The World Economic Forum and the Swiss Government share Davos this Year

Today I received an interesting invitation from the government of Switzerland to speak at a conference headed by Micheline Calmy-Rey, Federal Councillor of Foreign Affairs of the Swiss Confederation. The conference is called the Executive Roundtable on Global Security. According to the organizers the Purpose: The executive roundtables on global security are designed to bring together stakeholders to identify key security themes, trends and challenges. The resulting conversation, we hope, will provide strategic reference for security stakeholders as they anticipate future threats, develop solutions and navigate the trade-offs. This event seemed very attractive and similar in content to what we did at Safe Democracy my foundation. Frankly I was pleasantly surprised at seeing that the Swiss Government had decided to break WEF´s “ownership” of Davos and have an alternative conference to that of the World Economic Forum. The roundtable is being held at the Belvedere Hotel. I am encouraged to see that World Economic Forum does not have a monopoly of Davos anymore. I always felt sorry for the citizens of Davos and the “anti Davos” movement. As an Argentine if there was an anti Buenos Aires movement I would be pretty upset. Unfortunately on that very day I will be speaking at the O Reilly conference in San Francisco so I can´t attend but I congratulate the Swiss Government for hosting an alternative conference and try to shape the world´s view of Davos. At the same time I must say from the invitation that the event looked pretty similar to WEF´s!