by Bob Hancké, Political Economist at the London School of Economics and Political Science

Many years ago, the American sociologist Robert King Merton coined a term for someone obsessed with procedural detail but oblivious to the substantive goals that these means were supposed to serve: a ‘ritualist’. Psychology has a parallel expression for someone who mistakes the external expression of a thing, or a part of the thing, as the thing itself: a ‘fetishist’. All sounds somewhat abstract? Well, open your paper and look at the news on the G8 summit in Italy.

Berlusconi, who has recently become famous for a lot more than bribing and escaping court judgments, winning local festivals with cheesy songs, owning several TV stations and newspapers, and running Italy into the ground, seems to have decided that getting several heads of state to Italy in one piece is going to be his contribution to world development – full stop. Today and tomorrow, people like Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy – on the whole people with, probably, rather a busy agenda in these troubled times – are going to be taken on a guided tour of an earthquake-destroyed medieval Italian town, into a room for lunch and for a ride by Silvio.

The Guardian reported yesterday that Obama was so frustrated by the lack of preparatory work in Italy that he sent out his top civil servants to organize something substantial (ideas, not food) for the Italian G8 summit. Conventionally, the organizing country sets the agenda and then cajoles the others into accepting a series of goals and usually some sense of the resources that will get you there, but Berlusconi is too busy with other things. Mind you, G8 summits usually do not lead to much in terms of tangible outcomes. For some reason, participating heads of state forget their vows for world peace and development when they board the plane home. But they can put an issue on the political map. ‘Making poverty history’, triggering an world-wide epidemic of colored wristbands, resulted from the 2005 Gleneagles gathering.

Two conclusions follow from this. The first is that Berlusconi is utterly incapable of running international meetings – in the same way that he has been incapable of running his own country. Before Silvio made his reappearance in 2001, Italy had become, for the first time in its somewhat chequered post-war history, a well-adjusted political economy: wages and inflation were stable, companies were moving up-market, and the political system had managed to reinvent itself by kicking out the old, often corrupt, parties. When Silvio took office again, he tried to destroy each of these cornerstones of contemporary Italy. And succeeded, it seems: GDP growth has fallen dramatically over the last ten years, inflation and unemployment are rising, and Italy’s GDP per capita is now below Spain’s. No wonder Silvio is looking for admiration elsewhere.

The second conclusion is that Obama is now, again, after the G20 in April, the leading voice in Europe. As it happens, I think that’s probably better than Europe can do on its own; but it is a surprising solution to the Kissinger problem (‘Who do I call if I want to talk to Europe?’). and it lays bare, again, the massive leadership problem in Europe.

PS. Thanks to Sarah Pilkington for coming out last week: I had no idea whose banner Bruce and Stevie carried on-stage in Hyde Park. Now I do. Great idea too, by the way; that’s why I borrowed it.