This article is part of our special report on the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, finds itself in choppy waters. Long the prosperous symbol of a globalizing world that assumed more trade would bring more freedom, it now faces international fractures, rising nationalism and rising protectionism in the shadow of war in Europe and sharp tensions between the United States and China across from.
The post-Cold War era, dominated by the notion that Western liberal democracy and free-market capitalism held all the answers, is over. That was the Davos ethos. It must now adjust to the new reality brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the rise of extreme inequality, and aggressive Russian and Chinese autocracies.
When the old is gone, the new order has not yet been born. Power is shifting away from the United States as China’s military and economic clout grows, but the shape of an alternative international system is unclear.
A measure of a changed world is that when thousands of Brazilian protesters, convinced without evidence of a stolen election last year, stormed Brazil’s Congress this month, their action felt like a copycat attack akin to the attack on the Capitol of the United States on 6/14/2021. It is a measure of Donald J. Trump’s legacy that many people are now making this association.
Next week’s gathering of politicians, business leaders, technology gurus, environmentalists and other Davos well-wishers in the Swiss mountains, only the second in-person meeting after a two-year pandemic-related hiatus, will wrestle with questions once unthinkable.
To what extent is the world deglobalizing as the threat to supply chains from Covid-19 and war has become apparent? Is it possible to end the trench warfare in Europe that has already claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians and led to far-fetched but adamant talk of a possible nuclear “Armageddon,” a word used by President Biden last year has? If the conflict in Ukraine lasts until 2023, as now seems plausible, how can a war-induced global recession be avoided if investment-constraining uncertainty persists and prices soar?
These are some of the problems that the assembled crowd will face. China is sending a Vice Premier, Liu He, to Davos, the first time a Chinese leader has attended the forum since the pandemic began. The American delegation includes Katherine Tai, the sales representative; John Kerry, Mr. Biden’s special envoy on climate; and Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, has announced his participation, although it is unclear whether via video link or in person.
They will talk and they will admonish, but Davos is about bringing people together, at least a certain class of people, and at the moment the pressure to divide is strong. Politics in recent years has been dominated by nationalist revolts against elites from the very people Davos has overlooked, from the American heartland to what the French call “the periphery”.
There were other surprises too. The war in Ukraine has exacerbated the food insecurity that climate change was already causing across Africa and elsewhere. Many Africans are fed up with Western promises of help. Europe’s struggle for new energy sources to replace Russian oil and gas, in societies under acute economic pressure, does not always favor expensive renewable energy or the shift to “green capitalism” that so many business leaders in Davos have publicly embraced.
“We recognize that countries are concerned about energy security, but we cannot endanger the planet by investing in aging fossil fuel projects that will cause irreparable damage,” Kerry said in Davos last year.
Consensus on the environment, like global security, is difficult to achieve. Saadia Zahidi, chief executive of the World Economic Forum, warned this month of a “vicious circle” after his annual survey revealed deep concerns about near-term economic volatility and a cost of living crisis.
“Polarization is permeating our world, be it in domestic politics or in interstate relations,” wrote S. Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister, in a recent book entitled The India Way. He also noted: “We have been conditioned to see the post-1945 world as the norm and deviations from it as deviations. Indeed, our own complex history underscores that the natural state of the world is multipolarity.”
Convergence is out of fashion. There is no longer any political consensus on how to bring prosperity to an interconnected world. Great power rivalry on a warming planet is the new reality. The economic opening did not lead to a political opening in Russia or China, as widely predicted, with the result that rival democratic and autocratic blocs clash.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative has secured the allegiance of many countries through loans, infrastructure construction and trade deals. America is now making very clear its own approach to economics that must serve politics. On a recent visit to India, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the United States “wanted to diversify away from countries that pose geopolitical and security risks to our supply chain.” She highlighted India as one of the “trustworthy trading partners”. America’s focus on China, its designated “strategic competitor,” could hardly be more explicit.
Digital security and inclusivity will be an important topic in Davos this year. Another reason for the West’s turning away from China is the fear that data will be compromised. India, with its near-universal connectivity, has led the way to demonstrate how technological leapfrogging can empower poorer sections of society. About 1.3 billion Indians now have a digital identity and access to all online banking is commonplace.
“Nobody wants the current world order,” said Amitabh Kant, who is in charge of India’s presidency of the Group of 20 this year, in an interview. “There are still two billion unbanked people in the world.”
Major shifts in power are rarely peaceful. Tensions between the world’s most powerful country, the United States, and its possible successor, China, are hardly surprising. The confrontation requires other countries to choose sides.
However, many prefer to pick their allegiances and reject the binary choice Mr. Biden offers in his portrayal of a world at a turning point between Western democratic openness and the repression of the strongman. India, a vibrant democracy but also a country with a strained 2,100-mile border with China that needs to be managed, is one of them, although it has grown ever closer to the United States. More than a third of humanity lives on either side of this border.
India is one of several Asian countries where Western companies are building factories to secure supply chains that bypass China. These companies don’t want to be vulnerable to tensions between the US and China, which could escalate at any moment. If President Xi Jinping indulges his obsessions over a democratic Taiwan, seen as an unfairly separate island from mainland China, just as President Vladimir V Putin used similar obsessions over Ukraine to justify an invasion, all bets are off.
The biggest boost to business confidence and reassurance against a global spread of war would come from a ceasefire in Ukraine as the first anniversary of the February 24 Russian invasion approaches. But Mr. Putin must be able to portray his reckless gambling and repeated military setbacks as some kind of “victory,” and Mr. Zelensky has said after his people’s heroic sacrifice that he will not cede Ukrainian territory seized by force will by annexation to Russia.
For now, it seems certain that the war will see through the winter with terrible casualties. Wars often end when the protagonists are exhausted; this point has not yet been reached. At the beginning of the fighting, many feared World War III. The conflict now looks more like the First World War.
Mr Zelensky’s speech in Davos will likely be a call to arms in the name of the rule of law, sanctity of national borders, upholding human dignity and protection of human rights so violated by Mr Putin’s unprovoked attack. There is cheering. But there is no global consensus on the war outside the West. As Emmanuel Macron, the French President, noted, a majority of the world is “demographically” neutral or hostile to war, reflecting resentment and distrust for a Western order that is often perceived as hypocritical or self-serving.
Yet the human quest for freedom guaranteed by the rule of law is nearly universal. In Brazil, as in the United States, the insurgents were eventually repulsed. There were democratic transitions. Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration’s national security adviser, wrote on Twitter that “our support for Brazil’s democratic institutions is unwavering. Brazil’s democracy is not shaken by violence.”
Ukraine’s fierce attachment to its democracy and sovereignty has only been reinforced by Mr Putin’s war. That’s one of the painful lessons the Russian leader has had to learn over the past year: he has strengthened beyond measure what he denied, Ukrainian nationality. The world being debated in Davos will be sobered but not deprived of the thought that the pursuit of human dignity and equal opportunity are necessary accompaniments to the pursuit of gain.
Roger Cohen, former columnist and foreign editor of the New York Times, is the head of the Paris office. His new book, An Affirming Flame, a collection of his columns accompanied by an essay about our time, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf on February 21.
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