Time to retire the G8 summit

(breakingviews.com) -- Failure would be welcome. It's too bad that the leaders of western powers convening in Italy will do their utmost to pretend to avoid it.

But a G8 summit that ended in an avowed flop would be a forceful incentive for participants to draw the conclusion they should have come to long ago: Scrap the summits.

In the thirty-odd years of the event's history, the annual meetings have produced no serious decisions or major breakthroughs. What started in the mid-seventies as an informal, pool-side meeting between the leaders of the U.S., U.K., Germany and France has degenerated into a solemn and empty diplomatic celebration of banalities and good intentions. Thousands of reporters waste their days while hundreds of bureaucrats haggle over every comma of every paragraph of the usually watered-down final statement.

The composition of the G8 is a telling sign of its irrelevance. The laws of political niceties and diplomatic balance led to the inclusion of Italy and Canada -- but not Spain, for example, probably because it never bothered to ask.

Much worse, it doesn't include the real economic powers of tomorrow: China, India and Brazil. They are participating in another summit, along with Mexico and South Africa, at the same time in the same place.

It's not that all summits are useless. The London G20 meeting held earlier this year to tackle the financial crisis produced some potentially significant results. Summits can make sense: world leaders should talk with each other face-to-face, informally whenever possible. But the meetings should be seriously pared down, held on an ad hoc basis with a strictly focused agenda.

Unfortunately, inertia prevails. No one seems to be willing to go first in suggesting an end to the annual extravaganzas. Ideally, Silvio Berlusconi's somewhat farcical handling of the summit's preparation would serve as the long-awaited trigger. But the odds are that it will take a real disaster before the G8 decides to undo itself.