1st G6 summit

1st G6 summit
Château de Rambouillet
Host countryFrance
Dates15–17 November 1975
Participants
Precedes2nd G7 summit

The 1st G6 summit took place on 15–17 November 1975, in Rambouillet, France. The venue for the summit meetings was the Château de Rambouillet near Paris.[1]

The Group of Six (G6) was an unofficial forum which brought together the heads of the richest industrialized countries: France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[2] This summit, and the others which would follow, were not meant to be linked formally with wider international institutions; and in fact, a kind of frustrated rebellion against the stiff formality of other international meetings was an element in the genesis of cooperation between France's president and West Germany's chancellor as they conceived the first summit of the G6.[3]

Later summits in what could become a continuing series of annual meetings were identified as the Group of Seven (G7) and Group of Eight (G8) summits — but this informal gathering was the one which set that process in motion.

  1. ^ Japan, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA): Summit Meetings in the Past.
  2. ^ Saunders, Doug. "Weight of the world too heavy for G8 shoulders," Globe and Mail (Toronto). 5 July 2008 – n.b., the G6 becomes the Group of Seven (G7) with the addition of Canada starting in 1976; and the G7 becomes the Group of Eight (G8) with the inclusion of Russia starting in 1997, reverting to the Group of Seven (G7) after the suspension of Russia in 2014.
  3. ^ Reinalda, Bob and Bertjan Verbeek. (1998). Autonomous Policy Making by International Organizations, p. 205.