The central task of the Group of Eight industrialised states remains the effort to manage global economic tensions and challenges, including fiscal and trade balances, co-ordination of markets and currency values. All these issues will figure prominently at its summit later this week in St Petersburg, where Russia hosts the gathering for the first time.
But its agenda has become much wider than that since it was founded after the 1970s oil shock. The leaders will consider energy security, development aid and climate change, recognising that these now bear centrally on economic performance. Foreign policy questions include the Iranian and North Korean nuclear arms programmes and the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation.
The trouble is that the Group of Eight has neither the capacity nor the legitimacy to deal with such a huge agenda. It remains a mechanism of consultation and informal co-ordination rather than of legal decision-making among the major capitalist powers involved: the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Russia. The European Union has a watching brief on behalf of that important regional grouping, but this still leaves the gathering quite unrepresentative. The argument echoes the parallel one on how to reform the United Nations Security Council.
Russia joined the, as it was, G7 informally when its transition to a wild form of capitalism was recognised to be definitive in the 1990s. Now that it is stabilised into a more statist and authoritarian system, President Putin will use the summit to assert that Russia is no longer struggling to pay off its debts, but is a powerful player on its own terms. Altogether absent are China, India and Brazil - even though much of the G8 agenda arises from these states' growing success and how that can best be managed in the interests of the stability of the whole international system.
Whatever the reservations about capacity and legitimacy, realistically it must be acknowledged that the G8 brings together the world's most powerful states and leaders. When they decide to act together they can make a real difference. Thus it is sensible to make demands on their summit. Last year saw a powerful mobilisation of opinion in a number of countries around world poverty and development aid, making demands on the British G8 presidency under Tony Blair. It was valuable as to ambition and organisation, disappointing as to results one year on, and yet heartening as to the potential for transnational politics.
There has been nothing on the same scale this year. Mr Putin is using the occasion to underline and assert Russia's new world status, especially in energy security. The summit has good reason to recognise this. It should also insist that energy supplies should not be used to pursue political objectives if security is valued, and that international political leadership should respect human rights at home as well as abroad. The power concentrated at this gathering badly needs to be made more accountable.