Getting Serious.(World Economic Forum in Switzerland protested;)(World Social Forum held in Brazil)

On Saturday, peaceful Switzerland bared its teeth. In the biggest security alert the Alpine nation has ever seen, riot police sealed off all approaches to Davos, the genteel ski resort that hosts the annual network-athon of CEOs, heads of state and other VIPs known as the World Economic Forum. Anticapitalist activists, including militant anarchists, had promised via the Internet to "wipe out" the meeting. The authorities took them seriously. Declaring any demonstration illegal, they transformed placid Davos into an armed camp, turning back hundreds of would-be protesters at Swiss borders. Some of those stranded in Zurich set fire to cars there, prompting police to respond with tear gas and rubber pellets. Even the 200 demonstrators who somehow made it to Davos didn't get very far. When they came within a kilometer of the forum, riot police opened fire with water cannons. Drenched, the crowd didn't linger long.

Some 6,700 miles away, a much larger group of protesters gathered in southern Brazil for a formal anti-Davos gathering, dubbed the World Social Forum. In Porto Alegre, 10,000 delegates and spectators attended lectures and workshops on the evils of globalization and how to bridge the growing chasm between rich and poor. The forum was more peaceful than angry, with protesters lugging backpacks and sleeping bags, handing out pamphlets and arguing about socialism. Just to the north, 18 busloads of demonstrators stormed a farm owned by the American giant Monsanto to protest the company's experimentation with genetically modified foods. They camped out in the fields and, before a bank of TV cameras, ripped soybeans out of the ground. French activist Jose Bove (following story), in town for the gathering, proclaimed the act "one more blow in the urgent fight against multinational corporations."

Neither protest was in danger of becoming "another Seattle." But the Brazilian outcry shows not only that resentment of "the global economy" is growing but that it has gained new outposts. Indeed, the world has changed dramatically since the World Trade Organization's Seattle summit at the end of 1999. Back then the gurus of globalization were preaching their mantra of free trade, free markets and ever larger corporate mergers. Soaring markets seemed to prove them right; there was much talk of permanent, painless growth.

But the collapse of the WTO talks in Seattle amid violent protests showed things weren't so simple. Then came the Nasdaq crash, followed by the slowdown of the U.S. economy. Countries all over the world worried that the downturn in the world's largest economy would soon spread. Crises like Kosovo and Chechnya--combined with more fears of global warming and Europe's mad-cow-disease panic--only exacerbated the sinking feeling that the markets couldn't solve it all. How much the protests contributed to the changes is debatable, but the world has a very different agenda today.

There are few places where this shifting ground is more apparent than Davos. A few years ago, alpha executives compared the size of their mergers. This year, under the conference title "Bridging the Digital Divide," those same leaders are discussing problems like poverty, disease and climate change. At the opening plenary last Thursday, ministers from Brazil, India and Thailand gave 600 VIPs an earful on the industrialized world's sins: from agricultural subsidies that hurt poor farmers to IMF diktats that dry up badly needed credit. Forum organizer Klaus Schwab says he wants the power elite to spend more time thinking about how to improve the state of the world. "Business has to make a special effort to establish a world where everybody can live a dignified existence," he told the delegates last ...