Put 2,800 of the world’s most powerful people, including 60 heads of government, in a small Alpine village, and strange things can happen
The news that Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland will be in Davos this week, mixing with the global political and business elite, is sure to fire up the World Economic Forum conspiracy machine.
It is bizarre that so many people, particularly in Canada, have come to believe that the WEF encouraged economic collapse during the pandemic in order to spark a global coup d’état, perhaps using vaccines to enslave humanity.
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But that’s the nature of conspiracy theories — they don’t bear too much scrutiny and they are more comforting than the alternative reality — that no-one is in controlling things and the world is precisely as chaotic as it appears.
There are legitimate criticisms of the WEF and the Davos Man phenomenon (the event remains dominated by men).
The depiction in Peter Goodman’s book, Davos Man: How Billionaires Devoured the World — that a group of rootless, self-interested internationalists, whose wealth and power is so vast that they believe they are entitled to write the rules for the rest of us — is not entirely fanciful.
Oxfam released a study on Monday that revealed the world’s five richest men more than doubled their combined fortune over the past three years. It said net profits among the 148 biggest corporations jumped 52 per cent in 2023 over their previous three-year average.
The conspicuous consumption on display in Davos makes a mockery of its pretensions to reset the post-pandemic world in a more equitable fashion.
But the focus this year is on “rebuilding trust” in a troubled world and the forum does have a track record as a constructive force for peace and stability.
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In 1988, Greece and Turkey were pulled back from the brink of war to sign the Davos Declaration; in 1989, North and South Korea held their first ministerial meeting in the Swiss Alps, while East German prime minister Hans Modrow and West German chancellor Helmut Kohl met to discuss reunification. In 1992, F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela came together in Davos for the first time outside of South Africa, a visit Mandela later said changed his perception of the world.
The Davos advantage is its unpredictability. Put 2,800 of the world’s most powerful people, including 60 heads of government, in a small Alpine village, and strange things can happen.
John Kerry, the U.S. presidential envoy for climate change and former secretary of state and presidential nominee, was late for a panel on Tuesday because he unexpectedly met Li Qiang, the Chinese premier.
Li had already lunched with the CEOs of IBM, Intel and Walmart when he addressed the forum on Tuesday, and made a pitch for more foreign investment (this against a backdrop in which China, in the third quarter of last year, suffered its first outflow of direct investment since records began in 1979,).
In his speech, Li said China remains committed to the national policy of opening up “and will open the door still wider.”
“Choosing the Chinese market is not a risk but an opportunity” to access a “market-oriented, law-based and world-class business environment,” he said.
Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, gave his keynote speech after Li and offered an optimistic take on Sino-American relations, a vision of “strategic competition in an age of interdependence.”
He said there have been encouraging signs following the meeting between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping at the APEC summit in San Francisco last November: an agreement to renew military-to-military communications that is already being enacted, and moves to limit the export of fentanyl from China.
He made clear there are limits to that co-operation, such as the U.S. refusing to sell its most advanced chips with military applications to China. “Our strategic competitors should not be able to exploit our technology to undermine our national security,” he said.
But despite the geopolitical turmoil in Ukraine and the Middle East, he said he remains optimistic. “The more others seek to undermine stability, the more it brings our partners together,” he said. “People are more interested in whether their lives are improving than in any imperial projects or ambitions.”
Sullivan said he and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Davos and are working to secure bipartisan support in Congress for a multi-billion-dollar aid package. Zelenskyy, who addressed the forum earlier in the day, said he believed that the U.S. and the European Union will come through with more aid “in a matter of weeks.”
It is easy to lapse into a pessimism bias, as we are assaulted daily with predictions of a firestorm spreading across the Middle East or Russian nuclear escalation. These things might happen. But as Sullivan pointed out, “nothing in world politics is inevitable.”
Far from being a communist plot to take over the world, Davos provides a venue where geopolitical adversaries can meet face to face and attempt to reconcile their differences.
National Post
jivison@criffel.ca
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