The Significance of the Seven-Power Summit
by John Kirton

Notes:

5. The term "sherpa" comes from the native porters or bearers who assist mountain climbers in the Himalayas. The term preserves the fiction that these individuals serve only the most modest functions, and the fact that the summit is a forum where individual leaders have a unique ability to transcend entrenched bureaucracies and professional advisers and make decisions for themselves. The phrase, and the formal designation of personal representative, shows the strong bias and key feature of the summit as an antibureaucratic, transcendently political institution devoid of a separate organization or secretariat and dependent on the individual leaders involved. For the views of sherpas on the summit, see John Hunt and Henry Owen, Taking Stock of the Seven-Power Summits: Two Views, International Affairs 60, no. 4 (Autumn 1984): 657-61; Robert Armstrong, Economic Summits: A British Perspective (Toronto: Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, 1988); Pascal Lamy, The Economic Summit and the European Community (Toronto: Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, 1988); Allan Gotlieb, Canada and the Economic Summits: Power and Responsibility (Toronto: Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, 1987); and Sylvia Ostry, Summitry: The Medium and the Message (Toronto: Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, 1988).

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