Hanging Together: Cooperation and Conflict in the Seven-Power Summits, Revised and Enlarged Edition

by Robert D. Putnam, Nicholas Bayne

For nearly a decade the leaders of the seven major industrial countries―the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, and Canada―have met annually to discuss international economic and political issues. Regular summitry of this sort is virtually unprecedented in modern diplomacy. Proponents see the Western summits as providing collective leadership that is vital in a turbulent world, while critics dismiss summitry as distracting and even damaging to political and economic stability.

Hanging Together charts the modern dilemma between economic interdependence and national sovereignty. It assesses the history, decisions, successes, and failures of the seven-power summits from Rambouillet in 1975 to the 1983 meeting at Williamsburg, and looks forward to the 1984 summit in London. The authors show how the growing importance of international commerce and finance has caused national and international politics to become entangled, and how national borders have become more permeable. Born in an era of waning American hegemony, the summits reveal the tension between American leadership and collective Western management of the world economy. The authors also trace the struggles of heads of state to balance the conflicting imperatives of personal authority and bureaucratic expertise. Because summits involve the power and prestige of each country's highest authorities, summitry reveals in concentrated form how these conflicts are expressed and managed.

As a blend of contemporary history and political economy, Hanging Together demonstrates that summits are not isolated annual encounters, but part of a continuous process of international and domestic negotiation about the most important and controversial issues facing all governments today.

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Robert David Putnam is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government. Putnam developed the influential two-level game theory that assumes international agreements will only be successfully brokered if they also result in domestic benefits. His most famous work, Bowling Alone, argues that the United States has undergone an unprecedented collapse in civic, social, associational, and political life (social capital) since the 1960s, with serious negative consequences. In March 2015, he published a book called Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis that looked at issues of inequality of opportunity in the United States. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Putnam is the fourth most frequently cited author on college syllabi for political science courses.[