A group depends on what leaders make of it
By Cai Hong | China Daily | Updated: 2009-07-09 07:45
From England's Lord Palmerston in the 19th century to France's Charles de Gaulle in the 20th, statesmen have warned that countries have no friends, only interests. Times change, or at least language does. Today the talk is all about which G number you belong to.
Theoretically, G is short for group. Navigating international summits used to be easy: there was the unaccountable group of rich nations called the G7, which first met in France in 1975, and there was the "third world", represented by the G77 (which first met in Algiers in 1967).
Today leaders of the countries in the two worlds put their heads frequently together at G-whatever summits.
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