Davos globalism adopts a conscience

By Robin Oakley, CNN.com Europe Political Editor

DAVOS, Switzerland -- The World Economic Forum will never be quite the same again -- but probably it does not want to be.

Organisers and participants alike are these days concerned to present the human face of capitalism. Corporate conscience is in fashion. Inclusion is the buzz word.

The street protesters who were prevented by heavy-handed Swiss police from getting anywhere near the 2,500 business leaders and politicians attending the world's biggest think tank will count the change as their triumph.

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So will those who rioted in Seattle in 1999 or who demonstrated last year in Prague and Nice at other gatherings of influential people. They have made a difference, but change was happening anyway.

The organisers of the forum in Davos, Switzerland, had long ago invited a string of politicians from under-developed countries and the non-governmental organisations who plead the causes of the disease-ridden and poverty-stricken to help them debate this year's themes of sustaining growth and bridging the digital divide.

There was too some genuine humanitarian concern on display. Two stars of the show were Mexican President Vicente Fox and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

It was not as a software whiz that Gates made his mark, it was his $100 million gift to AIDS research and his passionate commitment to fighting the pandemic which had people talking.

Mexico's new president hit just the right theme for this year when he urged the delegates to do more than sugarcoat the present form of globalisation and to think of the 1.2 billion people living on less than $2 a day.

Another star was United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, who impressed journalists in a private session with his command of detail and who went up front to warn the Davos set that unless they proved to be more inclusive in their trading practices then there would be a serious backlash against globalism.

Business triumphalism was in short supply, with many of those present smarting from dot com collapses. And this year's meeting was much stronger on questions than on answers.

The U.S. economy was the biggest question. Most seemed to conclude it would be slowdown rather than recession and that Europe was strong enough not to catch a cold from the cool breeze blowing across the Atlantic.

But with no representative of the Bush administration attending there was much talk of a coming decoupling between the U.S. and Europe.

Defence in particular is causing tensions. Europeans are fretting that the National Missile Defence plan could spark a new arms race while failing to see that if the technology can be made to work no U.S. administration is going to deny itself that protection.

Bush's lack of overseas travel did not impress European leaders

Americans muttering over dinner tables that the new European Rapid Reaction Force would ring the death knell for NATO were themselves becoming a Rapid Overreaction Force. For years to come most of the force's capabilities will have to be borrowed from NATO anyway.

But there was too a sense of cultural decoupling as well, with the French, Germans and others resentful that what binds their youngsters together is less a sense of Europeanism than their enjoyment of American food, fashions and films.

Curled lips about the "death penalty president" and George W. Bush's lack of travel experience did not augur well for future trans-Atlantic relations.

Peacemaking efforts did not seem to prosper much either. A clutch of Balkans presidents came and made their pitch about regional reconstruction while scarcely looking at each other.

And a supposed bridge-building meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had Peres wryly observing that he thought he had been invited to a wedding, not a funeral after a classic anti-Israeli rant from the Palestinian president.

But for this first-time observer of the Davos scene there was plenty of attraction still in the intellectual bazaar which is laid out for the delegates. You can listen to cancer experts detailing the latest progress and introducing you to "doctorless medicine" before going on to debate the ethics of the advances in biotechnology and mapping the human genome.

You can hear "deep sea technologists" discussing computers which smell, washing machines which tumble your shirts on a voice command and vacuum cleaners powered not by electricity or batteries but by "eating" the cake crumbs they sweep up.

You can hear Hong Kong businessmen urging President Bush to send all his congressmen on cultural classes, stroll by legendary music producer Quincy Jones signing CDs for fellow delegates and hear President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria discussing the future of their continent.

It is a heady mixture. Old hands say it is a touch short of the glory days. But there is still plenty of business being done in those back rooms. And politicians back home will have to find answers over the next few years to many of the questions which earned an airing at Davos.

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