Blog Post | Summitry: Performing and Producing World Politics
On June 24 and 25, 45 heads of state and government were in The Hague, the Netherlands, to attend the NATO Summit. High-stakes security issues were discussed at the summit, which occurred during a crucial moment in time.
European leaders had been working together to hammer out a ceasefire agreement involving Ukraine, the US, and Russia. Add to that the recent escalation of conflict in the Middle East, defense spending of members was expectedly a topic of focus. More generally, however, NATO summits are a ritual for the collective alliance. They have followed a pattern or routine of activities, including, but not limited to, group photos, meetings, press conferences, and dinners.
Summits are meaningful not only for the participants. Summits index the overarching state of world politics. By dramatizing leaders and their summitry activities, they transform world politics into a theatrical-like performance, telling a story of international politics scripted by the ongoing affairs. It’s a performance of the social relations of the participating states, personified by leaders and their interactions. Each summit takes on its own peculiarity, unique to the participating states as much as it is to the host state, which comes under the limelight of the world’s attention as it showcases its history, society, and culture. The rest of the world becomes an audience, whether they choose to observe or engage with a summit or not.
This is where the real value of summitry lies. The symbolism of the meetings and other summitry activities, including public diplomacy activities produces world politics. In this blog post, I will highlight three types of performance content: international order and global governance, foreign policy, and the leader’s competence
Summitry as International Order and Global Governance
Thanks to Winston Churchill, who popularized summitry during the transition from the post-war to the Cold War period, along with the ease of international travel, summit diplomacy has become a mainstay of contemporary international relations. Multilateral summitry spearheaded by the Allied Powers after the war and subsequent bloc summitry, such as the G7, defined the international order as the participating states that formed the “summit” of the international order shaped the global security and economic landscape. Other multilateral summitry, such as the Earth Summits, contributed to global coordination and response to climate change. The collective performance of governance by leaders when they gather multilaterally exudes a sense of collective action and, more importantly, symbolizes states’ intentions to not only realize their foreign policy goals and strategy but to shape the future of the international order.
Summitry as Foreign Policy
Additionally, summits bring policy “alive” through theatrics. Foreign policy is performed by mobilizing symbolic activities or other states and their leaders, where leaders and their aides perform for their counterparts or the broader audience. Leaders may meet as a formality, but their meetings are part of the broader policy performance and are essential theatrical scenes before signing an agreement. Building interpersonal rapport and relationships among leaders is also a crucial component of the broader foreign policy performance, providing signposts of foreign policy direction.
Summits also function as public diplomacy. Multilateral summits such as the NATO summit generate a festive-like mood in the host state, where ordinary citizens are welcomed and encouraged to be part of the summit through events like the Public Forum aimed at enhancing the public’s understanding of NATO and collective security.
Summitry as Leader Legitimation
Lastly, summitry performance is more than a staged performance of politics or foreign policy. It is a show of power, authority, and legitimacy. By transforming leaders into diplomats, summits can be used to dramatize a leader’s power through the theatricals and spectacles that people understand as being accorded only to leaders—the “summit” of a country. Diplomatic ceremonies and protocols “christen” leaders abroad as chief holders of sovereignty. Summitry moments can also be used to create an impression of a leader as a problem-solver in complex international politics or a peacemaker.
World Politics as Performance-Audience Interaction
By virtue of being a public action, summitry is inter-mestic politics, requiring multidimensional performance planning by leaders and their administrations to satiate the political demands of domestic and foreign audiences. While summitry celebrates the state system by reproducing it and its principles of sovereign equality, its power is derived from its public dimension that draws attention from the audience. Without an audience, summitry is reducible to face-to-face negotiations and talks that could otherwise be carried out equally well by high-level officials or diplomats. But being a competent state leader today is also about displaying one as a virtuoso in directly conducting diplomacy and foreign policy strategy vis-à-vis other world leaders in public. In the age of fast media consumption, forgoing the public audience is poor political planning and a considerable political risk.
This is especially important for high-stakes summits such as the NATO summit, where (dis)agreements over commitment and defense spending or misinformation can be consequential for international security and potentially be detrimental to a leader’s political standing at home. The NATO summit in The Hague, for instance, capitalized on social media, mobilizing influential non-state actors, such as the nine young content creators from its member states, in lieu of relying solely on traditional news media to raise public awareness about the importance of the alliance.
Summitry, therefore, opens up intended and unintended political spaces for audiences to engage in world and domestic politics in their own ways. For the general public, summitry is more than just policymaking and enactment, or a foreign policy strategy. It transforms what is considered sanctified – the summit of a state and the world – into a public sphere accessible to non-elites and the lay voters and citizens. People who are not participants in summits gain access to this political sanctity, often reserved for leaders and political elites, by being exposed to summitry through various forms of media coverage.
Summitry and Visibility
Ultimately, summitry as performance makes states visible to the audience in world politics. Leaders and their administrations therefore perform with an audience and their expectations in mind. The targeted audience may be their domestic constituents, but for summitry participants, the world is a stage of both opportunities and risks for conveying intentions and messages to the rest of the world.
In the case of multilateral summits like the NATO summit, attendance itself speaks louder than speeches or statements by leaders. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s attendance represents the crossroads NATO is facing. It remains relevant and legitimate in the eyes of the domestic publics in some of its member states, who view it as a vital collective security. At the same time, it is gradually losing its appeal to some of its key members, such as the US, which sees it as a financial burden. The skipping of the NATO summit by non-member states like Japan and South Korea can also be seen as a sign of erosion of NATO as an anchor for the US’s commitment to its security allies and partners.
To restrict summits to their agenda, deliverables, and joint communiques or statements is to overlook the important functions they serve in world politics. The reason NATO summits remain the epitome of the international security order is because of their theatrical staging and performance of not only collective security but also the very relations among its member states and NATO’s interactions and relations with other international actors.
Minseon Ku - Postdoctoral Fellow in the Diplomacy Project at William & Mary's Global Research Institute and incoming Assistant Professor of Applied Diplomacy at DePaul University (mku@wm.edu)