Détente reached its peak in the mid-1970s. A visible sign of this easing of the East-West conflict was the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), which thirty-five heads of state and government signed in Helsinki in July 1975. On July 31, 1975, the government leaders and foreign ministers of the United States, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Britain met for lunch and discussed the French suggestion of holding a joint summit with Japan later that year to discuss economic and monetary problems. This gathering launched the world economic summits that have taken place annually since 1975.

In the 1970s, the world economic summits served primarily to coordinate economic and monetary policy between the leading industrial nations. The East-West conflict did not show up on summit agendas until the early 1980s. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union fundamentally transformed the role of the world economic summits, and Russia was gradually integrated into the summit process.

MULTILATERAL SUMMITS OR AMERICAN UNILATERALISM

By the beginning of the 1970s, several leading American politicians had repeatedly suggested the idea of a multilateral summit of major countries to discuss international economic and monetary questions, but always without success. In 1971, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, had proposed such a meeting to overcome the world monetary crisis, and the high point of the “year of Europe” proclaimed by Kissinger in 1973 was to be a summit meeting between Nixon and the heads of government of the European Community (EC).