PARIS (Reuters) - Despite annual calls to slim it down, this year's Group of Eight economic summit in France is shaping up as another megameeting with a huge cast, tight security and an army of anti-globalization protesters.
President Jacques Chirac, who only last year speculated about scrapping the jamborees France invented in 1975, raised the profile of this year's session by inviting China's President Hu Jintao -- a little-known newcomer to the world stage.
Another new face, Brazil's leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and about two dozen other Third World leaders are also due to travel to Evian on Lake Geneva's southern shore in June to meet the leaders of the world's biggest economies.
The guests will not join the closed-door "rich men's club" talks, but a discussion round on global issues and bilateral meetings will give world leaders some leads on questions such as "Who is Hu?" and "What does Lula want?"
If there were any lingering illusions that France would heed the annual calls for a modest summit, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin scattered them by describing the meeting to Hu as "this major international rendezvous."
Preparations for the June 1-3 meeting have already given hints of the same. Evian, a lakeside spa known for its casino and luxury hotels, will be sealed off during the summit and protesters kept at a safe distance several miles away.
About 12,000 police, half from France and half from across the lake in Switzerland, will patrol the town, ply the waters and survey the site from the sky.
Washington promptly made clear it welcomed what will be for most leaders present the first opportunity to meet Hu since he became Chinese Communist Party leader last November and the country's president in March.
"The United States welcomes the participation of China in this meeting," the State Department announced after Raffarin invited Hu to Evian during a meeting in Beijing on Friday.
FROM "FIRESIDE CHAT" TO VIDEOCONFERENCE?
Slimming down the summit has been a perennial theme ever since what started out as a "fireside chat" at a former royal hunting lodge in Rambouillet near Paris in 1975 ballooned into a major media event with a cast of thousands.
The membership list of this "world directorate" has crept up over the years from the tight circle of the United States, Japan, West Germany, France and Britain. Italy and Canada joined in 1976 and the club was baptized the Group of Seven.
With the end of communism, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev wrangled an invitation to lunch at the 1991 London summit. His successor Boris Yeltsin started out with a cameo role but eventually won Russia full membership in 1998.
What sounded like a death knell began to ring in 2001, however, when that year's summit turned the Italian port city of Genoa into a battleground, with one anti-G8 protester shot dead by police during street battles.
In a radical step, Canada banished the 2002 summit to the isolated Rocky Mountains resort of Kananaskis, putting miles of forests, troops and grizzly bears between the leaders and the protesters and journalists 55 miles away in Calgary.
After that protest-free parley, Chirac wondered aloud about swapping the mammoth meetings for a videoconference, but clearly thought better of it when it came down to preparing his summit.
Among G8 leaders, Chirac has stood out as the one most ready to listen to the arguments of the anti-globalization protesters who have become a fixture of international events since the chaotic World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle in 1999.
But thousands of protesters are still planning to mobilize against the Evian summit, demonstrating near Geneva and aiming to upset the movements of delegates, journalists and summit staff housed in Geneva, Lausanne or the French Alps.
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