Media Releases

Was the G8 Deauville Summit a success or a failure?

May 27, 2011

TORONTO, ON — Accord­ing to John Kir­ton, direc­tor of the G8 Research Group, the sum­mit promised to be an excep­tion­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant event. Sel­dom before had a sin­gle G8 sum­mit con­front­ed such a broad range of tight­ly inter­con­nect­ed burn­ing crises — wag­ing war to lib­er­ate Libya, bring­ing democ­ra­cy to North Africa and the Mid­dle East, cop­ing with Japan’s nat­ur­al and nuclear dis­as­ters, and pre­vent­ing new fis­cal and finan­cial crises from Europe or the Unit­ed States from snuff­ing out the glob­al eco­nom­ic recov­ery gath­er­ing force. The Deauville Sum­mit also had to deal with the for­mi­da­ble chal­lenges on its built-in agen­da, notably ter­ror­ism, nuclear pro­lif­er­a­tion, pira­cy, drugs, transna­tion­al crime, Afghanistan and Pak­istan, and a new part­ner­ship with Africa for devel­op­ment, health, edu­ca­tion and good gov­er­nance. The sum­mit final­ly had to take up the new ini­tia­tives added by its French chair — the oppor­tu­ni­ties offered by the new cyber tech­nolo­gies and inno­va­tion for green growth.

Kirton’s full assess­ment is avail­able at <http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/evaluations/2011deauville/kirton-performance-110527.html>.

-30-

For more infor­ma­tion, please con­tact:

Made­line Koch
Man­ag­ing Direc­tor
G8 Research Group
T: +1 416 588 3833 or +44 77 00 07 58 33
mad.koch@utoronto.ca
http://www.g8.utoronto.ca