The 19th-century historian and political analyst Walter Bagehot divided affairs of state between what he called the dignified and the efficient. In the dignified category were great formal meetings of state, the pomp and ceremony surrounding heads of state and monarchs, and all the symbolic parades and outward displays of power. In the efficient category were all the practical procedures and interests by which the real power in the state operated, such as the political lobbies and parliamentary lawmakers, the business and trade lobbies, and deal-makers, the quiet diplomatic manipulators settling international issues behind closed doors, and all the people of wealth and influence who in the end shaped policy, and everything else in a society.

Apply this approach to the modern world and it raises a central question about G8 summits. Have these colossal annual gatherings fallen from the efficient into the dignified category? Have they become just gigantic (and expensive) media events, with much wining and dining, and ceremony while the real issues are decided elsewhere?

The balanced answer would be that although this is the danger, the G8 events have not quite slipped into this role yet. It is true that they have come a long way from the almost casual and very informal gatherings of a handful of world leaders (only seven of them in those days) they once were. The seven would retreat to some suitably remote location and ruminate informally together on key world issues, with scarcely a single official in attendance, except perhaps the odd private secretary and press officer to tell the demanding media afterward what they had talked about. Naturally this could not last.

Heads of state talking without their officials by their side was of course an anathema to the world's bureaucratic classes, who were highly nervous about what their political masters might reveal, or give way, or worst of all, actually decide. So these unstructured gatherings have long since been invaded by armies of officials hovering around their ministers. Even more noticeable has been the growth of mini-G8 meetings before the peak event, as for example the meeting of G8 finance ministers in early June in Osaka.

These preliminary meetings, not just of finance ministers but of environment, energy and justice ministers, and others, have increasingly become the overture sessions before the eventual grand concerto of heads of state and premiers at the final summit itself.

But as the G8 meetings have swollen in size, which was perhaps inevitable, there have been some redeeming and practical developments. The most important of these is that as the pattern of global power and economic weight changes, so other key players have been invited to attend.

Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa will all be in Hokkaido, and rightly so. After all, these not only comprise more than a third of the human race, but in terms of production and political weight are beginning to challenge the former dominance of the OECD countries and the Atlantic community. So it is right that the G8 should be rapidly metamorphosing into the G-13 at the least, with maybe more key players, such as South Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia, yet to come. It also makes sense that this much wider group should now be present since the issues at the top of the agenda are all, without exception, matters requiring global attention and global action. For example, it would be impossible, and certainly a wasted effort, to try to address the linked issues of soaring oil prices, swelling food prices, world energy security and climate change dangers without the positive involvement of China, India and Brazil. This is because China's and India's appetites for energy, especially for oil and coal, are one of the main drivers on the demand side in forcing up energy prices.

It is also because behind the truly shocking increase in the price of foodstuffs, leading to food riots and political demonstrations in many countries from Africa to Asia, lie the twin factors of much higher transport costs, thanks to oil prices, and lower food production, thanks to the switch to biofuels.

There is a further complex but powerful link between energy problems, food problems and climate issues.

The biggest and most effective means of checking carbon growth lies in maintaining and even expanding the great rain forests that lie around the global equator. Yet it is these forest areas that are most directly threatened by the enormous transfer of crops from food to fuel. The transfer is not always direct. Thus in Brazil, the growers of sugar cane — the one truly efficient ethanol source — take land previously used for soya — the key content in most food in North America. The soya farmers take ranching land and the ranchers cut down the forests to make grazing land. Thus in a chain reaction one set of good intentions — to cut fossil fuel use — collides with another set of good intentions — to preserve the rain forests.

Behind these interconnected concerns lies another factor that makes the new, enlarged G8 so necessary, and the old limited G8 structure so redundant. This is quite simply, the total transformation of world communications and information transfer thanks to the microchip. This has had an extraordinary two-way effect. On the one hand, it has swiftly globalized all the problems, whether they be food or disease, or water shortages or credit and banking weaknesses, or global warming threats or almost anything else. But on the other, it has made concerted action to address these issues much more of a possibility than ever before.

This does not mean that the solutions are just around the corner, but it does mean that all G8 participating governments, and their increasingly well-informed people, are becoming fully aware of the problems and how they are affected. If the G8 gathering promotes only that message, it will have served some useful purpose.

Of course there are many who want the G8 gathering to do much more. They would like to see binding worldwide undertakings to cap carbon emissions by putting taxes or charges on the big emitters around the world. They would like to see big increases in food production to ease world food shortages. They would like to see oil demand dramatically cut everywhere and at the same time oil production increase to ease the price pressure. They would like to see an acceleration of poverty reduction in the poorest countries. They would like to see peace return to the turbulent Middle East, the proliferation of nuclear weapons checked and the aggressive ambitions of Iran — constantly repeated in speeches from the Iranian president — somehow contained. That is a noble wish list, but the realists know that it is mostly in the realms of utopia.

Not only do these ambitions conflict with each other but they require a degree of intimate and trusting cooperation between all nations, great and small, that simply does not exist and shows no sign of existing in the future. For the developing world to continue to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty — as China to its credit has done — the basic requirement is massive supplies of cheap energy. A policy of actually raising energy prices by taxes and charges to curb emissions, and check global warming three decades hence, stands no chance at all of being adopted.

Or to take another even more difficult area, no basis for agreement exists at all on the right policies for Middle East peace, which seems as far away as ever. Yet this, too, presents a global crossroads through which almost every other issue passes.

Insecurity and terrorism in the Middle East means unreliable and expensive oil, it means slower world growth, more debt in Western economies, more financial instability and more dangerous arms races between the Middle East powers.

There is no consensus at all on how to curb Iran's ambitions, with the Americans still talking about force being "an option on the table," and the rest of the world arguing that the use of force would certainly bring down the entire financial structure of the world, and turn the whole Arab and Islamic world against the West even more violently than at present. And there is little consensus on how to make peace between Israel and a new Palestine.

There was a time when at these global summits it was clear who was in charge and should take the lead.

The obvious "top dog" was the United States, which had all the firepower, all the economic resources, and all the innovation and ingenuity to make it the one unquestioned superpower. But these times are gone. America's reputation as the generous and benign Uncle Sam of former days has taken a severe knock in Iraq and Arabia, and in consequence all over the world. But the so-called asymmetry of warfare has removed America's natural dominance as a military power. The U.S. may spend ten times more than the rest of the world on armaments, vast carrier fleets and missile firepower beyond anything ever seen in history, but the supreme irony of the microchip is that it miniaturizes weaponry and military power. Small groups with small weapons can inflict as much damage as the giants, as events in Afghanistan demonstrate.

The superpowers are no longer super. No amount of expenditure on high-tech weaponry can defeat deadly but small weapons, obtainable in the arms bazaars of the world, in the hands of determined rebels and terrorists.

Herein lies an even deeper lesson for the grandees of the G-8 as they sit at their summit. The world they survey has become a more anarchic and less deferential place. It is even less ready than before to accept that its rulers know best, or indeed that those who gather at G-8 venues are in any way at the "summit" and in a position to command the world. Perhaps power is slipping from their grasp and is lodged somewhere else or perhaps it has drained away into the hands of a billion online citizens who think they know just as much as or even more than any summiteer.

The Europeans have just experienced a nasty cold shower of this new reality. While their rulers and governors have been trying to impose a new system of governance for the European Union from the top down, at the grass roots people have rebelled. Given the chance of a referendum the Irish have rejected new proposals to strengthen the central institutions of Europe in favor of their own local democracy, which they prefer and which they can control, as against vaguer concepts of European democracy that seem remote and unaccountable. This has the effect of stopping the entire treaty process in its tracks since all 27 EU member states are required to agree, and ratify the new treaty and all its proposals if it is to come into force.

So EU plans for a semipermanent president and a powerful single foreign minister have been postponed. The EU representation at the Hokkaido summit, which a few weeks ago could have been expected to carry new weight and speak for a united Europe with new authority, will not now be able to perform in that role. The challenge for this upcoming G-8 gathering will therefore be to reach out to a new world — a world of networks, rather than blocs, a world of the energetic smaller states as well as the giants, and a world in which grand utopian plans and solutions will have little impact.

The answers to the world's environment problems probably lie in millions of small technical and practical innovations rather than in any grand summit strategy. The answers to food costs and fuel dangers probably lie in changing the behavior of a billion citizens at the grass roots. The answers to nuclear dangers and weapons proliferation probably lie in the common sense of a young Iranian generation and their attitudes, rather than in the use of force or ambitious new peace processes. And the answers to development in the poorest societies probably lie more in grass-roots enterprise and honest politics rather than in massive aid handouts.

If the G-8 plus 5 can send its leaders home with these practical messages; if the media who look for instant solutions can come away with more understanding and realism; and if the world can grasp that problems may be global but wise solutions will be local, then this summit will have done much good to the human race. But that will mean the kind of high statesmanship that calms rather than excites or inflates expectations. And as every politician knows, that is not at all an easy task.

David Howell is a former British Cabinet minister and former chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. He is now a member of the House of Lords ([email protected] www.lordhowell.com).