Davos Dispatch

Robert Wright, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.

D-Day Eve

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Tomorrow is D-Day—the day the anti-globalization protesters are supposedly planning to make their presence felt at the World Economic Forum here in Davos. But they'll have to be pretty crafty if they're going to get anywhere near this conference. The town is crawling with submachinegun-toting cops. I talked to a local woman who said her husband was detained for four hours yesterday after he left some unattended packages at the train station. She also said she had heard that some people from Greenpeace were going to circumvent police checkpoints on the roads into Davos by skiing into town. Hmmm ... crafty.

Lori Wallach of Global Trade Watch, who is probably the closest thing the protesters have to an official representative within the walls of the conference, complained today that Davos has become "a near police state." She says police are roaming the aisles of trains as they approach Davos and sifting through the reading material of passengers. She says one guy was deported to Amsterdam after he was found to possess one of Wallach's treatises.

Not that I would take everything Wallach says at face value. Today during a panel discussion, she hailed an earlier panel discussion in which politicos from the developing world had complained about the rules of the global trade regime. Her summary: "Voices from the south" had said "that the system is just not delivering for their people." Strictly speaking, this is true, but Wallach's clear implication—that these "voices from the south" are her allies in a global battle between rich and poor—is not. The main things they had complained about were 1) agriculture subsidies in the developed world—the subsidies favored by some American farmers and by those anti-globalization French farmers who are Wallach's brethren; and 2) the stringent hygiene standards that the United States and other developed countries impose on imported foods—standards that, I venture to say, Wallach supports.

Of course, the far left is full of people who act as if they spoke on behalf of working people everywhere when in fact things are more complicated than that. But most of these people don't get the attention Wallach gets. Attractive, clever, and entertainingly sarcastic, she has become the unofficial standard bearer of the anti-globalization movement. And rightly so: she nicely reflects the movement's internal contradictions. (By the way, she'd probably reject the label "anti-globalization," but right now I can't think of a phrase that better captures what her, and the movement's, overall beef seems to be.)

Today I was part of a panel discussion, and I approached it with some dread. I was to appear alongside Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, whom I'd never met and whose book The Clash of Civilizations I'd given a pretty nasty review here in Slate. But though he clearly remembered the review, he was extraordinarily friendly. So I take back everything I said. I must have been getting his book mixed up with another book.

The panel was on world government. I had half-expected Huntington to denounce me after I delivered my traditional ode to evolving global governance, but he said he didn't disagree with anything I'd said. And the audience—including lots of corporate types—was surprisingly accepting of my argument that the World Trade Organization needs to move to the left. A guy from Merrill Lynch explicitly supported adding labor and environmental standards to the WTO.

Huntington is known for, among other things, coining the term "Davos Man" to describe the species of transnational elite that globalization has created. Today brought more evidence that I am not Davos Man. Once again, I find myself sitting in the "Executive Lounge" typing alone while just about everyone else networks. And when I go check my electronic messages at the kiosks that are scattered through the conference center, all I have is junk mail—notices about authors who are going to be signing books at the Davos book store. I stare enviously at real Davos Men as they access the kiosks and a long list of messages from fellow conference-goers cascades down the screen. Don't you feel sorry for me?

But it hasn't been a bad day. My crusade for world governance marches on. Even Wallach's panel had bright spots. Labor organizer Jay Mazur insisted—so many times that I believe him—that organized labor no longer supports national trade barriers and is now focusing on changing international trade rules—for example, getting labor standards into the WTO. (Today I spotted Mike Moore, head of the WTO, but as I was vacillating on the question of whether to walk up and ask him about this subject, he got into an elevator and disappeared.)

Well, it's time to return to my hotel, have a pathetic dinner alone, and get some shut-eye. I want to be awake by the time the protesters start skiing down the Alps.

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