WEF summit faces uphill battle to regain influence
In The Magic Mountain, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann chose the Swiss resort of Davos as his setting for a dark comedy about Europe’s elites secluded in the confines of a sanatorium as the world teeters on the brink of war.
Tomorrow, the world’s contemporary elites will descend on the Alpine town with conflict raging on the frontiers of the continent, as the World Economic Forum (WEF), a mainstay of the Davos calendar since 1971, returns for its first winter gathering of global business leaders and politicians since the Covid-19 pandemic.
A pared-back version of the WEF was held in Davos last May, after the event was cancelled in 2021.
Next week, Covid restrictions such as masks will be dispensed with – and there is snow, too, despite fears that a bout of unseasonably warm weather would melt the ski slopes.
WEF organisers say this year’s summit will boast a record number of delegates of unprecedented diversity. Attendees will include 1500 industry leaders, 600 chief executives, 300 government ministers, 52 heads of state and government, and 19 central bank governors. Female participation will be at a record high.
Prominent summit themes will be the war in Ukraine, climate change, and the fragile state of the global economy.
Despite the business-as-usual feel, the WEF’s cast list has a decidedly low-key feel, after many national leaders battling the threat of recession, cost-ofliving crises and geopolitical conflict chose to stay away.
Among the absentees are United States President Joe Biden, China’s President Xi Jinping, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Vladimir Putin and Russia’s delegation of businessmen and politicians are barred from the summit after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine last February. Delegations from Ukraine and China will attend, but have not made their names public for security reasons, organisers say.
‘‘Davos will happen against the most complex geopolitical
and economic backdrop in decades,’’ said Borge Brende, the WEF’s president and a former Norwegian foreign minister.
Klaus Schwab, the founder and chairman of WEF, lamented that ‘‘we are all stuck in a crisis mindset’’.
In its pre-summit global risks report, the WEF authors warned that the world was heading towards an era of ‘‘polycrisis’’.
The annual jamboree of the rich and powerful has often been derided as an elitist talking shop that rings a warning over climate change while generating megatonnes of emissions as its attendees’ private jets and chauffeured cars pile on to the mountain resort.
This year’s summit will be held amid a more sinister backdrop: swirling conspiracy theories holding up the WEF as a secret globalist cabal that controls the world.
Online disinformation about the forum has been ramped up ahead of the summit. For example, a fabricated news story shared tens of thousands of times on social media falsely claims that the WEF wants to decriminalise paedophilia and has published research supporting it.
Right-wing media outlets have railed against the WEF’s ‘‘Great
Reset’’ slogan from 2020, calling it a cipher to dismantle the world economy and forcibly vaccinate people. Ron de Santis, governor of Florida and a US Republican presidential hopeful, said this week that Davos delegates ‘‘run everything and everybody else is like a serf, a peasant’’.
The WEF has become a prominent victim of the societal polarisation it warns is in the top five threats to the world in the next two years. Organisers such as Saadia Zahidi, the WEF’s managing director, have said that the forum is ‘‘proactively’’ trying to fight the conspiracy theorists.
‘‘We believe in facts, we believe in science, we believe in evidence and we believe in expertise, and that’s what the hundred or so experts that are gathered at this meeting, along with business leaders and political leaders, are
going to provide,’’ Zahidi said.
The title of this year’s summit is ‘‘Cooperation in a Fragmented World’’, as the forum tries to revive the spirit of collaboration that inspired the WEF’s founding as a setting to bring together business leaders and politicians.
Talk is likely to be dominated by Russia’s war in Ukraine, which will mark its first anniversary next month.
The Davos summit last May professed unity towards Ukraine, but cracks have emerged between Kiev and its western partners, notably in Berlin, over sending armoured vehicles for use by Ukrainian forces ahead of an expected spring assault by Russian forces. A keynote speech by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will be closely watched for signs of a U-turn over the delivery of Leopard 2 tanks.
Cooperation has also been in short supply in global trade, with countries lining up to lambast the Biden Administration’s extensive green subsidies for US electric car makers.
Brussels and European leaders have promised to retaliate to protect their car industries from Washington’s Inflation Reduction Act, while South Korean and Japanese auto firms still hope to gain access to US tax breaks.
The annual jamboree of the rich and powerful has often been derided as an elitist talking shop.