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.

That was then. In 2007, the Russians were all over Davos once again — Russian politicians thinking ahead to the post-Putin era, and Russian businessmen riding the oil and commodities boom with a look of steely determination. Dmitri Medvedev, Russia ‘s First Deputy Prime Minister (and a rumored successor to Putin), spoke of Russia as “another country” from the way it had been in 2000, when its economy was marked by low productivity and high inflation.

Those bothered by the sense that Russia was starting to throw its weight around were told to relax. Russia, Medvedev said, wanted to be recognized as a major economic and political power “not by the use of force but by the example of our own behavior and achievements.” Any concerns about the way Russia sets about business and politics, Medvedev said, stemmed from “a lack of communication,” rather than anything Russia did. But those worried by Russia’s use of its energy resources as a political weapon — ask the Ukrainians or Belarusians about that — were granted little comfort. The days when Russia sent energy to its friends at less than market rates are gone for good. “There will no longer be any free gas for anyone,” said Medvedev, for those who had not yet got the message.

Demography As Destiny
Everyone arrived in Davos ready to talk about climate change, and plenty did. But for me, another meta-theme — much less evident on the formal program — kept cropping up in interesting ways. That was the idea that, as population continues to grow in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, even as the population in Europe stagnates at best, so huge and unpredictable political and economic power swings may follow. Certainly, the Indians present — this was the second year running that they provided a huge contingent, and threw some of the best parties, too — had the sort of confidence that comes from knowing that their domestic market is going to continue to grow. The European one won’t. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in her second year already something of a Davos star, spoke of the end of a “Eurocentric” view of the world, but most leaders I talked to thought that European public opinion was still woefully ignorant of the ways in which the old Continent’s influence may shrink in the coming years. That said, I wanted someone to challenge the conventional wisdom, and argue that low birthrates are compatible with long-term prosperity and happiness.

(Scandinavia, anyone?) But I didn’t hear that case.

Maybe that’s something for next year, as the Davos devotees gather again. “The world,” said British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in what was his last appearance at Davos as a head of government, “is in a kind of perpetual global conversation.” It’s the easiest thing imaginable to make fun of the sometimes self-important men and women with their self-important ways who trot to Switzerland each January. But the truth of the matter remains: despite all its challengers, you never hear more of that global conversation in one place, and one short spell of time, than you do in Davos.

Sometimes, power doesn’t shift.