As we all know, Madonna and Justin Timberlake only had four minutes to save the world. The big question today: can Gordon Brown achieve the same in four hours 35 minutes? Sam Coates at Red Box has been looking at the London Summit timetable, and he’s come away sobered:
Leaders’ breakfast 8.30am – 9.45am
Morning session including finance ministers and central bankers 9.50am- 1.25pm
Lunch 1.25pm – 2.30pm
Afternoon session including finance ministers and central bankers 2.30pm to 3.30pm
Closing press conferences, 3.30 onwards
That adds up to 4 hours and 35 minutes of formal talks plus time spent chatting over three meals. Not much to work with: as Sam notes, Bretton Woods took all of three weeks. As Madona and Justin could no doubt tell Gordon if he were to ask them, when time is short to save the world, everything depends on the quality of the choreography.
Still, there’s no doubt that more time would be preferable. Let’s not forget Bill Lind‘s observation on the difference between the Congress of Vienna and the Versailles peace talks a century later:
In 1814, the Congress of Vienna, which faced the task of putting Europe back together after the catastrophic French Revolution and almost a quarter-century of subsequent wars, did what aristocrats usually do. It danced, it dined, it stayed up late playing cards for high stakes, it carried on affairs, usually not affairs of state. Through all its aristocratic amusements, it conversed. In the process, it put together a peace that gave Europe almost a century of security, with few wars and those limited.
In contrast, the conference of Versailles in 1919 was all business. Its dreary, interminable meetings (read Harold Nicolson for a devastating description) reflected the bottomless, plodding earnestness of the bourgeois and the Roundhead. Its product, the Treaty of Versailles, was so flawed that it spawned another great European war in just twenty years. As Kaiser Wilhelm II said from exile in Holland, the war to end war yielded a peace to end peace.
The fact that today, it’s inconceivable that leaders could spend a whole summer negotiating with each other, as at Vienna – or even three weeks, as at Bretton Woods – is a major worry. Time to brush up on your Joseph Tainter: it’s all about diminishing returns from greater complexity…
