There wasn't a single North American accent among them, but the show went on smoothly without anyone so much as noticing. Onstage were Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation; Juan Carlos Echeverry, Colombia's Minister of Finance; and other figures from what used to be called "the South."

They talked about the double-digit growth of trade across emerging markets – between Africa and India, or Latin America and the Middle East and China – and how commodities, consumer products and construction services are all crossing oceans at record rates, just a couple of years after the greatest financial crisis since the Depression.

The reason is simple: Globalization is going global, and the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, is the best place to see the writing on the wall.

Sitting in Washington in the 1990s, it was so easy, and even somewhat accurate, to depict globalization as synonymous with Americanization. How times have changed. The key figures at Davos now are the CEOs of "multi-Latina" companies from Brazil and Colombia, or the heads of Arab and Asian wealth funds.

A decade ago, American officials muscled Asians around, using the International Monetary Fund as their tool; today, the future of the IMF hinges on Asian support, and so does the United States' own rebuilding effort.

And if we have to rethink who has power, then we also have to rethink diplomacy. The last year or two have witnessed no shortage of silver-bullet rhetoric on the world's most pressing challenges: a global economic "G2" of the U.S. and China; the United Nations' "Millennium Development Goals"; grand climate summits in Copenhagen and Cancun.

All of these attempts to solve global problems with the stroke of a pen have proved to be stillborn, as complacent vestiges of a Western-led, state-centric world.

That era has ended. We have entered a new Middle Ages: an era that most resembles the international dynamics of nearly 1,000 years ago, a period of history when the East rivalled the West, cities mattered more than nations, powerful dynasties and trading companies were engines of growth and innovation, private mercenaries fought in all wars, religious crusades shaped intercultural relations and new trade routes over land and sea forged the world's first (nearly) global economy.

De-professionalizing diplomacy

In the Middle Ages, diplomacy was characterized by complex multilevel relations – between the Pope and his emissaries, Germanic duchies and vassal territories, Italian city-states such as Milan and Venice, and great universities from Oxford to Bologna.

It was also informal. For most of history, the chief criteria for diplomatic inclusion have been status and prestige, not legal sovereignty. The formalized, bureaucratized foreign ministry we know today is a legacy of Cardinal de Richelieu, who as an adviser in the court of King Louis XIII established a Ministry of External Affairs in 1626 and dispatched the most extensive professional diplomatic corps in Europe.

But diplomacy, as the professional joke goes, is the second-oldest profession. It long predates the state, and will thrive even as new ways of organizing people, resources and ideologies emerge. And diplomacy takes place not just among politicians but between anyone who is someone.

This week in Davos, for example, as happens each January, the planet's most influential heads of state, CEOs, mayors, religious leaders, heads of non-governmental organizations, university presidents, celebrities and artists gather to network and make deals across public and private lines.

Davos has nothing to do with sovereignty and everything to do with authority: Like online file trading, it's peer-to-peer. Where else can the mayor of London, the Prime Minister of Catalonia, the chairman of China's Export-Import Bank, George Soros and Bono speak directly, and form new ventures on the spot?

Davos, in its informality, actually reflects the true parameters of diplomacy today better than the United Nations.

Beyond the traditional "public-public" relations of embassies and multilateralism, there are public-private partnerships sprouting across sectors and issues – from Qatar's natural-gas arrangement with Exxon to India's investment-attracting private Confederation of Indian Industry to the alliance of Botswana with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Merck pharmaceutical company that saved the country's population from being wiped out by AIDS.

But the often-neglected dimension is "private-private" interactions that circumvent the state altogether: The Environmental Defence Fund's direct deal with Wal-Mart to cut the company's greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 million tonnes could barely be dreamed of by the diplomats at the Cancun climate conference.

Projects 'grow and go'

All three of these combinations of negotiating partners thrive at Davos, as well as the World Economic Forum's mini-Davos-style regional conferences and year-round multi-stakeholder initiatives in health, climate change, anti-corruption and other areas.

The WEF does what no UN agency would ever do: allow "coalitions of the willing" to organically "grow and go," incubating them but also quickly spinning them off into self-sustaining entities; but, importantly, also letting projects die that fail to attain sufficient support from participants.

The WEF rarely gets credit for the alliances born in four decades of wintry January weeks, but the fact that thousands of elites come year after year is proof enough that it has long been ahead of the curve, from broadening the understanding of economic competitiveness through its signature reports that began in the 1970s to promoting good corporate citizenship years before anti-globalization protesters stormed Seattle.

And contrary to its reputation as a host for secret, if glamorous, deal-making, "Davos Man" has been praised by The Economist as the necessary antidote to the veils of protocol that conceal traditional diplomacy – instead, participants immerse themselves in the latest innovations, technologies and trends, speaking English as their lingua franca and engaging with the media. The WEF has more followers on Twitter than any international organization, and convenes live Global Town Halls online to debate global priorities. Davos Man isn't afraid of WikiLeaks.

Where money meets megaphones

As its critics say, as a meeting of the already powerful, Davos does not correct the "democracy deficit" afflicting the world. But what it does better than any other is correct the diplomacy deficit: NGOs speaking for the oppressed, social entrepreneurs and all manner of others seeking attention and funding get unobstructed access to the world's richest companies, governments and philanthropists.

And only in Davos do the dot-gov, dot-com and dot-org domains interact so efficiently.

Nobody can stop the entropy that is diffusing power in the world. Instead, we need more Davos-like congresses to harness all the new power centres, from presidents to entrepreneurs to activists.

Indeed, what matters most of all is not what happens at Davos, but who copies it, a demonstration effect visible from the Clinton Global Initiative to the Saudi Arabia General Investment Authority's "Davos in the Desert" the week before the real Davos.

Global governance is not a thing. It's not a collection of formal institutions. It's not even a set of treaties. It is a process, involving a far wider range of actors than have ever been party to global negotiations before.

The sooner we find new meta-scripts for regulating transnational activities and harnessing global resources to tackle local problems, the better. Davos continues to be a good place to start.