THE VENICE SUMMIT : Economic Summits--the Symbolic Value Outweighs Concrete Results

They may already be calling this the “do-nothing summit,” but it’s not as if it has much competition.

In the 12 previous economic summits, beginning in Rambouillet, France, in 1975, few major accomplishments have ever emerged from the high-level meetings. From the start, the summits have been less important for any concrete results than for their symbolic value.

“The purpose of the summits is not to make decisions,” said Robert D. Hormats, a former State Department official who has been instrumental in planning several economic summits, “but to give the leaders a better understanding of their counterparts and their policies.”

Indeed, on the rare occasions when the heads of state have agreed on specific actions, the results have sometimes backfired.

“Whenever the leaders have tried to engage in actual negotiations,” said W. Allen Wallis, undersecretary of state for economic affairs, “the results have been generally unfortunate.”

U.S. Pleas Resisted

In 1978, in Bonn, for example, then-President Jimmy Carter extracted a pledge from the West Germans and other allies to stimulate their economies in hopes they would take over the U.S. role as the “locomotive” of the world economy. But shortly after West Germany moved to boost European growth, the fall of the Shah of Iran set off an oil price hike that sparked a worldwide inflationary spiral. Ever since, the West Germans have resisted U.S. pleas for more active economic policies.

And last year’s summit in Tokyo, where the United States won support from its allies for a joint statement against international terrorism, turned into an embarrassment late in the year after it was disclosed that the Reagan Administration had been secretly shipping arms to Iran, a sponsor of several terrorist acts.

Instead of prodding the leaders into taking action on pressing political or economic issues, most of the summits have been dominated by pageantry or overshadowed by events elsewhere.

The 1984 summit in London, for example, is chiefly remembered for President Reagan’s side trip to France, where he delivered an emotional tribute on the cliffs of Normandy to the American soldiers killed 40 years earlier during the D-Day invasion.

Controversial Bitburg Visit

And the Bonn gathering in 1985 paled in comparison with the controversy over Reagan’s visit afterward to a West German war cemetery at Bitburg, where some members of Adolf Hitler’s combat SS troops are buried.

So why bother with summits?

“It’s important that the leaders have a forum to move the discussion of common issues above the bureaucratic level,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department official now at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Last year’s gathering in Tokyo, unlike most previous economic summits, also was unusual in producing some important breakthroughs on economic issues. The seven nations adopted a plan for greater international monetary coordination initiated by Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III and added representatives of Italy and Canada to the group of finance ministers that now convene every few months to seek better ways to ensure greater currency stability.

Some summits have been marked by discord among the heads of state. In 1985, for instance, French President Francois Mitterrand publicly opposed Reagan’s space-based anti-missile defense, popularly known as “Star Wars.”

The economic summits originally grew out of the deep slump of 1974-75, the first economic downturn since the end of World War II to have halted simultaneously economic growth in Europe, the United States and Japan.

The 1975 session in Rambouillet that initiated the summits focused exclusively on energy and economic problems. Since then, the summits have rotated among the seven participating nations--France, the United States, Britain, West Germany, Japan, Italy and Canada, which was first included at the second summit, hosted by the United States in Dorado Beach, Puerto Rico.

Political Questions

Within a few years, economic issues were soon overtaken by political questions, with the 1980 summit in Venice dominated by how to respond to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Although economics returned to center stage a year later in Ottawa, in 1982 the Versailles summit focused on the conflict between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The following year, in Williamsburg, Va., Reagan used his position as host to drastically restructure the summits to allow much more informal discussion among the leaders and less insistence on “dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s” of the formal communique.

Ironically, after all the efforts by U.S. officials to play down the importance of this year’s summit, there are some predictions that genuine news might actually emerge from Venice.

“I would not be surprised to see important announcements come out,” White House Chief of Staff Howard H. Baker Jr. said in a television interview Sunday. “I think you’ll have important developments.”