The World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, finds itself navigating troubled waters. Long the affluent symbol
of a globalizing world where the assumption was that more trade would bring
more freedom, it now confronts international fracture, ascendant nationalism,
and growing protectionism under the shadow of war in Europe and sharp tensions
between the US and China.
اضافة اعلان
The post-Cold War era, dominated by the
idea that Western liberal democracy and free-market capitalism held all the
answers, is over. This was the very ethos of Davos. It must now pivot to the
new reality provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the growth
of extreme inequality, and aggressive Russian and Chinese autocracies.
If the old is gone, the new order is not
yet born. Power is shifting away from the US as China’s military and economic
heft grows, but the shape of an alternative international system is unclear.
One measure of a world transformed is that
when thousands of Brazilian protesters, convinced without evidence of a stolen
election last year, stormed the Brazilian Congress this month, their action
felt like a copycat attack modeled on the assault on the US Capitol of January
6, 2021. It is one measure of Donald Trump’s legacy that many people now make
this association.
New realities, new questionsThe gathering in the Swiss mountains this
coming week of politicians, business leaders, technology gurus,
environmentalists, and other Davos patrons, only the second in person after a
two-year pandemic-induced hiatus, will wrestle with questions once unthinkable.
If the old is gone, the new order is not yet born. Power is shifting away from the US as China’s military and economic heft grows, but the shape of an alternative international system is unclear.
To what degree is the world de-globalizing
as the threat to supply chains has become evident through COVID-19 and war? Is
it possible to end the trench warfare in Europe that has already taken tens of
thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives and led to talk, far-fetched but
insistent, of possible nuclear “Armageddon”, a word used by President Joe Biden
last year? If the conflict in Ukraine persists through 2023, as now appears
plausible, how can a war-induced global recession be avoided as
investment-curtailing uncertainty persists and prices soar?
These are some of the issues that will
confront the assembled crowd. 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 will include Katherine Tai, the trade
representative; John Kerry, Biden’s special envoy for climate; and Samantha
Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International
Development. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, has indicated that
he will attend, although whether through video link or in person is unclear.
They will talk and they will exhort, but
Davos is about bringing people together, at least a certain class of people,
and for now divisive pressures are strong. The politics of recent years have
been dominated by nationalist revolts against elites by the very people Davos
overlooked, from the American heartland to what the French call “the
periphery”.
There have been other surprises. The
Ukraine war has compounded the food insecurity that climate change had already
induced across Africa and elsewhere. Many Africans have tired of Western
promises of aid. The scramble in Europe for new sources of energy to replace
Russian oil and gas, in societies under acute economic pressures, does not
always favor expensive renewables or the conversion to “environmental
capitalism” that so many business leaders in Davos have publicly embraced.
“We realize that countries are concerned
over energy security, but we can’t jeopardize the planet by investing in legacy
fossil fuel projects that will cause irreparable damage,” Kerry said in Davos
last year.
A polarizing planetConsensus on the environment, as on global
security, is elusive. Saadia Zahidi, the managing director of the World
Economic Forum, warned this month of a “vicious cycle” after its annual survey
revealed deep concern over near-term economic volatility and a cost-of-living
crisis.
“Polarization permeates our world, whether in domestic politics or interstate relations.”
“Polarization permeates our world, whether
in domestic politics or interstate relations,” S. Jaishankar, the Indian
minister of external affairs, wrote in a recent book called “The India Way.” He
also noted: “We have been conditioned to think of the post-1945 world as the
norm and departures from it as deviations. In fact, our own complex history
underlines that the natural state of the world is multipolarity.”
Convergence has gone out of fashion. There
is no political consensus any longer over how to deliver prosperity to a networked
world. Great power rivalry on a warming planet is the new reality. Economic
opening did not lead to political opening in Russia or China, as had been
widely predicted, with the result that rival democratic and autocratic blocs
confront each other.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative has
secured the allegiance of many countries through loans, infrastructure
construction, and trade accords. America now makes its own
economics-must-serve-politics approach very clear. On a recent visit to India,
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that the US wanted to “diversify away from
countries that present geopolitical and security risks to our supply chain”.
She singled out India as among “trusted trading partners”. The American
targeting of China, its designated “strategic competitor”, could scarcely be
more explicit.
Major power shifts are rarely peaceful. The
tension between the world’s most powerful country, the US, and its would-be
successor, China, is hardly surprising. The confrontation demands of other
countries that they choose sides.
Many prefer, however, to cherry-pick their
allegiances, declining the binary choice offered by Biden in his depiction of a
world at a tipping point between Western democratic openness and the
strongman’s repression. India, a vibrant democracy but also a country with a
tense 3,400-km border with China that must be managed, is one of them, although
it has grown steadily closer to the US. More than one-third of humanity lives
on either side of that border.
The greatest boost to business confidence and insurance against war spreading across the globe would come from a cease-fire in Ukraine
India is one of several Asian countries
where Western corporations are building factories to secure supply chains that
circumvent China. These companies do not want to be vulnerable to US-Chinese
tensions, which could escalate at any moment. If President Xi Jinping of China
cedes to his obsessions over a democratic Taiwan, seen as an island unjustly
torn from the Chinese motherland, in the same way as President Vladimir Putin
of Russia used similar obsessions about Ukraine to justify an invasion, all
bets will be off.
Dignity, opportunity, profitThe greatest boost to business confidence
and insurance against war spreading across the globe would come from a
cease-fire in Ukraine, as the first anniversary of the February 24 Russian
invasion approaches. But Putin needs to be able to portray his reckless gamble
and repeated military setbacks as some form of “victory”, and Zelenskyy, after
the heroic sacrifice of his people, has said he will not cede Ukrainian
territory taken by force or through annexation to Russia.
Ukraine’s fierce attachment to its
democracy and sovereignty has only been reinforced by Putin’s war. That is one
of the painful lessons the Russian leader has had to absorb over the past year:
He has reinforced beyond measure the very thing — Ukrainian nationhood — whose
existence he denied.
The world that will be debated in Davos is
sobered but not stripped of the idea that the pursuit of human dignity and
equal opportunity are the necessary accompaniment to the pursuit of profit.
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