Allies Prodded to Face Tough Issues : Summitry: Under the glare of world attention, the seven leaders felt compelled to act, although gingerly.

Hours before the start of the 16th annual economic summit Monday, British spokesman Bernard Ingham was asked how the heads of the world’s major industrial powers could possibly reach agreement on the intractable problem of cutting back farm subsidies.

“Ah,” Ingham replied, “therein lies the miracle of summits.”

Wednesday’s final results seemed to prove him correct.

Summits defy the wisdom of management theory, with its belief in clear-cut, decisive action and its abhorrence of evasion and inefficient half-steps. And critics were quick to point out that the Houston summit dealt with several issues by reaching agreement on broad goals while leaving individual countries free to do largely as they pleased.

Yet, in politics, half a loaf is often a lot of bread. And in international negotiations, “progress is not a straight line, it’s a sawtooth” moving in zigs and zags, said one senior U.S. official.

Even in this era of almost nonstop consultation, therefore, the bringing together of heads of state for large, set-piece meetings seems to play a vital role in keeping their governments zigging and zagging ahead.

The reason, experts say, is simple. By assembling national leaders in the full glare of world attention, summits force them and their aides to confront difficult issues they might otherwise push aside.

While they still may disagree and refuse to take decisive action, leaders find it difficult to ignore a pressing issue entirely and often cannot avoid taking first one half-step, then another. Once all the national delegations have arrived and negotiations are under way, no one leader wants to be tagged as the person who blocked accord and caused the summit to “fail.”

“It doesn’t work . . . to march in lock-step on all these questions,” President Bush said during his post-summit news conference Wednesday. At the same time, summit participants feel a strong pressure not to get too far out of step.

The prime example at the latest summit came in agriculture, in which the heads of state agreed, some of them reluctantly, to break a logjam that had stalled world trade negotiations.

Bush arrived in Houston determined to get a deal that would move the trade talks forward. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl used the summit as an occasion to break ranks with fellow European leaders and support Bush on the key agricultural issue. In the end, that forced a deal.

On the environment, the summit played a similar role, although in the opposite direction. For months, the major industrial nations have been locked in debate on reducing carbon dioxide and other gases that are believed to cause global warming. Some want aggressive action to reduce the gases; others favor postponing action.

At the summit, the no-action side, led by the United States, won decisively--for better or worse--putting at least a temporary end to the debate.

Summit meetings do have their limits.

“Informality is not possible,” noted W. Allen Wallis of the American Enterprise Institute think tank, who was President Reagan’s chief negotiator at several economic summits. And the meetings typically cost taxpayers of the nations involved millions of dollars, probably nearly $20 million this time around.

But the role of summits in grabbing the attention of world leaders may be even more important now than in the past. In earlier years, noted Robert D. Hormats, former assistant secretary of state, the pressures of the Cold War helped force the major industrial democracies together. Now, by contrast, the chief job facing leaders of the industrial nations is to prevent economic tensions from pulling them apart, Hormats said.

And economic disputes are the sort of matters that most world leaders prefer to avoid. They almost always involve complicated, technical matters in fields that few politicians feel comfortable discussing in detail.

The annual economic summits force the leaders of the participating countries to focus on those issues, at least for a few days each year. Moreover, for lower-level officials, the summits pose a deadline, forcing action to avoid confrontations when the heads of state meet.

The international agreement reached late last month on new protection for the ozone layer illustrates that point. Officials from the United States and its European allies, knowing that this week’s summit might face a split over another environmental issue, global warming, were eager to get the ozone issue out of the way before the summit leaders arrived.

The pressure paid off with a quick agreement on ozone protections, and a summit confrontation was avoided.

Finally, of course, regardless of what the experts and the scholars say, there is one inescapable fact: So long as world leaders enjoy attention, they will schedule summits. One line in Wednesday’s final summit declaration took no negotiation to work out.

“We have accepted the invitation of Prime Minister Thatcher to meet next July in London,” it declared.

Greenhouse Gases CO2 Emissions (as percentages of world total) United States: 17.6% Japan: 3.9% Western Europe: 13.1% Canada: 2.0% Brazil: 10.5% Soviet Union: 12.0% Eastern Europe: 4.0% Rest of World: 36.9% Source: World Resources Institute