Go Tell It On The Mountain

Each year, the World Economic Forum chooses a theme for its annual meeting in Davos.

And each year, veterans forget the choice before they arrive in the Swiss mountain town and get on with their usual Davos pastimes — counting heads of government; balancing champagne flutes and canapés; sneaking off for a quick run or two on the slopes (and since you ask, yes, a constant dusting during the week made the pistes gorgeous when the sun finally came out on Sunday, as the photo opposite proves). Plus, there's now celeb spotting, even if it is of a peculiarly Davos kind — by which I mean that nobody misses Sharon Stone or Brangelina, but delegates get quite excited if a session has not one but two Nobel economics laureates in the audience. What was that theme again? Who knows: let's catch another panel on the implications of climate change for business.

But the 2007 annual meeting broke with tradition.

The announced topic of the conference was "The Shifting Power Equation," and for once — at least for me — it worked, coming unbidden to the mind during countless quick conversations. Whether it was the growing significance of the Asian economies as compared with the Atlantic ones, or the extent to which technology has distributed economic clout from producers to consumers — and in the media business, turned consumers into producers themselves — the idea of a power shift seemed neatly to sum up what was on people's minds. Some examples:

The Vanishing American
There were no really big American names at Davos this year — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice didn't make the trip, and Vice President Dick Cheney, who notched up a surprisingly successful visit to Davos three years ago, stayed home, too.

But even if the cream of the Bush Administration had shown up, they would not have shaken the firm conviction in Davos that, in the wake of the fiasco in Iraq and the mauling Republicans received in the midterm elections, the U.S. is no longer the all-powerful hegemony, the hyperpower, that it seemed to be after the end of the cold war. To some, the schadenfreude was too much to resist: "They've been knocked off their perch," said one Brit, with grim and evident satisfaction. But much more often, the relative decline of American power was discussed with a worried mien, one that recognized that, if the U.S. did not make things happen in the world, then nobody else would, either.

That sense of foreboding was most obvious in talks on whether the Doha Round of trade liberalization can be concluded before President Bush's "fasttrack" authority to do trade deals expires on June 30. (After that, any deal would be nibbled to death by powerful interest groups in Congress.) Trade ministers met and remet on the margins of Davos, chivvied into shape by the indefatigable Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organization. At the end of the week, Susan Schwab, the U.S. Trade Representative, talked optimistically about the chances of a deal. "There's been a real step-up in the level and depth of dialogue," she said. But others doubted whether, given Bush's political weakness, any deal — especially one that further reduced U.S. subsidies to its farmers, which is the only one anyone else will accept — was doable.

The Russians Are Back
In the mid-1990s, in the first flush of economic and political freedom, you couldn't walk into a high-end store in Davos without tripping over some Russian businessman's "executive assistant," usually decked out in a sumptuous fur coat.

Then Vladimir Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin, Russia got serious, and the Moscow-to-Zurich run lost its cachet.