providing needed global governance on issues where no other credible institutions exist, and in catalysing and guiding the modernisation of those that do.
Sir Nicholas Bayne has thus provided a powerful new interpretation of how a strengthened G8 is operating effectively within a transformed world. He provides an essential account for all who wish to comprehend and direct the dynamic of global governance in the twenty-first century.
This book is the fruit of 25 years' fascination with the summits. I was present at the very first of them, at Rambouillet in 1975. I have been conducting research into them since 1982. Over the years they have had many names. They began as 'economic summits'; as their agenda grew, they evolved into 'seven power summits'; by association with their finance ministers they became known as 'G7 summits'; and in 1998 the formal addition of Russia made them 'G8 summits'. I have tried in this book to remain faithful to the nomenclature in use at the time.
Over so long an association I have accumulated many debts, which I here recognise-I can never repay them. My first debt is to my colleagues in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and Her Majesty's Treasury over the years. They first brought me close to the summits and enabled me to remain involved with them throughout the rest of my professional career: as Financial Counsellor at the British Embassy in Paris (1975-79); as Head of Economic Relations Department, FCO (1979-82); as UK Permanent Representative to the OECD (1985-88); as Economic Director of the FCO and sous-Sherpa (1988-92); and as High Commissioner to Canada (1992-96). This sequence explains why I am better informed about some summits than others. This book is mainly about the summits from 1988 to the present. Here I know much more about Paris 1989, Houston 1990, London III 1991, Halifax 1995, Denver 1997 and Birmingham 1998 than I do about Toronto 1988, Munich 1992, Tokyo III 1993, Naples 1994, Lyon 1996 and Cologne 1999.
