Well-Guarded Elite Ponders World's Division
-- For the past six days, the world's political, academic and business luminaries who gathered in this Swiss mountain resort struggled -- between bites of lobster tail and sips of Louis Roederer champagne -- to comprehend the reasons behind growing populist backlash against globalization.</br></br>At seminars and panel discussions held in a fortress-like conference center surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire, they were confronted by a staccato burst of statistics depicting the monstrous inequalities of our age: that more than a billion people live on less than $1 a day, that half of humanity has never made or received a phone call and that Manhattan has more Internet connections than all of Africa.</br></br>But as they descended today from the snowy alpine peaks, there was an air of disappointment among many of the 2,000 participants who were brought together by the World Economic Forum to ponder how to "Bridge the Divides." "When people talk about globalization, what we see is a world that is divided into two," said Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's president. "There is a structural fault of poverty: on one side, there are the powerful and the wealthy, and on the other side, there are the powerless and the poor."</br></br>The exhilarating promises of globalization -- of new technologies, the elevation of living standards through free trade and the global web of mutual interests that was supposed to render wars obsolete -- have given way to fresh suspicions about the need to shatter traditions and break down the last barriers to the flow of capital, people and ideas.</br></br>Given the growing hostility to globalization, Mexico's new reformist president, Vicente Fox, said the world's industrial democracies need to acknowledge that the present methods of reaching out to the illiterate and the impoverished are simply not working. Instead of bridging the divide, he said, the chasm between rich and poor is only getting worse.