TIME EUROPE
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The Brilliance of the Brilliant
The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in snowy Davos, Switzerland attracts luminaries from around the world
By DON MORRISON
Day one of the hostage crisis, and the situation is grim. More than 3,000 presidents, prime ministers, central bankers, corporate chieftains, Internet billionaires, economists, policy wonks and freeloading journalists are being held hyper-communicado in this overpriced, under-hotelled Swiss mountain resort. They are prisoners of habit, intellectual curiosity and, yes, vanity. Drawn like moths to each others' brilliance, they are gathered here for a week of high-level speeches, panel discussions and informal chats on the great issues facing humankind. The event, of course, is the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. It has taken place in Davos, the 19th century tuberculin spa of Thomas Mann's exquisitely depressing novel The Magic Mountain, every year for the past three decades.
Mann, for whom life was never a bowl of cherries, would enjoy this event. Not only are lots of important people forced to endure ski-dormitory lodgings and cafeteria-quality food, but this year a cloud of anxiety hangs over the conference. Since last year's raucous World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, where opponents of free trade and related issues pretty much brought the proceedings to a halt, the armies of globalization have been in disarray. And Davos -- the conference, not the town -- is probably the closest thing globalization has to world headquarters. The World Economic Forum, a nonprofit organization based near Geneva and founded 30 years ago by a courtly, German-born academic, Klaus Schwab, is funded largely by 1,000 or so multinational corporations, which pay as much as $300,000 a year for the privilege. Not surprisingly, the agenda at the Forum's annual meetings has reflected the postwar Western consensus in favor of free markets and open societies. But as the ferocity of the anti-WTO protesters in Seattle indicated, globalization has its discontents these days. So the Davos crowd is trying to figure out what went wrong and reach out to its critics.
As a result, a large number of representatives from non-governmental organizations are on the program this year. They include some important environmentalists, labor activists and champions of the developing world -- people like Greenpeace's Thilo Bode, the International Labor Organization's Juan Somavia and Martin Khor, director of the Malaysia-based Third World Network. Meanwhile, some not-so-famous activists are threatening to lay siege to Davos, just as their ilk did to Seattle. Swiss police, who firmly but deftly contained a small demonstration of anti-business activists at last year's annual meeting, are girding for a larger show this week. Any rank-and-file activist who makes the three-hour journey up from Zurich to these cold mountains and subjects himself to the ruinous schnitzel without an expense account deserves respect for determination, if not necessarily economic sophistication.
Anyway, the real headlines this week will come not from what happens on the streets but from what a number of high-profile worthies have to say: Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Britain's Tony Blair, Chinese Vice-Premier Wu Bangguo, Mexico's President Ernesto Zedillo and about 20 other heads of state and government. (Ecuadorian President Jamil Mahuad is a late scratch; he was overthrown in a coup last week. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad bowed out the other day without explanation, though his government denied reports that he had fallen off a horse while on vacation.) Davos is traditionally a place where deals are done and international understanding is advanced at the highest levels, so it's good for the Middle East peace process that both Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will be here. But it's a shame Pakistan couldn't send anybody senior enough to take advantage of the opportunity to confer on neutral ground with India's Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Increasingly, the statesmen at Davos are being overshadowed by the titans of technology, and this year there is an e-normous number of them: Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, AOL's Steve Case, Dell's Michael Dell, eBay's Pierre Omidyar, Intuit's Scott Cook, Novell's Eric Schmidt, Pacific Century Cyberworks' Richard Li, Softbank's Masayoshi Son. I can hear their helicopters now, or at least one of them, setting down loudly on a nearby field. Soon it will be time to put on my snowshoes and trudge down to the overcrowded Congress Center to register. It's cold as a central banker's heart outside, and the wolves are howling. Or maybe it's the anti-WTO demonstrators. But go I must. Like 3,000 others in this town, I am drawn to the flame inexorably.
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