This is the last of five dispatches from Davos. Click here to read about Wright’s arrival, here for predictions of protest, here for an eruption of violence, and here for adventures in networking.
The View From 30,000 Feet
Of all the headlines that came out of the World Economic Forum while I was in Davos, my favorite was from the International Herald Tribune: “Globalization Foes Have Their Say: Poor Countries Unleash a Barrage of Criticism at Davos Forum.” The headline is wrong, but it’s wrong in a way that captures the significance of this year’s forum.
It’s true that some people you might call “globalization foes”—or at least, foes of the rapid globalization now underway—had their say in Davos. Lori Wallach, head of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, a prime organizer of the Seattle demonstrations, was there, as were others of her ilk, representing American labor unions, transnational environmental groups, and other lefty nongovernmental organizations.
What is not true is that the foes of globalization included leaders of the “poor countries.” Yes, presidents from Africa and Latin America unleashed a “barrage of criticism” at Davos, but they focused most of their firepower on one goal: lowering the developed world’s barriers to trade in textiles and agriculture. That is, they want to speed globalization up. (They complain—rightly, so far as I can tell—that northern nations welched on a commitment to open textile markets and curtail farm subsidies, even after the south had kept its end of the deal by accepting intellectual property rules designed in the north.)
Here lies a basic fact that got almost no air time in Davos, and was at times actively obscured: The globalization debate isn’t between the haves and the have-nots in some universal sense. The interests of some of the north’s “have-nots”—such as American workers and French farmers—often conflict with interests of the world’s have-nots: workers and farmers in the poorest nations. As noted in an earlier Dispatch, Wallach in particular obscured this tension, acting as if she and leaders of the developing world are reading from the same page, when in fact these leaders are clashing head-on with one of her constituencies, American labor.
I don’t want to be too hard on Wallach. For one thing, at the moment she’s sitting two seats away from me on a Swissair flight headed back to the States, a fact that has an oddly inhibiting effect. For another thing, she wasn’t alone in papering over these tensions. In Davos, John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, was on a panel with Thabo Mbeki, president of South Africa, and neither took pains to highlight their differences. (A hint of tension between northern lefties and southern nations came when someone from the audience asked Mbeki if, given the environmental cost of an expanding global bourgeoisie, his people should pursue a less materialistic, more spiritual path than the north had pursued. Mbeki replied dryly that he was perfectly happy for his people to be poets, but he wanted them to write their poetry on full stomachs.)
Why is it that, on this particular issue, so few illuminating sparks flew at Davos? In part, I think, because the Mbekis and Sweeneys of Davos felt united by 1) a sense of discontent with the status quo, even if their specific grievances collide; and 2) a sense of alienation in a cultural setting dominated by northern executives and politicos. Looking out on a sea of wealth and power, an American labor leader and an African president can feel as if they’re in the same boat.
Part of the problem may also lie in the fabric of the conference: Moderators tended toward the genteel, and panels were sometimes too homogenous for their own good. It would have been great for Wallach—a clever and impressive speaker—to face off against someone more bullish on globalization. This year, I gather, the closest thing to that came at a dinner on nongovernmental organizations, where Wallach watched as Jagdish Bhagwati—an economist who, being from India, knows something about developing nations—told the NGOs that parts of their agendas could harm workers in the developing world.
Though I’m dwelling on a particular issue—tension between southern nations and northern lefties who claim to speak for them—the point I’m trying to make is more general. The World Economic Forum’s decision to become a broadly inclusive talk shop, and hence the world’s most high-powered broadly inclusive talk shop, could be momentous, but only if it produces results in the form of compromises struck among the planet’s major constituencies. And the first step toward compromise is the candid delineation of difference.
I don’t want to overdramatize the changing composition of Davos. Some European press reports depicted the forum as having taken a radical leap forward this year, what with all the NGOs and poor countries that were represented. But lots of poor countries were represented the last time I was in Davos, five years ago, and this year wasn’t the first year that an NGO made an appearance, either.
Still, by inviting Wallach, Jeremy Rifkin, et al., the forum this year expanded its embrace all the way to Seattle. To what I’m pretty sure is an unprecedented extent, alpha males and females from left, right, and center convened to discuss the world’s future, with the implied premise that this future must be decided collectively. If you believe, as I do, that we’re approaching a time when we either achieve a coherent system of world governance or face the real risk of chaos, then this year’s World Economic Forum was truly a big step forward for humankind.
Random Gripes
Curious George: There was no shortage of Americans in Davos—635 of the 2,200 participants—but there were no high-ranking officials from the Bush administration. The Clinton administration, in contrast, was just about always at Davos—either Clinton himself, or such high-ranking officials as Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. (There were gobs of people from Congress this year, including John Kerry, Ed Markey, and Bob Toricelli. I nearly collided with Orrin Hatch in a bathroom, and Jim Leach was in the audience for my ode to world governance at a panel discussion on Thursday, though he seemed unimpressed.) Was the Bush absence due to the hasty transition, or to Bush’s alleged insularity and the administration’s seeming obliviousness to the world’s growing interdependence? Next year we’ll find out.
A word on behalf of the Swiss police: A lot of people from the NGOs were indignant that the police kept people from protesting—first by using heavy-handed tactics to keep them out of Davos, and then by using water cannons to disperse the few who got there anyway. Personally, I’m not too worked up about this. First of all, the “water cannons” weren’t set on stun; judging by the CNN footage, the water was arced in at the demonstrators, not blasted at them, and its purpose was to get them so cold that they had to head indoors. Second, when you’ve got lots of heads of state in a building, you have to be more careful than usual. It is easy to look at that innocuous crowd of 200 protesters and say—as many critics did—that authorities should have just cordoned off a section of Davos and let them peacefully demonstrate. But if peaceful assembly within Davos had been the official policy, the crowd would have numbered thousands, not hundreds—and nobody could have guaranteed that things wouldn’t get out of hand. (At last year’s Davos demonstration, when police weren’t so stringent, a McDonald’s got trashed, and a small incendiary device was found inside the conference center.)
Overly moderate moderators: Back to this question of why key differences didn’t emerge in some panel discussions: Many of the moderators at Davos were either politicos or businesspeople, two categories of people who sometimes favor amity over clarity. This is often good—certainly the forum couldn’t keep attracting heads of state from all over the world if they got raked over the coals once they arrived. But in selected cases—such as the hoped-for debate next year between Lori Wallach and a player to be named later—a penetrating moderator would be nice. How about using a professional? I nominate Ray Suarez of PBS (and formerly of NPR’s Talk of the Nation), who excels at cordially isolating the crux of disagreements. He was in Davos this year. Next year they should put him to work!
Random Qualifications
I’m a bit of a lefty myself—honest! In pointing, above, to tensions between the interests of northern and southern workers, I don’t mean to say that the interests of the northern workers deserve no consideration. In fact, I’ve argued to the point of tedium for putting labor and environmental standards into the WTO. And I’ve tried to debunk the claim by leaders from the south that this would be bad for their workers in some general sense. (If the standards were mild, the effect would be like slightly raising the minimum wage: somewhat good for lots of workers, and very bad for the few who lost their jobs.) My point is just that, on the issues that developing-world leaders were stressing at Davos—opening agricultural and textile markets in the north—the tension between northern and southern workers is clear and direct, and denying that fact isn’t productive.
Was I too hard on Lori Wallach in Davos Dispatch No. 2? There’s a chance that the answer is no, and that I’m just feeling twinges of remorse because she’s sitting six feet away from me. But it’s true that, having just talked to her (for the first time ever), I must concede that she knows a lot of details about international trade rules (even if she does blurt them out so fast that trying to absorb them is like trying to get a drink from a Swiss water cannon). Anyway, I plan to interrogate her at length soon, and if it is determined by an impartial judge (me) that I owe her an apology, I will publicly extend one in this space. But meanwhile, let me close one loophole she might try to crawl through. People like her commonly claim that the heads of developing nations don’t truly speak for their workers. And I’m sure that’s sometimes true. But in the remarks for which I took her to task, she herself was calling those leaders the “voices of the south”—and was implying that the views they expressed in Davos were in concert with her agenda, which by and large they weren’t.
There are certainly areas in which lefties in the north see eye to eye with developing nations. Though I’ve stressed the tension between the two over the issue of northern trade barriers, there is agreement between them on some intellectual property issues, including the way patent protection makes it hard for people in poor countries to afford lifesaving drugs. Also, some southern leaders would like more control over capital flows into and out of their nation—a position on which they get sympathy not only from some northern NGOs, but also from the aforementioned Bhagwati, a long-standing free trader.
