Why are som many political summits placed in big cities?

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

Recently, there was a G8 meeting with many political bigwigs from 8 leading countries. This time it was held in Germany, and true to form there were lots of protests.

This is not by any means the only example - there have been protests in (on the top of my head) Nice, Genoa, Gothenburg, and a whole lot of other big cities.

Why on earth do the political leaders insist on putting many of those summits in big cities? After all, the point of the whole excercise is not to interact with the inhabitants of the host city, it is to interact with the other pols.

The big-city placement leads to two main problems:
1. The security needs hinders transports in already congested cities
2. The meetings invariably attract scores of protestors, placing further strain on the security apparatus and leading to all sorts of problems (public unrest, stuff being broken, police violence, lessening of societal legitimacy, the list goes on. In the Gothenburg case, cops used doctored evidence to get harsher punishments. Nothing was done to those cops once it was found out.)

There are two obvious exceptions to this bad placing:
1. The World Economic Summit in Davos, held in the winter.
2. A summit between the USA and Russian leaders which was held on a US. war vessel in the Mediterranean several years ago.

The Davos summit attracts few protestors since it is in the mountains in the wintertime. The summit at sea hindered no one elses movements. What more can one ask for?

If the boat alternative is deemed too much of an hardship, every G8 country has places which are perfect hosting places for summits - no or very little local population which can be displaced, and sufficiently remote or cold to deter all but the most hardened of protestors. Examples:
Canada - Ellesmere Island
France - Amsterdam Island
Great Britain - Port Stanley
USA - Point Barrow
Germany - Helgoland
Russia - Most of Siberia
Japan - Iwo Jima (recently returned to its old name, Iwo To)
Italy - Any of the Alpine resorts during wintertime

Granted, the transport to those places would cost more than to most of the cities now used for summits, but the costs of a city being banged up, hundreds - or thousands - of legal cases, tens of thousands of police being paid overtime for a week, security teams scouring lots of difficult urban area, decreased productivity for millions of people when their commute takes longer, etc costs a lot too.

So, what is the holdup? The pols will not see much of the sights of the city anyway, so a remote island is not much of a difference anyway. As an added benefit from the perspective of the pols, the very remoteness will make it easier for them to control which journalists cover the whole thing.

Anyone else than me wishing too see future summits held in places where they do not hold up anyone else?


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[Inquartata]

List of G8 summits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G8

Note the number which were NOT held in big cities.

The US has often held other sorts of summits at Camp David, a quasi-remote rural spot...

However, I suspect that the main concern is that the dignitaries demand accomodations of a fairly luxurious sort, which are not usually found in remote places. And when such can be found, the lodgings for all of their retinues cannot be arranged.

Then there are the security concerns involved in getting large numbers of high-value targets into places which may be accessible only by one or two roads, with no airports in near proximity, and so forth.