The social atmosphere has been very different this year in the forum that for decades extolled globalization as a reference framework of the time.
Not only because this kind of assembly of world elites that meets in Davos has been held on an unusual date (and with an atmosphere), but also because structural aspects such as a war that no one knows how to predict its duration and outcome;
the expansion of illiberal democracies, even within Europe, or the constant intervention of the States in the markets with the aim of reviving and correcting them.
Nothing to do with the cheerful and short skirted cartography that was drawn just a few years ago.
The
man from Davos,
an expression coined in the 1990s by the American sociologist Samuel Huntington, is depressed despite the fact that business has gone well for him.
Such a concept tried to describe those who come every year to the ski resort of the Swiss Alps on the occasion of the World Economic Forum.
The journalist Lewis Lapham spoke of Davos as "the mountain of vanities" because "the caste" (in an old-fashioned term) went there to, in addition to exchanging experiences and business cards, publicly flaunt their power and live with those who are the same as them and those who hope to be.
For decades, if there was a concrete representation of power, a circumstance, a place to learn the great global power and those who possessed it, that was Davos.
There, the neoliberal globalization that would put an end to economic cycles (the “end of economic history”) was theorized exhaustively, the transition to capitalism of the countries of Eastern Europe that left behind the iron curtain was blessed, the certainty that the new technologies would open spaces in which everyone would benefit from them and companies would be the main actors in this gigantic transformation.
The balance is not balanced: the really existing globalization has reduced poverty in many parts of the world, but it has obscenely increased inequalities, which corrupts political systems and destroys the cohesion of societies (the wealth of billionaires has increased both in the last 24 months and in the last 23 years: Profiting from suffering, Oxfam);
Hungary and Poland are moving away at forced marches from the European values that they once seemed to embrace;
surveillance capitalism has become omnipresent (we know where you are, we know where you have been, we know more or less what you are thinking), and the States, through their agencies and their policies, lead the way out of a multi-crisis composed of Great Recession, trade protectionism, pandemic and war.
Now there is less talk of globalization than of deglobalization (or alternative globalization), less of economic policy than of geopolitics.
The dominant vector of public interventions is the relocation of companies, their renationalization, the strengthening of the strategic autonomy of countries in sectors as significant as energy (gas and oil), technology (microchips), pharmaceutical (vaccines) and agri-food (scarcity and rise in prices).
It attends more to the difficulties of the industry than to those of finances, and puts security ahead of profitability.
It is a priority to consolidate the functioning of domestic supply chains as opposed to export chains, and the fragmentation of the world into blocks is of great concern,
The US and China (who fought a sharp trade war before the emergence of covid and the war in Ukraine) were leading each of them.
In the midst of these scenarios, the specter of an inflation that is much more persistent than the consensus of economists had predicted, that a generation of citizens is not aware of, and which is intended to be combated with a new cycle of monetary chemotherapy with price increases of money.
And the debt.
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