In the public imagination, a “summit” is a meeting between the political
leaders of two states, with those between the United States and the Soviet
Union seen as the most important. Yet one of the most interesting
conclusions of David Reynolds’s compellingly written book is that these
“personal” summits do not succeed. In a work of great originality, Reynolds
sets out an analytical structure, considers six important summit meetings
between 1938 and 1985, and concludes that only one of them had the desired
result. The history of the political summit – truly a triumph of hope over
experience – arises from the conviction of leaders that if only they can
meet face to face with their opposite number, something can be worked out:
charm will triumph. And time after time, the result was, at worst, disaster
– as at Munich in 1938 – but more frequently the unravelling of hopes. Only
one summit, that of Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in Geneva in 1985,
is seen by Reynolds as a success, thanks to forward planning.
Reynolds defines summitry as a form of dialogue between states which is
conducted at the highest level. Taken thus, it has been happening throughout
recorded human history. In earlier times, when journeys between states was
time-consuming and dangerous, the host had a higher status than the visitor.
(When, in 1929, the first summit meeting between the British and American
heads of government took place, it was the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald,
who travelled to Washington to meet President Herbert Hoover, while, in
1938, it was Neville Chamberlain who went to Germany to meet Adolf Hitler.)
Summitry is really a twentieth-century development, “made possible by air
travel, made necessary by weapons of mass destruction, and made into
household news by the mass media of newsreels and television”. Reynolds’s
classical period of summitry as intimate business meetings between a small
number of heads of government is restricted to the half-century between the
late 1930s and the late 1980s: thereafter the fundamental transformation in
means of communication rendered summits much less necessary.
Reynolds presents six dramatic case studies: Munich 1938, with Chamberlain and
Hitler; Yalta 1945, with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin; Vienna 1961, with
Kennedy and Khrushchev; Moscow 1972, with Nixon and Brezhnev; Camp David
1978, with Begin, Sadat and Carter; and Geneva 1985, with Gorbachev and
Reagan. Reynolds’s treatment of Munich is gripping. The hubris and the
blinkers are familiar; it is the detail that makes the story almost
unbelievable. He quotes from a private letter of October 1937 in which
Chamberlain wrote of “the far-reaching plans which I have for the
appeasement of Europe & Asia and for the ultimate check to the mad
armaments race”; indeed, as Chamberlain wrote to his sisters, “I could
hardly have moved a pebble: now I have only to raise a finger & the
whole face of Europe is changed”. In grandiose aspirations, in any case, he
and Hitler were not so ill-matched. But Chamberlain was almost wholly
ill-prepared. He kept the Foreign Office, including his Foreign Secretary,
Lord Halifax, at arm’s length, very few preparations were made, and he did
not even take his own interpreter and record-keeper with him, thereby
rendering himself dependent on the Germans. By the end, his whole sense of
self was tied up with success – a state of affairs that almost guarantees
ultimate defeat.
The failure of Munich to avert war can be compared to the success of the 1985
Geneva summit and the subsequent summit meetings, thanks to which the two
superpowers for the first time agreed to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear
weapons. First, the two countries were roughly comparable in military
strength, and over the period between 1985 and 1988, mutual trust developed
between the two leaders. Thorough preparations were made; the US Secretary
of State, George Schulz, had the Washington bureaucracy behind him; and the
lower as well as the upper levels of the two sides worked together: Schulz
and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, made a formidable
team. The path to success was neither clear nor unencumbered, but the
episode highlights the requirement that both sides, not just one, must
strongly desire a successful outcome, as was not the case at Munich.
Reynolds sets out a typology of summits as part of his effort to understand
why some succeed but most fail. There are personal summits, with an emphasis
on the encounter between the two leaders, as at Munich and Vienna. There are
plenary summits, where the personal encounters are balanced and supplemented
by specialist advisers, and the participants also try to resolve substantial
problems, such as Yalta and Camp David. There are progressive summits, where
there are elements of both personal and plenary summits, but in which the
meeting is seen as part of a series, both between leaders and among
lower-level specialists: Moscow 1972 almost fitted the criteria, but Nixon
and Kissinger were too devious for it to be a success.
And now there is what Reynolds calls “institutionalised summitry”, in which
groups of national leaders meet at regular intervals backed up by a huge
bureaucratic infrastructure. It has replaced “classical summitry” largely
because the world and its problems have changed substantially since the end
of the Cold War. In place of a confrontation between two over-weaponed
giants, many problems of security, trade and the environment require
multilateral rather than bilateral solutions. Examples of institutionalized
summitry include the regular meetings of the European Council under a
changing presidency, the Group of 8 leaders of the advanced industrial
nations, the Organization of African Unity, and the Non-Aligned Movement.
What has also changed is that the audience for this new kind of summitry
extends far beyond the respective governments, as various police forces know
to their cost.
And what about the Blair–Bush summits? They were seldom called that, of
course, possibly because the term “summit” seemed too formal for a meeting
between friends. According to one Cabinet minister, “supporting the
Americans is part of Tony’s DNA”. For Reynolds, the Iraq conflict grew
directly out of Blair’s misuse of summit diplomacy. He makes a particularly
sharp comparison:
"A well-intentioned leader convinced of his rightness, whose confidence
in his powers of persuasion bordered on hubris. Who squeezed out critical
professional advice, controlling policy and information from an inner
circle, and who played his best hands too early at the conference table. A
leader whose rhetoric became increasingly extravagant and deceptive, yet
whose apparent naivety may have been the outward face of a man who knew he
had gone too far to turn back. Who does all this remind us of? For all their
differences, Tony Blair’s approach to summitry had a good deal in common
with that of Neville Chamberlain."
Reynolds has thoughtfully drawn up a list of dos and don’ts for participants.
Is there scope for real negotiation? If not, don’t go. Know the concessions
you cannot afford to make and the concessions which you must have from the
other side, or the exercise is pointless. Is the overall strategy one of
coordination – common ground which requires only minor adjustments – or
conversion? If it is necessary to bring the other side round to your way of
thinking, to what extent should you use threats or rewards? Surprise can be
a useful weapon. Personality matters, but there is a fine line between being
too nice and gaining nothing, and too nasty and damaging future relations.
Summitry is exhausting, and tiredness can result in mistakes which cannot be
rectified. This leads to a final difficulty: can the agreement be
implemented? Agreements need domestic support and political backing, and
leaders go to great lengths to gain these, not always successfully. The
final test is implementation, which can expose the cracks papered over when
the primary goal was agreement and leaders ignored their bottom lines: too
much was at stake for them personally to allow it to fail. Succeed now, fail
later.
Neville Chamberlain is revealed as matching Henry Kissinger in vanity, while
Ronald Reagan emerges as something of a statesman. Reynolds reveals how
governments as foreign policy machines actually worked. These summits seldom
followed strict patterns, and David Reynolds himself admits defeat when he
tries to draw up rules for political leaders. Knowledge tempered by realism
is always impressive. Summits is an important book, which should change the
way we think about the international history of the twentieth century.
David Reynolds
SUMMITS
Six meetings that shaped the twentieth century
497pp. Allen Lane. £25.
978 0 7139 9917 4
Kathleen Burk is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at
University College London. Her latest book, Old World, New World: The story
of Britain and America, 2007, is soon to be published in the US.
