As the goings on in Copenhagen demonstrate, the international summit has been gradually diluted over the last 50 years from a history-making occasion to little more than a pompous Shriners’ Convention — no more stylish, and not as benign.
When Pope Leo I (St. Leo) met Attila the Hun in 452 and mysteriously persuaded him not to march on Rome, the ancient world held its breath, and history was made.
The meeting of Henry VIII and the French King Francis I on The Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, like the meeting of Napoleon and Czar Alexander I on a raft on the Nemar River at Tilsit in 1807, were epochal occasions that have entered into the general knowledge of the Western world.
Tilsit, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 with the Czar, Talleyrand, Metternich, Wellington, Castelreagh, Consalvi and others, and the Congress of Berlin in 1878, where Disraeli and Bismarck and the dashing and cunning Hungarian, Andrassy, were the leading personalities, were the only real summit conferences in the 19th century. The principal figures at these and subsequent real summit meetings were leaders of historic stature, decades of prominence and usually legendary cunning. Disraeli returned from Berlin with “Peace with Honour,” and unlike subsequent employers of that expression (including Neville Chamberlain and Richard Nixon) his description was confirmed by events.
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Copenhagen: a convention on the Ministry of Silly Walks.