25th G8 summit

25th G8 summit
25th G8 summit official logo
Host country	Germany
Dates	June 18–20, 1999
Follows	24th G8 summit
Precedes	26th G8 summit

The 25th G8 Summit was held in Cologne, Germany, on June 18–20, 1999. The venue for this summit meeting was the Museum Ludwig in the central city.

The Group of Seven (G7) was an unofficial forum which brought together the heads of the richest industrialized countries: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada starting in 1976. The G8, meeting for the first time in 1997, was formed with the addition of Russia. In addition, the President of the European Commission has been formally included in summits since 1981. The summits were not meant to be linked formally with wider international institutions; and in fact, a mild rebellion against the stiff formality of other international meetings was a part of the genesis of cooperation between France's President Giscard d'Estaing and West Germany's Chancellor Helmut Schmidt as they conceived the initial summit of the Group of Six (G6) in 1975.

The G8 summits since the late 1990s have inspired widespread debates, protests and demonstrations; and the two- or three-day event becomes more than the sum of its parts, elevating the participants, the issues and the venue as focal points for activist pressure.

The G8 is an unofficial annual forum for the leaders of Canada, the European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The 25th G8 summit was the first summit for German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and was the last summit for Russian President Boris Yeltsin. It was also the first and only summit for Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema and Japanese Prime Minister Keizō Obuchi.