To have and have not The Davos summit is being mirrored by an anti-globalisation forum in Brazil. Guy de Jonquières and John Lloyd report
Two thousand business and political leaders have been experiencing a distinctly "morning after" feeling in Davos this week. After the exuberant optimism that suffused many participants at last year's World Economic Forum, this time they are awaking bleary-eyed and nervous to a grey dawn.
Gone are the breathless excitement about the "new" US economy and the American triumphalism that previously both enthralled and irked other delegates. The question today is not about how high the US economy will soar but how far it will slide and how painful the fall-out will be for the world.
The consensus among economists in Davos is that a full-blown recession will still be avoided but that the current sharp slowdown will increase US unemployment, deepen Japan's structural problems and damp east Asian growth. In the words of Alan Blinder, a former vice-chairman of the US Federal Reserve: "It is quite a jolt and may have the feel of a recession."
A similar return to earth has chastened senior executives of once high-flying internet companies, whose presence is far less conspicuous than a year ago. Many concede that, instead of re-inventing the rules of the old economy, they now depend for survival on applying them to their own businesses.
The most candid mea culpa was delivered by Hasso Plattner, chairman of SAP, the German software company. Lamenting the $250m (£171m) lost by a recent internet venture with Intel of the US, he blamed "a business model taken from utopia". The days when such businesses aspired to 100 per cent annual growth rates were over, he said. "In sum, we are back to gravity."
At least the dotcom community knows what the rules of the game now are. Other delegates, pondering the political runes, are finding it much harder to decipher a future that depends heavily on the untested administration of George W. Bush, the US president. They are likely to get few answers in Davos because no member of the Bush team has shown up. That has not stopped some speakers taking pot shots at US hegemony - the most aggressive being a tirade by Shintaro Ishihara, governor of Tokyo and author of The Japan That Can Say No.
The more serious talking points are Mr Bush's controversial plans for a National Missile Defence system, his likely stance on trade and his attitude to Europe and Asia. The debate has exposed a familiar ambivalence, even among speakers sympathetic to the US, between the desire for strong American leadership and international engagement, and concern about the US throwing its weight around.
These mixed feelings have also surfaced in discussions on this year's headline Davos theme, "Sustaining growth and bridging the divides". Stung by criticisms that the forum is just a rich persons' club, the organisers have sought to include more representatives from developing countries, who account for half the 400 politicians present.
Politicians from countries including India, Brazil and Tanzania have bombarded the wealthy and powerful with calls for a better deal on trade and investment, spiced with accusations of hypocrisy and unfairness by industrialised countries. Yashwant Sinha, India's finance minister, berated the "north" for a catalogue of sins, ranging from protectionism to luring away his country's educated citizens and subscribing to double standards over environment policy.
But the most rousing speech so far was by Vicente Fox, Mexico's new president, who said more needed to be done to combat the spiritual deprivation created by globalisation. "Attempts to sugar-coat the current form of globalisation with compensating policies aren't nearly enough."
It is debatable how far this year's meeting will bridge the north-south divide or create a more compassionate public image for a gathering derided by critics as a citadel of bloodless capitalism. Some delegates think all the talk of inclusive policies and global corporate responsibility will evaporate once economic conditions get really tough.
Amid all the swirling anxieties and uncertainties, one principle at least appears to unite those invited to Davos. Even the critics of globalisation accept that the process is an inexorable reality. The differences are about how it should be managed and the benefits shared. d4 Ayoung Brazilian woman, naked to the waist, glides and jumps about a stage before a humid, crammed auditorium, her background a sea of multicoloured banners, her accompaniment the insistent throb of an Afro-Latin drum band. She declaims, as if in a stream of consciousness, a brilliant monologue against globalisation and neo-liberal economics.
"Can we not imagine a better world than this? Where the air will be free from the poison of fear of insecurity? Where the TV set is not the most important member of the family? Where food and communication will not be commodities because the right to eat and to talk to each other are human rights? Where justice and liberty, Siamese twins condemned to live apart, shall again be conjoined, back-to-back?"
This was not a Davos-ian disquisition on the importance of bearing down on inflation or the need for financial sector reform. It was transcendent and physical, defiant and sexual, poetically revolutionary yet unaffiliated to any political movement.
Bernard Cassens, a senior editor at Le Monde Diplomatique, a French journal that helped organise this week's "anti-Davos" World Social Forum meeting in the city of Porto Alegre, looked a little uncomfortable about the performance yesterday morning, admitting it was "very Brazilian, it is true" but insisting that it was "colourful, engaged, a drama to bring alive our themes".
The themes of the World Social Forum are those of the demonstrators of Seattle, Washington, Prague and other conferences of the global elite last year. They include how to produce and distribute wealth for all; how to construct a financial system that will tend to equality; how to "transform scientific development into human development"; and how to explore "the limitations and possibilities of planetary citizenship".
Planned at breakneck speed, the forum is a mix of good and bad organisation, intellectual rigour and fiesta. Its stars - the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, the Brazilian state where the event is being held; Olivio Dutra of the leftwing Brazilian Workers party; Jose Bove, the French farmers' leader; Ahmed Ben Bella, first president of post- independence Algeria - were mobbed by cameras and microphones, while other delegates hissed for silence. The opening speeches were full of declamation and little else - the product of a movement that sees itself as opposed to almost everything in the modern world but is leery of proposing much itself.
Opening one of the main sessions yesterday morning, Mr Ben Bella abruptly demanded a moment's silence in memory of his "dear friend" Che Guevara and spoke of "the light which shone from his dead body in those pictures which were printed everywhere, which illuminates our way still". In fact, many of the Latin American left have broken with Che Guevara's way, viewing the armed struggle as a dead end that helped to legitimise rightwing repression.
Mr Cassens, in the cool of his hotel cafe, gave some indication of the forum's ambitions. "This will now happen every year, like Davos, and it will become bigger and better. We will keep opposing the meetings of the global organisations, like those of the World Trade Organisation. But we will also build an alternative. We are not yet ready to have a definite programme, a 'little red book'. We have modest aims to begin a process."
There is more here than the crossing of French leftism with Latin American populism. The state of Rio Grande do Sul is well run by the Workers party. The city is clean, its public transport extensive, its public and commercial life lively. The participants in the forum are overwhelmingly academic and non-governmental organisation types. But it is a first sketch by those who see their ideals, or their ambitions, served by opposition to current economic orthodoxy.
Among those who turned up were two French junior ministers, as well as Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who resigned from the French cabinet last year and whose Mouvement des Citoyens opposes, as he puts it, "a world in which the domination of capital and of the financial markets works against democracy, and works against the need for long-term investments in health, in education, in culture".
Tomorrow, some of those in Davos, including George Soros, the financier and philanthropist, and Pascal Lamy, the European commissioner for trade, will debate globalisation over a television link between the Swiss resort and the Brazilian port. "It is of course useless, at least for us. For them it is useful only as press relations," says Mr Cassens. But by debating, Davos is conferring on Porto Alegre the legitimacy it needs if it is to grow. And grow it probably will.