In Tokyo, Dinosaurs and a Club Limited to Seven : Structure: Critics call the G-7 a lumbering giant that hasn’t changed with the times. Developing nations want a voice.

When leaders of the Group of Seven leading industrialized countries first began meeting almost two decades ago, the sessions were small, the attention paid by the outside world was modest and the participants mostly confined themselves to abstruse questions of international finance.

Now when the G-7 leaders hold their annual summit, as they did here this week, the official entourage numbers in the hundreds for each country, every issue under the sun is on the table and each diplomatic twitch is pounced upon, adjudged a step forward or backward and flashed around the globe by thousands of reporters.

“Some of us were at the first summit at Rambouillet” in France in 1975, recalled Robert D. Hormats, a former official with the Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter administrations who is now with Goldman, Sachs & Co. “I can remember all the press people, of which there were maybe 12 or 14, were in one little room and mingled freely with the heads of state and government.”

Not everyone likes the change. Some even are so bold as to suggest that a few of today’s players are like the creatures in “Jurassic Park”--dinosaurs from an earlier age who have remained center stage long after their hour has passed.

Indeed, so many people from so many countries are so unhappy about the way that the G-7 summits have evolved that calls for reform this week were almost as numerous as security details on Tokyo streets.

To begin with, some G-7 critics complain of the membership itself. Why should these seven countries--the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada--be members of the club, and no one else?

In the most direct challenge to the G-7 club’s membership, Indonesian President Suharto led a partly successful campaign this year to appear before them as a spokesman for the Nonaligned Movement, which represents more than 100 developing countries.

Other critics have taken aim at the G-7 format. They complain that for all the hoopla, the annual summits have become arid conclaves in which some of the world’s most powerful leaders spend too much time haggling over the bland language of formal communiques and not enough time grappling with the real problems.

Does it really matter, critics ask, exactly how strongly the formal communique in which the G-7 nations reaffirm their support for Bosnia-Herzegovina is worded? Are Serbian troops, whose bloodstained march across Bosnia has not been deterred by many other diplomatic efforts, really sitting on the ground waiting to read the G-7 communique?

“I’m not very excited about communiques,” Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen said Thursday. “You get a more candid discussion with a more informal approach. . . . (If the discussions are kept informal), you don’t argue so much over what’s going to be in a communique.”

Actually, it has only been in the past decade or so that the summits have devoted much attention at all to political and diplomatic issues.

The origins of the G-7 date to the spring of 1973, when George Shultz, President Nixon’s Treasury secretary, invited his French, German and British counterparts to an informal meeting in the White House library to talk about the disarray in the international monetary system. The meetings were held in secret and were judged successful.

“There was a common understanding that it would be worthwhile to maintain the informal contact,” economists Paul Volcker and Toyoo Gyohten wrote in their recent book, “Changing Fortunes.” The ministers from the four countries became known as the Library Group.

“Japan’s finance minister became quite jealous when he heard about the meeting and was determined not to be excluded again,” recalled Gyohten, a longtime Japanese Ministry of Finance official.

Soon Italy and Canada were added, and the presidents and prime ministers decided to attend along with the finance ministers. In 1975, the annual G-7 summits were launched.

The first ones stuck to economics, dealing with disruptions in the international economy caused by the Arab oil embargo and the huge surge in oil prices.

Not surprisingly, however, it wasn’t long before politics began creeping in. In 1980, for example, the G-7 diverted from its usual agenda of fiscal policies and exchange rates to condemn the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.

The group’s biggest move into the political arena came at Williamsburg, Va., in 1983. At that summit--with a strong push from then-President Ronald Reagan--the G-7 stopped pretending that it was supposed to confine itself primarily to trade, financial and other economic issues.

Originally, there was a simple logic behind the G-7 membership: The countries represented the world’s seven largest industrialized economies, and it made sense for them to coordinate their economic policies.

But the rationale for having the current seven countries at the G-7 summits has begun to erode.

Critics note, for example, that China, India and Russia all have huge economies but are not G-7 members. Even among Western democracies, it is difficult to understand why Canada is a member and Spain, with a larger economy, is not.

Indonesia’s Suharto argued in Tokyo this week that the G-7 summits tend to make decisions on trade issues that affect scores of developing countries around the world--but that they do so at sessions in which the smaller nations are not represented.

The reverse can also be true: Because the seven no longer speak for the world economy, their ponderously-arrived-at decisions sometimes mean nothing until others have considered and ratified them.

Suharto was allowed individual sessions with Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa and President Clinton in Tokyo, but he was not allowed to appear before the august Seven.

Then, as if to prove Suharto’s point, just after the Indonesian leader left town the G-7 leaders announced a deal on trade that will have to be presented for approval to the world’s developing nations.

The biggest complaint of the G-7 heads of state and government themselves is that the summit meetings have become too formalized and boring.

British Prime Minister John Major has been pressing for two years to have the seven summit leaders set aside more time to talk among themselves instead of merely ratifying precooked statements and agendas worked out by their “sherpas,” or subordinates.

Clinton agrees. Talking to reporters Thursday night, he said that summit participants had managed to make that day’s sessions somewhat less stiff and “agreed this afternoon to make next year’s session even more informal.” The idea, he said, is to “focus on a few big things, cut out a lot of the bureaucracy and . . . all the other stuff that goes with these summits.”

One possibility, aides say, would be to eliminate the formal communique that is now issued at the end of the summit--a step that advocates hope would eliminate the need to debate every problem in the world, from Antarctica to Zaire.

In each of the member governments, however, dozens of high-level bureaucrats now have jobs that depend largely on preparations for such communiques, a White House official noted, creating a built-in source of resistance to such fundamental changes.

And in several countries, the finance and foreign ministers are independent political actors who do not necessarily take orders from--or even agree with--their heads of government on how the summits should be structured. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, for example, heads a coalition government in which he depends on the political support of his foreign minister.

Finally, some G-7 veterans acknowledge that the intense press coverage of the summit sessions creates pressures that the seven elected democratic leaders find impossible to resist.

“The kind of massive media attention given today and the compelling need to make news,” Volcker said, “can often detract from the essential purpose of the meeting--to understand and reconcile conflicting views.”

The Summit by the Numbers

Some statistics on the G-7 conference in Tokyo:

* The smallest of the seven delegations: Britain, with 56 members. That’s more than the 44 who attended the last Tokyo summit in 1986.

* The largest delegation: The United States with 396 members, compared with 126 seven years ago.

* The final communique: 2,750 words, 1,000 less than last year’s but still more than the 1,132 words in the first G-7 communique in 1975.