Summitry as the social international: performance, audience, and vicarious identification

Abstract

International Relations (IR) scholarship reduces summitry as a site for leaders’ agency. This paper treats summitry as a social practice of states, and contributes to our understanding of it by arguing that summitry is a performance producing the audience and what I call the “social international” or world politics as a social space in which states act like people with social relations. The audience emerges with a summitry performance and vicariously identifies with the social international which is essential for the audience’s feeling at home in the world as it experiences world politics through their state personified by leaders and other state actors during a summit. I revisit the 1972 US–China summit and integrate original archives and secondary sources to illustrate how political elites in the United States prepared, staged, and performed rapprochement to engineer the American public’s expectations and reactions to a change in US foreign policy toward China. Poll figures and public discourse suggest the summit functioned as a vicarious contact between the American public and China, reinforcing the former’s sense of feeling at home in the world. The theory of summitry performance raises theoretical and empirical implications for how we think about shifts in public opinion in IR.