A jamboree just made for protests and protocol By Stephen Fidler in Prague
Anti-globalisation protests, such as those that hit the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank this week in Prague, have increased the premium on out-of-the-way locations for international conferences.
So the venue for the meetings the next time they are held outside Washington, in 2003, fits the bill nicely. Dubai may still be baking in September, but it is impossible to reach in a VW van.
The decision to hold the meeting on the western edge of the Arabian desert was more a matter of luck than judgment: the discussions began when most IMF officials thought Ya Basta! was a brand of spaghetti sauce.
The fund and bank agreed back in 1991 to stop the custom of holding the meetings every three years outside the US capital. But in the fine tradition of the institutions, this decision has been ignored.
So many governments want to host the shindigs that the habit is likely to continue. Deloitte & Touche estimated before the event that the overall economic benefit to the Czech economy of the meetings would range between $200m and $440m, with most of the gains coming from expected increased tourism - though the cost-benefit analysis for the McDonalds in Wenceslas Square turned out to be less positive.
Still, the format of the meetings is expected to provoke serious talks between the institutions on whether they can be streamlined. Given the security arrangements now necessary, the cost and disruption associated with them is rising.
Whether the institutions will manage to agree is another matter. The meetings this year were preceded by an agreement meant to govern the sometimes difficult relations between them. Both James Wolfensohn, World Bank president, and Horst Kohler, the new IMF managing director, repeated how thrilled they were with their new working relationship.
Sometimes, however, there are more revealing glimpses of their relations. The start of a joint meeting of the two main ministerial committees that govern the institutions was delayed on Sunday by a big controversy over the nameplates used to identify the ministers.
The difficulty was that the nameplates had been placed there by the World Bank and did not conform to IMF style in the designation of women ministers. The World Bank uses the title Ms, which the fuddy-duddy IMF secretariat has yet to adopt. A compromise was reached which allowed officials to avoid asking Clare Short, Britain's development minister, about her marital status.
Mr Kohler and Mr Wolfensohn were among the dignitaries trapped in the Prague congress centre - used by the Czechoslovak parliament in the Communist era - by Monday's protests. They were able to escape, not in the usual chauffeur-driven limo, but strap-hanging on the Prague Metro.
This is the same World Bank chief who telephoned Mike Moore, head of the World Trade Organisation, after the Seattle riots last November. If only he had consulted more with campaigning groups, Mr Wolfensohn suggested to his fellow Antipodean, then he could have avoided all the trouble.
But that was before protesters disrupted the spring meetings of the fund and bank in Washington, when the New Zealander telegrammed Mr Wolfensohn to remind him of his words.
Others who were also less than enthusiastic about the protesters were operators of the food and drink stands at the Strahov stadium, where a tent camp was created for the demonstrators. After a lousy weekend when only a fraction of the expected 5,000 protesters turned up, they were demanding rent rebates from the organisers.