What G7 is and how it works

There is nothing to sign

No treaty founded the G7, no charter governs it, and no secretariat administers it. It has no headquarters, no budget of its own and no legal personality, so there is no instrument a country could accede to and no office that could receive an application. What exists instead is a calendar: an annual meeting of heads of state and government, a chair that moves between the members at the end of each year, personal representatives known as sherpas who negotiate the text through the year, and separate standing tracks for finance ministers, foreign ministers and others.

The nearest thing to a membership rule is a sentence in the first declaration. The leaders who met at the Château de Rambouillet from 15 to 17 November 1975 wrote that they had come together because of shared beliefs and shared responsibilities, each of them answerable for the government of an open, democratic society and for the prosperity of a major industrial economy. Nothing since has replaced that sentence with a criterion, and it is the sentence the group reached for on the one occasion it stopped meeting with a participant.

The order of the chair

Rambouillet seated France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Canada joined at the San Juan summit in Puerto Rico on 27 and 28 June 1976, and the European Community joined at the London summit of 7 and 8 May 1977. The list of states has been fixed since.

The chair passes in a fixed cycle: France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada. The order runs from Rambouillet through Versailles in June 1982 and Deauville in May 2011 to Kananaskis in Alberta on 15 to 17 June 2025 and Évian on 15 to 17 June 2026. Because it is a rotation rather than an election, the host of a given year is known long in advance, and the agenda is written by whichever government happens to hold the chair when the year comes round.

The eighth chair, and the sentence that closed it

Russia entered by stages rather than by admission. It took part in a post-summit dialogue from 1991, met the group at each summit from Naples in July 1994, joined everything but the financial and certain economic discussions at Denver in June 1997, and sat as a full participant from the Birmingham summit of 15 to 17 May 1998, which is where the name G8 begins. Kananaskis in June 2002 settled that Russia would host, and it did, at St Petersburg on 15 to 17 July 2006.

The suspension used the founding sentence. On 2 March 2014 the leaders announced they were suspending preparations for the Sochi summit. Meeting at The Hague on 24 March 2014 they published a declaration recording that the group had come together because of shared beliefs and shared responsibilities, that Russia's actions in recent weeks were not consistent with them, that they would not attend Sochi, and that participation in the G8 was suspended until Russia changed course. They met in Brussels on the originally scheduled dates of 4 and 5 June 2014, at the European institutions rather than in a member country.

What the text suspends is the eight rather than the seven: the declaration halts participation in the G8 and leaves the smaller group running unaltered. The catalogue records that wording and takes no position on whether the arrangement is a suspension or an ending.

The participant that is not a state

The European Community was at the table from 1977 and the European Union is at it now. Its place is asymmetric by design: the Presidents of the European Council and of the European Commission signed The Hague Declaration alongside the heads of state and government, and the Union neither takes the chair nor hosts a summit. Three of the member records here give the euro. The United Kingdom's membership of the European Union ended on 31 January 2020 and its place in this group did not move.

What a communiqué can and cannot do

Nothing the group agrees is enforceable, because there is no instrument to enforce and no organ to enforce it. What the record shows instead is a habit of starting a body and handing it to a wider membership.

The economic declaration of the Paris summit of 14 to 16 July 1989 resolved to convene a financial action task force, drawn from the summit participants and from other countries interested in the problem, to examine the use of banks and financial institutions for laundering the proceeds of drug crime. The Financial Action Task Force has set standards assessed far beyond the states that sat at Paris.

Finance ministers and central bank governors meeting at Bonn in February 1999 endorsed the creation of a Financial Stability Forum, on a recommendation from Hans Tietmeyer, then president of the Deutsche Bundesbank. The Forum first convened in Washington in April 1999. It was reconstituted in April 2009 as the Financial Stability Board on a membership the G20 had called for, and the G20 endorsed its charter of 25 September 2009 at Pittsburgh.

The pattern held in 2021. Finance ministers meeting in London on 4 and 5 June 2021 committed to a global minimum tax of at least 15%, calculated country by country, and then looked to the G20 and OECD Inclusive Framework to settle it. The rate was agreed in the room; the framework that carries it was concluded outside.

What the member records hold

Every record filed here also carries the OECD, the G20, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, so the grouping sits inside four wider memberships before it is anything of its own. Japan is the member with no NATO accession on its record; five of the others date theirs to the North Atlantic Treaty of 4 April 1949, and Germany's gives 9 May 1955. France, the United Kingdom and the United States hold permanent seats on the Security Council under Article 23 of the Charter.

The forms of government do not match. Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom are filed as constitutional monarchies, Germany and Italy as parliamentary republics, France as a semi-presidential system and the United States as a constitutional republic. Three records give the euro and the rest give a currency of their own. Nothing in the grouping requires any of that to agree, which is what follows from having nothing to sign.