WEF/Annual Meeting/1996
Davos, Switzerland
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| Date | January 1996 |
| Location | Davos, Switzerland |
| Description | "As globalization goes on deploying its impact, innovative policies that help contain the mounting backlash against it are urgently needed," warned Klaus Schwab |
| Planners | WEF |
| Participants | John Perry Barlow, Ulrich Bettermann, Klaus Schwab, Shimon Peres, Yasser Arafat,Carlos Menem,Tung Chee-hwa,Thomas Klestil, Ion Iliescu, Michael Bloomberg,Bill Gates,Elie Wiesel,Gennady Zyuganov, |
The 1996 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting was held in Davos, Switzerland in January 1996.
Own words
Klaus Schwab, Founder and President of the World Economic Forum, and Claude Smadja, then Forum’s Managing Director, in an editorial published in the 'International Herald Tribune that attracted worldwide attention, warned that[1]
As globalization goes on deploying its impact, innovative policies that help contain the mounting backlash against it are urgently needed
On the political front, the Annual Meeting 1996 turned out to be a watershed in Russian history with the so-called "Davos Pact". Macha Levinson, at that time a director at the Forum, remembered the events:
The members of the Russian delegation, and particularly the business leaders, became deeply concerned about the popularity of Gennady Zyuganov and the likelihood of a victory of the Communist party. Many were infuriated that Zyuganov was saying one thing in Russia and another thing in Davos, appearing in the guise of a modern moderate rather than a hard-line Communist. They decided to take action and to throw their financial weight behind Yeltsin’s campaign. The unwritten collective pledge became known as the Davos Pact.[2]