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| Donald Trump meets with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21, 2020, in Davos, Switzerland. (Evan Vucci/AP) |
| DAVOS, Switzerland — It’s a quirk of the calendar that the U.S. presidential inauguration takes place the same day as the start of the World Economic Forum here in the Swiss Alps. But it’s not just timing and frigid temperatures that link the two events. For years, the gathering at Davos has been shorthand for the prevailing political orthodoxy — an assembly of well-heeled elites and corporate power brokers who exulted in the dogmas of globalization and cloaked themselves in the bromides of a liberal age. As the stereotype went, they loved open borders (at least for big business), privileged cosmopolitan connections over national allegiance and moved hand-in-hand with a class of technocrats in the West’s political establishment that had grown steadily more distant from the voters who put them in power. Donald Trump and the wave of populist, illiberal leaders that have come to the fore in the West over the past decade found a useful punching bag in the form of “Davos Man.” The globalization and internationalist spirit long championed at Davos is, in their view, the source of much of what ails their countries: the hollowing out of industrial heartlands, the acceleration of multiculturalism, the rise of China at the expense of the West, the elite fixation on costly green energy transitions.
Their angry nationalism is a rejection of two decades of rampant liberalism — or, as critics on the left would put it, neoliberalism — that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s a rejection, too, of the United States’ liberal status quo in the aftermath of World War II. Trump says he will slap tariffs on the exports of geopolitical adversaries and allies alike, a move that could trigger a sprawling set of retaliatory actions that may upend global trade as we know it. At the tip of the spear of an anti-immigrant backlash in the West, he intends to carry out mass deportations of undocumented migrants. And he seems bent on flexing U.S. might on the world stage in his own way, bullying other states into serving the country’s interests while approaching major international institutions like the United Nations with scorn and sharp elbows. Davos bigwigs recognize the awkwardness of the moment. “We are in the middle of two orders,” Borge Brende, the president of the World Economic Forum, said during a briefing with reporters last week. The “post-Cold War” era — marked by a liberal triumphalism and an embrace of globalization that’s now in retreat — is over, Brende suggested, “and now it’s an unruly time because we don’t know what the new order will be.” Whatever is emerging — and there’s plenty of wonky deliberation over what that “new order” may or should be — it’s worth pausing to consider what may have passed. If Trump’s first term marked a disruptive jolt to the West, his second term seems more a confirmation of historical trends. Across the West, liberal or center-left parties are in retreat or holding onto shrinking pools of support. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a frequent Davos attendee, has bowed out after nine years in office, and his ruling liberals are projected to face a historic defeat. Elections in Germany next month are likely to deliver a withering blow to the ruling social Democrats and the neoliberal and green parties in their collapsed coalition. The far right is ascendant in much of Europe; in some countries, they have fully entered the political mainstream; in a few, they are already in power. Ivan Krastev, a liberal Bulgarian political philosopher and commentator, likened the current moment to 1989 — a year of “radical rupture” when the Soviet bloc fell and hopes for liberal democracy surged. “The mood in 1989 was internationalist and optimistic; today, it has soured into nationalism, at times even nihilism,” Krastev noted, but the restlessness of the zeitgeist is undeniable. While President Joe Biden may have won election in 2020 on promises of restoring “normalcy,” few Americans five years later seem content with the status quo. “Trump captured the public imagination not because he had a better plan for how to win the war in Ukraine or manage globalization, but because he understood that the world of yesterday could be no more,” Krastev wrote in the Atlantic. “The United States’ postwar political identity has vanished into the abyss of the ballot box. This Trump administration may succeed or fail on its own terms, but the old world will not return.” Other scholars are all the more blunt about the shift under way. “January 20, 2025 marks a symbolic end to global neoliberalism,” declared Serbian-American economist Branko Milanovic, gesturing to how Western political elites, led by Trump, seem ready to dispense with liberal dogmas in favor of more naked self-interest. “Both of its components are gone,” Milanovic expanded. “Globalism has now been converted into nationalism, neoliberalism has been made to apply to the economic sphere only. Its social parts—racial and gender equality, free movement of labor, multiculturalism—are dead. Only low tax rates, deregulation and worship of profit remain.” In Davos, most attendees are fixated on the new world that’s taking shape. Cryptocurrency and AI companies line the town’s icy promenade with pavilions touting the vibrant futures their technologies are fashioning. As usual, a host of governments — including countries and states within them — have their own kiosks, too, and showcase their societies as hotbeds of innovation and dynamism worthy of major investment. Such optimism and dealmaking is the stock-and-trade at Davos. But the World Economic Forum can also be gloomy. Its annual “global risks” survey warns of a “growing sense of social fragmentation” in the world’s unequal societies, the dangers of “geoeconomic confrontation” as new trade wars get launched, and the corrosive effects of the spread of misinformation and disinformation — a threat made all the more acute by the proliferation of AI technologies. The Forum’s separate survey of top economists found mounting pessimism about the state of the global economy, with concerns over weak growth in Europe, the slowing down of China and the potential volatility promised by Trump’s economic agenda for the United States. “The growth outlook is at its weakest in decades and political developments both domestically and internationally highlight how contested economic policy has become,” Aengus Collins, head of economic growth and transformation at the World Economic Forum, said in a statement. “In this environment, fostering a spirit of collaboration will require more commitment and creativity than ever.” | ||||||