"Doha will make Seattle look like a picnic," said the World Trade Organization (WTO) official. That was a surprise. After all, one of the reasons to hold the next summit of the world's trade ministers in Qatar's capital was that its government and remote location would make it harder for activists to reenact the protests that made the 1999 meeting of the WTO in Seattle famous and the Genoa G-8 summit fatal. "I wasn't talking about the action outside the building but about what goes on inside," she said. "The disagreements that scuttled the negotiations in Seattle will be even deeper in Doha. The chances of making any substantive progress are minimal."

Such comments highlight a telling paradox: The summits that attract today's angry flocks of antiglobalization protesters would not have accomplished much even if the protesters had stayed home. Indeed, the dramatic television coverage of protesters engulfed in clouds of tear gas obscures the reality that while the action in the streets of Geneva, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Prague, Quebec City, Göteborg, and Genoa was frantic and, at times, lethal, the action in the rooms where the dignitaries gathered was frustrating and, for the most part, inconsequential.

Both protesters and summiteers have a strong self-interest in conveying the impression that today's global gatherings are where momentous decisions for humankind are made. Yet for all the talk of a democratic deficit, the world's real problem is not that these summits produce too many decisions but that they produce too few. At a time when problems that require international...