The Group of Eight summit that closes on Friday is being hosted by Italy in L’Aquila. The summit was to have been held in La Maddalena, on Sardinia, but the venue was shifted after an earthquake hit L’Aquila in April as a “show of solidarity” with the victims. The move sums up the politics of gesture that these all too frequent summits embody. This one comes only two months after the G-20 meeting in London, and two months before the next G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, which will be the third such assembly in a year. One summit is an adventure; two are routine. After that, it’s publicity by hyperactivity, and activity as a substitute for achievement.

The wonderfully scattershot agenda of the Italian session betrays the grandstanding, and the tedium, that now characterizes these gatherings. The Italians assert that the G-8 need to become “more representative and more efficient,” as though there is no contradiction involved in inviting China, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and Egypt to the party and enhancing efficiency. A “new global governance” structure is needed to “bring the institutions closer to the people,” as though such a structure – merely by virtue of being global – could be anything but further removed from the people. Climate change must be stopped, but at the same time producers and consumers need to coordinate a stabilization of energy prices, as though the signals sent by changing market prices are not the most efficient way to move the world’s economy off carbon-based fuels.

There is a nod towards the need to oppose “food protectionism,” from which Italy benefits – by way of the Common Agricultural Policy – to the tune of over $6 billion per year. African development is yet another priority, though it is not a cause that will be advanced by the EU’s January decision to resume agricultural export subsidies. And, while Italy dreamed that the summit might engage Iran into responsibility in Afghanistan, the Iranians refused even to attend a preliminary meeting of foreign ministers. As a result, a summit led by Italy, Iran’s biggest trading partner in the EU, and including Germany and Russia, two of Iran’s most important economic and military enablers, will do nothing more than pretend to be serious about the Iranian nuclear program.

This is all hypocrisy. But it is not only hypocrisy. It is an expression of the inevitable gap between what big, active governments promise, and what they can deliver. Much modern statecraft consists of denying that governing involves making any meaningful choices. We can protect agribusiness in Europe and promote development in Africa. We can make our dime – or our Euro – from Iranian oil, and still convince Iran to stop developing nuclear weapons. We can create a global regulatory structure that will be more democratic and more efficient than the cooperation of sovereign nation-states. We can create a nationalized health care system that will cost less, cover everyone, and provide better care. We can nationalize major car companies and run them without corruption, more efficiently, and more effectively in every way than the private sector. We can have it all, without pain, and anyone who denies this is motivated by ignorance, or, more likely, ill-will. In its denial of tradeoffs, this is simply childish.

One of the advantages of limited government is that the choices it has to make are, by definition, limited. Once government gets big and active, it cannot do everything it promises – not simply because big government is inefficient, or because experts do not know it all, or because the world is complex, or because bureaucracies have motives of their own, though all this is true. It cannot do it all because no one can do it all. Incommensurability is not just a philosophical problem: it is a reality of government.

The gap between promise and achievement can only by bridged, for a time, by rhetoric, and by the appearance of ever-more relentless activity, by summit succeeding summit, and promise succeeding promise. Eventually, reality intrudes: the activity, at best, only slows, but people pay steadily diminishing attention to it, even as the volume at which the promises are made increases. Activist governments end up producing one commodity in abundance: cynicism. What a contrast to the liberals of the nineteenth century, who placed their hopes on the advance of popular education, and in informed public participation in politics. Even socialists like Clement Attlee did not aspire to promote alienation – though, in Britain, it was Attlee’s state that made the fateful move into activism.

Every Western government today is made in Attlee’s model. The differences between them are important, but – compared with what came before the rise of big government – they are also only a matter of timing and degree, as are the results of cynicism they breed. Those results depend, in part, on the political culture the cynicism has left in its wake, and, in part, on just how activist the state has been. Right now, all the facts call out for restraint on public spending: as the IMF noted in its recent assessment of “The State of Public Finances: Outlook and Medium-Term Policies After the 2008 Crisis,” governments need to ensure that stimulus packages consist of temporary measures that do not raise deficits permanently, and to pursue a growth strategy by broadening the tax base and lowering tax rates. Public finances are exhausted, the entitlements crisis – which the IMF describes as the “major threat to long-term fiscal solvency” – is getting worse, and loose fiscal and monetary policies are fueling inflationary expectations. But much of the psychology leans the other way. Blame for the financial crisis having been pined, ridiculously, on the ‘Anglo-Saxon model,’ there is the sense that the model’s emphasis on state restraint must now go by the boards. Above all, perhaps, there is the left’s argument that the crisis is an opportunity that is too valuable to miss, a chance to bring about a permanent increase in state activism that the political culture, or public cynicism, would reject in more settled times.

In Europe, the results of that cynicism were clearly visible in June’s European elections: the center-right parties won on the day, but the real victor was apathy. And that makes sense. The Continent has had the longest exposure to the stereotypical free-spending activist European state, and to the expert-driven, undemocratic model of the EU. Its disenchantment with the establishment is accordingly the most severe.

Indeed, to an extent Americans do not appreciate, this disenchantment was manifest long before the elections, as state after state – to no avail – voted against further EU integration, and as the share of the economy consumed by the state stabilized and even began to decline. The lack of enthusiasm that France and Germany have displayed for stimulus spending as a response to the financial crisis hardly makes them conservative: as Bruce Bawer points out, “many on both the right and the left, while acknowledging the need for welfare-state reorganization, have ultimately resisted it—as if the philosophical leap required were simply too great.” But it does, at least, place them on the downward slope of the spending curve. On the other hand, the crisis has offered the continent’s leaders a chance to play their favorite game: transferring responsibilities to supranational authorities, which, because they are undemocratic, can pursue an activist agenda unencumbered by any need to consult with actual voters. In the long run, restraint on spending will count for very little against this erosion of democratic sovereignty.

The U.S., for its part, looks to be at the start of another cycle of the sort that began in the 1930s. Contrary to popular myth, the Hoover Presidency (like that of George W. Bush) was an interventionist one. Hoover, after all, made his fame as a great Progressive administrator. The next government – Roosevelt then, Obama now – doubled down, in the erroneous belief that they were starting, instead of following, the trend.

From the European perspective, the difference between Roosevelt and Obama is that Roosevelt started off as an economic nationalist, whereas Obama shifts uncertainly between supporting free trade, backing a variety of protectionist measures (such as the “Buy American” provisions in the Stimulus Act), endorsing a European-style global financial regulator, and proclaiming the benefits of a free market. His reluctance to accept the European transnationalist agenda, and the rapidly-waning support for Obama’s economic agenda among independent voters is a reminder that, even if the GOP’s credentials as a party of fiscal restraint and limited government were badly damaged in the Bush years, a substantial part of the country still accepts those aims as the right ones. They lack a party and a creditable leader, not beliefs.

But for now, the U.S., unlike Europe, is moving up the spending curve, becoming more European in its reliance on activist government. The U.S. is not, naturally, a cynical country. Normally, American optimism is associated with individualism, and thus with state restraint. But when coupled with the ‘do something’ excuse of a crisis, the American can-do spirit – in the 1930s and today – becomes a powerful instrument in the hands of liberal activists. That will ultimately bring about a reaction, when the inherent inability of activism to deliver all it promises becomes manifest. In the interim, though, the U.S., in ways we are still too slow to appreciate, will become an even high-spending, activist-government kind of place: for a time, the gap between reality and fantasy will be bridged by the creation of even more florid fantasies about governmental omni-competence.

And then there is Britain. If the U.S. is closing the gap between itself and Europe, Britain has already closed it. Britain has reached the peak of the spending curve: Americans, again, have been slow to appreciate the fact that New Labour has turned Britain into a continental state. As Roger Bate has emphasized, both public and private borrowing in Britain have spun out of control. The OECD’s most recent report on Britain’s public finances was savage, concluding that national debt will rise to 90% of GDP – this year’s budget deficit will by itself amount to 14% of GDP – and that cutting government expenditure will be “the main task of policymakers for years to come.”

The government is so frightened that it cancelled a planned comprehensive spending review, concluding that such a review would only reveal what everyone already knows: its twelve years in power, which began with the most favorable domestic and world economic situation in decades, have produced only a debt explosion and steadily declining efficiency in the public sector. For its part, the Economist referred to Gordon Brown’s April budget as “a dishonest piece of pre-election politicking,” and now spends its time considering “the thin line between bending the truth and lying outright” and posing the unanswerable question of whether politicians actually believe what they say when it has lost all creditability. It chose to illustrate that question with a picture of Pinocchio. Now that is the cynicism born of the activist state.

The sad thing is that, as bad as Britain’s finances are, they are in some respects the good side of the picture. If the will is there, Parliament, in theory, can always stop spending money. But that is the rub. Over the past decade, Parliament has lost much of its ability to make law in Britain. Authority has been moved down, into thousands of quangos – quasi non-governments organizations – and up, into the European Union, both essentially immune to Parliamentary scrutiny. The Parliamentary expenses scandal that has rocked Britain for the past several months is both a sign of and a contributor to an ongoing collapse in belief in government and the political class, aided and abetted by the government of the day and MPs of all parties. The 1960s had many malign consequences, but among the worst was the way it combined activism with a corrosive, left-wing skepticism about public service. As the fading of the Brown government reveals, the two are now inseparably linked: far too many voters now accept – bolstered by a good deal of evidence – that while politicians talk a good game, they are simply in it for the money.

Britain is now well into the second generation of this problem, which, in essence, is the problem of the slow collapse of Victorian standards of governing and behaving. It is impossible to imagine Mr. Gladstone doing as this government has done, impossible to imagine the Commons tolerating it, and impossible to imagine voters accepting it. When given a chance, they are now most unlikely to do so: there is no chance that a referendum on the Euro would deliver a positive verdict, and Labour’s catastrophic performance in the June elections suggests that, in Britain as on the continent, the financial crisis is likely to lead to a Conservative victory, and to a measure of financial retrenchment. What is less clear is whether that victory will staunch the slow bleeding of support away from all the major parties, bleeding born of impatience with the establishment that led to the rise of UKIP, the (over-hyped) BNP, the nationalist parties and – as on the continent – the triumph of the stay at home voter.

And, as on the continent, the EU is at the center of the British problem. Cutting spending is no cure for the problems inherent in the activist state if that activism is simply transferred up to an untouchable European Commission. As the now-famous Tory Euro MP Dan Hannan rightly notes, the EU is ultimately an expression of national pessimism, of a cynical lack of faith in the right and the duty of self-government. As such, once it gets rolling – and it is certainly rolling now – it is dangerously self-sustaining: it disempowers voters, and governments, which leaves the EU free to impose itself even more freely, and for its supporters to do the utmost to pull down any remaining opposition to Europeanism.

Ireland’s pending and EU-enforced revote on the Lisbon Treaty, which it has already rejected once, is one sign of this. The fact that Lord Peter Mandelson –the most powerful man in the British government today – went out of his way the week after the June elections to assert that Britain will “obviously” join the Euro is another. Come what may, today’s liberals are going to do their best not to allow the cynicism their activism breeds to become an obstacle for their policies. Having helped to drive Britain’s economy into the ditch, Mandelson is eager not to learn from experience by adopting more sensible policies, but to throw the keys out the window so that no future government will be able to drive anywhere else.

On Thursday, the second day of the G-8 Summit, President Obama emerged to announce what he described as “important strides forward” to addressing climate change, “one of the defining challenges of our time.” For the first time, he said, developing nations had recognized that they too had an obligation to “take strong and prompt action.” Therefore, they “agreed to take action to meaningfully lower their emissions relative to business as usual in the midterm, in the next decade or so.” To assist them in achieving this impossibly vague goal – since every nation will be able to argue that any given level of emissions is a reduction against “business as usual” – they will receive “significant financial assistance” from the richer states, certainly including the U.S.

Thus, for the sake of a cause about which there is significant scientific uncertainty, on a timetable of over thirty years, in pursuit of a goal that cannot be defined, the President has agreed to transfer large sums of money away from Americans to the corrupt, pollution-intensive dictatorship of the People’s Republic of China. An ambitious aim, to be sure, and the President was well aware that it might give rise to doubts. It was, he said, therefore vital when considering his plan to “fight the temptation towards cynicism.”

One wonders where that temptation towards cynicism comes from.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.