Demonstrators came anyway, and on Tuesday about 10,000 of them defied Czech police lines to try to march on the Congress Center, a dreary communist-era conference hall, where delegates to the joint annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund arrived in special sealed subway cars. When Czech police blocked demonstrators from a bridge leading to the hall, small groups of masked anarchists broke off and tried to storm the hall from other directions, launching hours of street action that sometimes pitted police water cannons against rock throwers and Molotov cocktails.

Scarcely a corner in Prague is without the most resonant historic symbols. The old part of the city, practically alone among Continental capitals, escaped bombing by either side in World War II; from Hradcrany Castle, the seat of the Czech Republic's government, medieval rooftops cascade down the hill to the Vltava River and Charles Bridge. The cacophony of Czech jazz and rock, cellphones and beepers, resounds through the same 12th century alleyways that have echoed with the footfalls of Christian dissenter Jan Hus, Nazi governor Reinhard Heydrich and playwright turned president Vaclav Havel.

With Havel now chair of the IMF-World Bank meeting, the symbolism of this week's Prague protest (actually only one of 27 demonstrations against the IMF and World Bank occurring worldwide) may well turn out to be just as enduring as past protests. For one thing, Prague is not just any European city. The Czech Republic was an early, aggressive laboratory for a radical shift to deregulated markets after the downfall of the Soviet Union -- precisely the formula pressed on developing countries by the two world financial institutions. Recovering from a downturn three years ago, Prague is crawling with foreign investment, Benetton is perched on Wenceslas Square and the nation is on the verge of membership in the European Union.

Yet beneath the dazzling surface, the country that's hosting the IMF and World Bank is also a distinct symbol for everything that's wrong with corporate globalization. For one thing, the Czech economic miracle happened only because the country literally ditched its poor, separating from neighboring Slovakia in 1993. Secession was widely portrayed in the West as a victory for Slovak nationalism, but Czech politicians were just as anxious to be rid of the economic burden of a population widely viewed as ignorant peasants by Prague's cosmopolites. I remember attending a reception in Prague not long after the Velvet Revolution and listening with astonishment as the new President Havel presented a long, jeering narrative about a complaining letter he had received from an old woman in a Slovak dairy.

The respective fates of the Czech Republic and Slovakia seven years after their separation are symbolic of the growing inequality taking root even on the Social Democratic soil of Europe. In Slovakia, unemployment runs at 20 percent -- twice the level of its neighbor. Inflation there is 14 percent, compared with 2.5 percent in the Czech Republic.

Yet Slovakia is a raging success story compared with many of the other transitional countries of Central and Eastern Europe. According to a little-noted report released by the World Bank just one week before the Prague conference, "there is little doubt that poverty has increased dramatically" in the former Eastern bloc since it entered the global system. "Moreover, the increase in poverty is much larger and more persistent than many would have expected at the start of this process."

It is the Eastern European version of a worldwide phenomenon. As Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith note in a new book, "Globalization From Below," 89 countries are worse off than they were 10 years ago. In Africa, where per capita income grew by 34.3 percent from 1960 to 1980, per capita income subsequently fell by about 20 percent from 1980 to 1997. At the same time, they point out, the world's 200 richest people have doubled their wealth in the past four years.

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