Soaking in 'The Spirit of Davos'
TIME's Pat Regnier hangs with the anti-globalization activists at the WEF
BY PAT REGNIER Davos
| JANUARY 28 |
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It would be easy to write off the antiglobalization protests in Davos as a comic farce. At best, maybe 300 activists made it past the gendarmes on hippie alert at the Landquart train station, more than an hour outside of this remote town. They didn't get anywhere near the high-and-mighties in the bunker called the Congress Center. And then it only took a few squirts of the water cannon to convince them that it was time to go home. On television, those water cannon look pretty harmless. Any self-respecting radical, you'd think, would have waited for tear gas at the very least. But the Swiss police knew what they were doing. We're in the high Alps, and it's freezing cold. I got caught standing a little too close to front of the action, got soaked, and within five minutes there was a thin layer of ice covering me head to toe. It's a pacifying and faintly humiliating experience. That adrenaline rush you had upon seeing cops with guns pointed in your direction (even if they did have masking tape over the muzzles) is soon replaced by a devastating case of the sniffles. Even the hard core kids singing the Internationale must have been secretly dreaming of cups of hot cocoa and a warm blankie.
That said, the demonstrators I talked to didn't go home feeling entirely defeated. They thought they made the authorities here look petty and thuggish. There are, of course, legitimate security issues surrounding the World Economic Forum. Last year, that McDonald's got trashed, and the coordinators of this year's march refused to denounce such actions. And there are certainly people in this world who wouldn't mind seeing a bomb go off in the Congress Center. Some of those people might have been in Saturday's crowd. But in the end, here's all that the television cameras saw yesterday in Davos: the police training anti-riot weapons on a crowd of people whose only visible crime was walking down the street singing songs and carrying placards. Well, that and a few snowballs.
Inside the Forum, WEF officials talk about something called "the spirit of Davos." This ghost is typically invoked as a reminder to reporters that most of the sessions are supposed to be off the record. That way, the thinking goes, the high tech CEOs, trade ministers, and assorted crown princes can speak freely — all the better to Get Things Done. I'm skeptical of whether Davos is really about anything more than schmoozing and skiing. But if the Forum really expects to live up to its pretensions of becoming "a catalyst for the global agenda," as conference materials put it, demonstrations like Saturday's are going to be a part of the package. The antiglobalization activists on the streets share one big concern: that transnational organizations like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund have thwarted local democratic processes. They are frightened that Davos is becoming another opportunity for the rich to privately divide up the world's spoils. The ring of steel around Davos and the culture of symbolic secrecy inside the Forum aren't likely to reassure anyone on that point.
The organizers of WEF make much of the fact that the Forum is trying to open up the world, addressing issues like poverty, Third World debt relief and the environment. And it's true. More trade unionists, activists and think tank types are sharing brie and champagne with the power set this year. They are happy to be here and tell me that their voices are being heard, if a bit grudgingly. The trouble for WEF is that democracy isn't an invitation-only event.
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