davos08

Lots of bloggers have already commented on this New York Times story about how U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Zalmay Khalilzad is catching flak for—the horror!—sitting next to an Iranian in Davos. But the Iranians have their own demons to exorcise:

When Timothy Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, arrived at a lunch on the theme of "Political Islam and Democracy," he was seated where Samare Hashemi Shajareh [the close personal advisor of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] was originally supposed to sit. But Samare Hashemi Shajareh had refused to be seated opposite an Israeli journalist.

It's stupid when Iran plays these kinds of games, and it's stupid when the United States does, too.

UPDATE: I see that the FT's Gideon Rachman has a similar Iran anecdote from Davos:

Eventually I struggled downstairs and sat through the press conference. But a nap might have been a better use of my time. [Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr] Mottaki said almost nothing. The only amusing moment came when he said, gallantly, that he would like to take a question from one of the ladies. Unfortunately, the woman he motioned to turned out to be an Israeli journalist - so he refused to answer the question. Refusing to talk to people usually makes you look silly, I think - which is perhaps a lesson the White House should bear in mind, when thinking about Khalilzad's appearance in Davos.

Well said. 

JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images

Further proof that blogging is injurious to your plans to enjoy Davos: Having sent off my previous post after 3 a.m., I awoke too late to show up at a UNICEF panel with the former child soldier Ismail Beah, whose bestselling memoir has just come under attack from a section of the Australian media. Last night, with my blogging duties in mind, I managed to forget the Google After-Hours Party, a much sought-after event where the likes of Bono, Bill Gates, and Tony Blair hobnob with the regular pass-holders. So this will definitely be my last post: In future years, if I return, it will be to enjoy myself fully rather than enlighten the cognoscenti.

The last full day of the Forum, Saturday, began to show a slight slackening of the pace, as many attendees started bidding farewell to Davos. (The official closing is on Sunday, with a final session expected to attract so few that it has been shifted from the plenary Congress Hall to a smaller room, and a lunch in the mountains, both of which are likely to be feel-good events and neither of which I intend to blog about.) There was a strong session on the global economic outlook, which nonetheless only confirmed that the outlook is mixed and that economic forecasting is usually slightly less reliable than meteorology.

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty

I attended one of the prestige private events, a lunch with the Japanese prime minister (who had flown down to Davos in the midst of a regular session of his country's parliament, the Diet, something that in the previous 37 years had only been done once by any of his predecessors). But the number of empty seats at the half-dozen tables around the PM testified to the declining salience of Japan, a country that two decades ago was seen as the world's economic powerhouse and, bluntly, no longer is.

Otherwise, it was a day of conversations—some accidental, some planned—with a host of friends from the multilateral world: Juan Somavia, the head of the International Labor Organization, EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson, Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo of the Yale Center on Globalization, and my old U.N. colleagues Zohreh Tabatabai and Nick Van Praag. Talking to these dedicated servants of the international system was itself a reminder of how little Davos had focused this year on multilateral institutions, once seen at the Forum as the foundation of global cooperation and now largely treated as somewhere between an irrelevance and an afterthought.

So, how would I wrap up this week's experience of Davos? A few observations, not meant to be comprehensive:

• The Forum remains, above all, a networking event. People come to meet and be met, and officials as well as executives expressed satisfaction with the large number of private and "bilateral" meetings they were able to hold in Davos. By this yardstick, the Forum was a success—as it always is.
• The panels were, as usual, of varying quality, with world-class speakers and a few slightly off their game. The scheduling—a huge challenge—meant that no one could really attend everything they'd have liked to, because each interesting panel clashed with another interesting panel.
• Some of the topics chosen were of limited interest, and some of the omissions surprising ones. There was surprisingly little discussion of U.S. politics in a presidential election year—and few American political figures were present. The first few days, thanks to the gyrations in the financial markets, prompted an excessive degree of short-termism in the conversation, which was unfortunate for an event that likes to think of itself as taking the grand and long view of the really important trends in the world.
• In my opening post, I mentioned I'd pay attention to India. There was an extraordinary number of Indians present. The movers and shakers from the worlds of business and politics ranged from the finance minister to the CEOs of all the top information technology companies. But what struck me was the extent to which India is now taken for granted at Davos, in a good way. There's scarcely a panel without an Indian on it, and most discussions of world affairs—economic or geopolitical—witnessed several mentions of India. This Forum afforded confirmation, if any were needed, that my homeland has truly arrived at Davos. It no longer needs any special effort to promote itself to this audience.
• I also promised to look at the attention paid to poverty and development. Some years ago, a World Social Forum was created as a challenge the World Economic Forum. This was the first year in nearly a decade that there wasn't a rival gathering proclaiming that "another world is possible." This is at least partly because Davos has quietly taken on board the same slogan, as this year's Forum demonstrated. The discussions of development and corporate social responsibility have reached a level of seriousness that can only be applauded by an old U.N. hand like me. Of course, action must follow and results have to be visible, but both are beginning to be seen, and the companies and political leaders at the Forum are in many cases responsible for that positive trend.

Finally—as the debris of the extensive Bahrain-sponsored lunch is cleared away and preparations begin for tonight's concert and the black-tie Gala Soirée—it is time to reflect on those peculiar habits of Davos Man (and Woman) that they will have to struggle to shed when they fly away from this snow-capped wonderland. These include, but are not limited to:

• The Davos bend-and-bob: the peculiar movement required to stretch your smart-card badge to one of the ubiquitous scanners that determine whether you can be granted entry, whether you can read your e-mail, and whether you can attend a session for which you may have forgotten to register.

• The furtive chest glance: The quick darting movement of the eye toward the dangling badge that sports a participant's name, which usually precedes a familiar exclamation of pleasure at meeting its wearer, whose identity you had completely forgotten until you saw his or her badge. (Davos is the only place where it is completely socially acceptable, when you meet a woman, to look quickly at her chest first. The operative adverb is "quickly.")

Enough amateur anthropology. Now for the real thing—time to don my glad rags and get ready for the Gala Soirée, which begins at 9 p.m. and goes into the wee hours—a veritable smorgasbord of food, drink, music and last-minute networking. Your faithful blogger relinquishes his keyboard at last. Ladies and gentlemen, it's been a pleasure.

Shashi Tharoor, a former Under Secretary General of the United Nations, was India's candidate in the 2006 race to succeed Kofi Annan as Secretary General and came second out of seven contenders. He is the award-winning author of 10 books, most recently The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century. Visit him at www.shashitharoor.com.

You can find Tharoor's previous Diary entries here or at the following links:

• Davos Diary, Day 5: Never tempt Providence
• Day 4: Fatigue can't stop this blogger
• Day 3: Panels galore
• Day 2: Snowy arrival
• Day 1: Setting the scene

Our humble Davos narrator, Shashi Tharoor, gave a remarkably concise, eloquent defense of the United Nations during a panel on the topic "Rebuilding Brand America" (moderated by FP Editor in Chief Moisés Naím). Here's what Tharoor said, referring to News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch's comment that "everyone knows" that the United Nations is "a corrupt, ridiculous, dysfunctional place":

I was a bit taken aback by some of the references to the U.N., largely because many of the individual countries in the organization have a great deal of regard for the U.S. of course, and the U.S. has its way more often than not in the U.N. And the fact is that, you know, a lot of the demonstrators against the U.S. in many parts of the world are probably really saying, "Yankee go home, but take me with you."

So, the admiration is real, but at the same time, what on Earth is the alternative for the U.S.? This is the one organization that brings every country together. Many countries, especially smaller ones, send their best and most skilled diplomats to New York. It's a place where the U.S. can engage with the rest of the world, where the U.S. can advance its goals in partnership with others rather than on its own. I mean, what's not to like about an institution that helps the U.S. to share the burden? Sure, it's got its limitations. Dag Hammerskjold said 50 years ago that the U.N. wasn't created to take mankind to paradise, but rather to save humanity from hell. And sometimes that's the best the U.N. can do. It can prevent things from getting a whole lot worse, and it seems to me that the U.S. has a great deal of interest in working with the rest of the world at the U.N.

You can also watch the YouTube clip of Tharoor below. Skip to 29:10 to see his remarks:

An improvident editor at FP placed a hubristic headline on my last post: "Fatigue can't stop this blogger."

Never tempt Providence. Fatigue did stop this blogger Friday morning. Or maybe just plain laziness.

After four nights of minimal sleep, my body decided it didn't want to catch a 7 a.m. bus from Klosters to listen to President Musharraf assure a hot-ticket breakfast crowd that the fate of Pakistani democracy was safe in his hands. It went a step further and decided it could do without a serious discussion on Corporate Global Citizenship in the 21st Century, featuring British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Cisco Systems CEO John T. Chambers, and PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi.

JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images

When I finally stirred myself and trudged out on a surprisingly sunny morning, the Klosters to Davos shuttle bus, supposedly scheduled at 20-minute intervals, took 35 minutes to arrive. Two fellow passengers were raving about the panel I'd just missed. Ever the diligent blogger, I pulled out my notepad: "What did they say?" An abashed silence followed. "I don't really recall," one attendee confessed. "Queen Rania of Jordan was seated right in the middle and I just looked at her the whole time."

I eventually surmised that the panelists had agreed that it made business sense for corporations to make social responsibility a priority. They've been saying that for years at Davos, of course, but this time there was an added flourish: Indra Nooyi declared that philanthropy had "unleashed the emotions" of PepsiCo's employees. Brown and Chambers agreed that customers are not just supportive, they are demanding that corporations become more socially and environmentally aware.

When I finally got to the Forum, I decided to pass up the Ukrainian lunch to which I'd been invited by Viktor Pinchuk, a son-in-law of ex-President Leonid Kuchma whose invitations had remained highly popular with the Davos glitterati (he was also the host of the relocated philanthropic round table I'd missed yesterday, on that occasion for no fault of mine). My choice was clear: the risk of long speeches on Ukraine versus a chance to catch up on the Davos buzz. The latter was useful, because it helped me realize that in attending only the panels that interested me I'd steered clear of what all the business journalists were focusing on: the loss by the French bank Société Générale of the small sum of $7.1 billion, which the bank was blaming on a reckless (and dishonest) trader—Barings all over again, except with more zeroes.

I'd also missed the interminable arguments about whether the world economy was in crisis or not (they don't know any more than you do) and whether it was the fault of the regulators or the speculators (or possibly both). As someone once famously said, if you put all the economists in the world end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion. I have never been a practitioner of the dismal science, so I skipped a BBC debate on global economics (though I commend it unseen to those who care, if only because its moderator, my friend Nik Gowing, knows how to keep an argument moving). And I returned to the topics that interested me.

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Just as well, because I caught two terrific panels back to back, which doesn't always happen in Davos. The first, on Indian innovation, was stimulating and educative, and it was attended (judging by the badges of the questioners) by a surprisingly large number of Davos spouses who had actually traveled or worked in India. The second was even better: a first-rate discussion on what could have been too well-worn a subject—development. Despite the absence of the advertised Kofi Annan (on a mediation trip in Kenya rather than on the stage in Davos), the panel featured Gordon Brown, Bill Gates, World Bank President Robert Zoellick, South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, and the chairman of both Unilever and Ericsson, Michael Treschow, all ably moderated by PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi. The conversation managed to be both thoughtful and wide-ranging: In the span of an hour, the heavyweights spoke of skill-building and education, corruption and good governance, the empowerment of women, African agriculture, mobile telephony and entrepreneurship (and a lot else besides). Though the focus was principally on Africa—as if other regions don't still have major development challenges to overcome—it was a first-rate conversation, Brown especially coming off as an insightful and committed leader on the issue. If the British voters ever tire of him, he should be put in charge of a global development agency.

I managed to make an appearance at three of the six receptions to which I'd been invited (the fact that two were at the same hotel helped) before arriving at my dinner panel. I'd groaned at the topic—"The Rise of the Multicultural Couple"—and at first sight I was convinced this was going to be a disaster. There were five speakers, six paying dinner guests, and four Forum staff around the table. But it turned out to be a delightful discussion, covering inter-religious marriage, the case for cosmopolitanism, and even an exchange about the neurological consequences of falling in love. That Davos still retains the capacity to put on a panel like that humanizes the place.

Since yesterday's format appears to have won some approbation, I'll end with a few notes from the events I attended:

Most intriguing facts I learned about India today:

• One hundred fifty of the Fortune 500 companies have established R&D operations in India.
• In 2002, more people traveled by train in one day in India than by plane in an entire year.
• Of the 300 million children in India between the ages of 6 and 16 today, 270 million will reach adulthood without the benefit of a formal education.

Swiss Image/World Economic Forum

Most irrelevant observations about Davos: The "no-tie" rule proclaimed by founder Klaus Schwab, in an effort to preserve the informality of the Forum, is honored by the corporate types but not by the officials. At the development panel, Brown sported a splendid purple tie, Manuel a vivid red one, and Zoellick a drab navy tie. Far worse sartorially is the number of women wearing high heeled shoes and stiletto boots amidst the snow and the ice. How do they do it, one is tempted to marvel. But more to the point: Why do they do it?

Most memorable corridor confabs: I greeted my old friend Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden, most warmly, and only after a few minutes realized whom I'd interrupted him chatting with. It was the Duke of York. Davos rules prevent further indiscretion about the subsequent conversation, but even a staunch republican like me doesn't treat running into royalty lightly.

Most quotable one-liners:

• "Economics has made us interdependent and politics divides us. We need to bring our politics in line with our economics." –Trevor Manuel, finance minister of South Africa
• "The most significant breakthrough innovations are made out of fear." –Sunil Bharti Mittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel, India's largest telecom company
• "Cosmopolitans are rich; evangelicals are poor." –David McWilliams, Irish entrepreneur

Shashi Tharoor, a former Under Secretary General of the United Nations, was India's candidate in the 2006 race to succeed Kofi Annan as Secretary General and came second out of seven contenders. He is the award-winning author of 10 books, most recently The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century. Visit him at www.shashitharoor.com.

You can find Tharoor's previous Diary entries here or at the following links:

• Day 4: Fatigue can't stop this blogger
• Day 3: Panels galore
• Day 2: Snowy arrival
• Day 1: Setting the scene

PHILIPPE DESMAZES/AFP/Getty Images

Author Ian Buruma, who is in Davos at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, has picked up on a tactic increasingly used by undemocratic countries such as China and Iran in defending themselves from international criticism: demanding that Westerners stop "imposing" their values on cultures that supposedly have a different understanding of what democracy means.

As Buruma put it me this morning, this is clearly self-serving hogwash. "It's much less a division between East and West along civilizational lines than some people like to see it," he said. "It's really a political division," he added, pointing out that the Indians and the Japanese, or even the Indonesians don't see things that way. Few people may buy the argument, Buruma said, but nonetheless it's an effective way of neutralizing the democracy issue because people don't want to be seen as dissing other cultures. "When people discuss this in terms of culture and civilization, then you get a lot of that pious stuff," he noted, referring to the kind of Kumbaya moments that former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami has made into a veritable Davos fetish. "People have the habit of expressing fine sentiments as soon as civilization and culture come up." 

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf pulled the culture card at a breakfast Buruma attended and found the Pakistani leader to be "completely out of touch," fixated on the notion that "any bad news about Pakistan is a distortion by the foreign press." After all, Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, and George W. Bush had assured him that "everything is fine." Musharraf also tangled with Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, who had the temerity to suggest that Pakistan's human rights record could use a little improvement. Musharraf's response, essentially "We have our own human rights," was underwhelming, to say the least.