Debt, the most pressing and most intractable challenge to the developed world, was in danger of slipping down the international agenda dominated by firefighting crises such as Russia, the Far East and Brazil. The thousands of postcards sent to Bonn on the fiftieth anniversary last February of the cancellation of Germany's wartime debts, courtesy of Jubilee 2000 campaigners, hit their mark. But the test of this pudding will be in the eating.
Window dressing ahead of a summit helps boost statesman status.
President Chirac made extravagant promises of a new deal for the world's poor before the Lyons summit in 1997 with little subsequently to show for it. He promised to speed up HIPC, but that is what we heard from Gordon Brown a year ago, and yet it still moves with glacial slowness. HIPC was set up in 1996, but it has as yet benefited only three countries - Uganda, Bolivia and Guyana. There is no sign in Schr der's tentative initiative of the scale or ambition of the schemes which resurrected his own country's economy postwar, and which are so urgently needed if a humanitarian injustice and environmental disaster is not to be carried into the next millennium.