How to host a G20 summit

LONDON — When the leaders of the G20 meet in London Thursday for breakfast, lunch, photos and a few hours of talk there will be few surprises. There’s a reason for that. Safety first is the cardinal rule whenever heads of government agree to meet in public. How this summit came together is instructive.

So let’s start at the very beginning. In November when the first wave of panic over global financial institutions was at its height, the leaders of the G20, the world’s 19 largest economies plus a representative of the European Union, held a long-scheduled meeting in Washington D.C. A decision was made there and then to reconvene at some date in the near future. As Britain was due to hold the rotating presidency of the organization London seemed the best possible venue.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown set his civil servants the task of making it happen. But before the embossed invitations went out there was a lot of work to do. What should be on the agenda? How detailed should it be? A consensus needed to be reached.

Civil servants — the sherpas — went to work, burning up email networks and phone lines to find out how far the various governments were willing to go in pursuit of some kind of unity. As the panic receded this became more difficult.

The U.S. and the U.K. wanted the summit to commit the G20 to a coordinated stimulus package. The leaders of the big two European economies, Germany and France, decided the rush to stimulate economies by bailing out banks and loosening controls over money was not a good idea. They began to focus on increased regulation of the financial industry as the thing they wanted most to achieve. Then the leaders of the emerging — actually fully emerged — economies of China, India and Brazil decided they wanted to focus on reforming the main international financial institutions like the IMF so that they had more say in how those bodies were run.

An agenda of more or less these five items came together in late January:

1. Coordinated stimulus as a way of applying defibrillator pads to the collapsing global economy.

2. New transnational banking regulations including closer scrutiny of offshore tax havens.

3. A general statement against protectionism.

4. Reform of institutions like the IMF, reflecting the new reality of the global economy (in other words getting China a seat at the top table).

5. A package of measures for developing, i.e. poor, nations.

The last item came up only recently. At the November meeting the conventional wisdom at the G20 was that the poorest nations would weather the storm better because they had no financial sectors to go bust. But the collapse of global trade has left poor countries, particularly those in Africa reliant on exporting raw materials, without markets.

Once the development question was officially on the agenda the question was raised: Shouldn’t potential recipients take part in the talks? The answer was yes, so now Africa will be represented by Ethiopia. Thailand has been invited to represent ASEAN. There will be other official attendees from international bodies making this more the G29 than the G20.

By mid-February the British government thought it was time to fix a date. Best time for the main man, President Barack Obama, was during a trip to Europe for a long-scheduled meeting to celebrate the 60th anniversary of NATO on April 3-4. It’s a short flight from London to Strasbourg, France, where the celebration will take place.

Once the summit was a go, money had to be found to stage it. Conveniently there was a 20 million pound ($26.6 million) contingency line in Britain’s Foreign Office budget. Then a decision on a venue had to be made. The ExCeL Centre, way out at London’s eastern edge, was chosen. The official line is because it is in a successfully regenerated neighborhood and the government wants to show it off. But that’s the equivalent of moving a U.N. General Assembly meeting from mid-town Manhattan to a warehouse near Kennedy Airport to show that Jamaica, Queens is thriving. In reality the only reason to hold the meeting there is security. Demonstrators attach themselves to these events like leeches and London has been filling up with anti-globalization protesters for the last week. ExCel is hard to get to and those who make it will be easy to keep away from the hall itself.

Then the protocol people have to coordinate schedules. That’s easier said than done. Britain is overloaded with protocol officials: Downing Street has one set, the Foreign Office keeps track of diplomatic protocol and then there are the Queen’s people at Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth II is hosting a pre-summit dinner Wednesday. Each group guards its turf and negotiations among them can be delicate.

Final task is monitoring participants to make sure things don’t fall apart. That hasn’t been so easy for Gordon Brown in the last 10 days.

Last week Czech prime minister Mirek Topolanek, who will be the EU’s representative at the meeting (because the Czech Republic currently holds that organization’s rotating presidency) said that President Obama’s economic recovery plan was "a way to Hell." Those words might have caused more consternation if Topolanek’s government hadn’t just failed a confidence vote in Parliament.

Then the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, publicly stated there was no more room for stimulus in the British economy and he would not do anything else that allowed the already massive public debt to grow further. Brown was in no position to respond publicly as he was on the road in Latin America, where at a press conference with Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva he had to stand quietly while the Brazilian blamed the crisis on "the irrational behavior of some white, blue-eyed" bankers.

Finally, yesterday, there was the inevitable stamping of a French foot as President Nicolas Sarkozy authorized one of his spokesmen to say he would walk out of the meeting if serious measures to impose tight banking regulations were not considered. French politicians of the right and the left have long deplored the free-form capitalism practiced in London and New York’s financial districts.

By chance — or not — President Lula da Silva is stopping off in Paris Wednesday to meet with Sarkozy before flying to London.

The final phase of planning for a summit is the period of managing expectations. Reporters are briefed off the record. The host keeps quiet the week before as a way of further dampening. Gordon Brown has done his best to honor that rule. Now Thursday’s meeting is expected to do no more than show that the leaders understand the gravity of the situation and are looking for solutions together. There is likely to be something concrete about the structure of the IMF and a commitment on aid.

Expect to hear mentions, but no details, of stimulus packages and regulations. And expect to see plenty of smiles in the aptly named, "family photographs."

Additional stories on the G20 summit:

A helpful guide to saving the world

It all comes down to derivatives

For more on the global economic crisis: