Summit Conferences - Conclusion

While the principal aims of the summit conference has changed little from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, the environment in which summitry occurs has changed since the end of the Cold War. At present and for the foreseeable future, the "typical" summit conference, a bilateral meeting of national leaders, has been replaced by multilateral summits, reflecting the diverse circumstances and problems of an increasingly multipolar and interdependent world system.