at the World Economic Forum the autocracies dominate – Corriere.it

If Davos has always been the party of globalization, it remains to be understood what party it will be now that globalization seems to be in retreat everywhere or at least in the midst of a skin shed with unpredictable outcomes. And not only the war that Russia is unleashing in the heart of Europe, which even until 2021 was among the most influential and welcome powers at the World Economic Forum. Not only the fact that Roscongress Foundation – a direct emanation of Vladimir Putin – had a “memorandum of cooperation” with the World Economic Forum since 2017, while now the Kremlin is trying to destroy the world of Davos with mortars. The deeper issue is the shedding of skin everywhere, in the event taking place next week in the Swiss mountains. Trade barriers are being raised between the United States and Chinaglobal industry chains have never fully recovered from the pandemic, as Brussels and Washington clash over who subsidizes their industry the most.

The crisis of Big Tech

If Davos ever had an ideology beyond money, it seems as solid today as real socialism in the 1980s. Maybe for this, but the interlocking game of presences and absences of the week of meetings that opens on Monday looks like a particularly illegible mosaic. There will be the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, David Solomon and Larry Fink; those of Microsoft and Amazon Satya Nadella and Andy Jassy; and Meta-Facebook president Nick Clegg. Together, their groups have announced around 34,000 layoffs in the past few months. And together the Davos darlings of the six biggest Big Techs – with Alphabet-Google, Apple and Netflix, as well as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft – arrive at the Forum after losing more than four trillion dollars in market value in the last year. True, these large groups had created many more jobs in recent years than they destroy now. And even after the bad 2022, Big Tech still generated nearly six trillion dollars in stock value in a decade. But although he always talks about “strategies” and “visions”, the world of Davos lives in the immediate. He prefers to forget or pretend to, if something sounds uncomfortable to talk about.

The disappearance of the crypto world

Thus the world of cryptocurrencies, which had been fed, raised and exalted in the Swiss mountains, practically disappeared this year: there are two trillion dollars of burned value to be removed for many small and naive investors, in addition to the biggest financial scandal since 2008 with the crash of Sam Bankman-Fried’s Ftx platform. Maybe because of this, maybe because of the ruthless focus on immediate costs and benefits, but there must have been rumors among the leaders of the big countries that it’s better not to be at Davos now. The political cost in the polls of shaking too many hands with business titans risks being intolerable in this age of endemic populism.

The absence of France (and Italy)

The only one among the G7 leaders will be Chancellor Olaf Scholz, because Germany needs to relaunch its productive vocation after the Russian shock. But Emmanuel Macron will not show up and will allow few of the French ministers to be there. Rishi Sunak stays away, sheltered from the very Blairite tradition whereby the prime minister of London never misses a single hour of Davos (Tony Blair himself, a man from another era, yes he will be there instead). British Labor leader Keir Starmer will come, just because he is studying to be prime minister and has to establish relationships. All in all, the American, Chinese and Japanese delegations are also low profile, while even a Davosian star like Canadian leader Justin Trudeau does not show up. Italy then beats all absence records, because neither Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni nor any economic minister will attend the (reserved) tables which still count and still serve especially those with a reputation deficit.

The role of the United Arab Emirates

In fact, there will be those who need more international visibility, coming from countries with less specific weight: the Finnish leader Sanna Marin, the Greek Kyriakos Mitsotakis. But above all, increasingly, there will be entirely the ruling classes of the Eurasian and Middle Eastern satrapies seeking global legitimacy. This year the United Arab Emirates stand out, which in Davos is not presented as the absolutist monarchy that harbors the dirty money of the Russians or allows the Russians to import war technologies. No, in Davos the Emirates are the country that will host the next global climate summit and for this reason it has signed an “agreement” with the World Economic Forum. It is not known if and how much you pay. Certainly representatives of the Emirates are invited to 28 debates – more than a superpower – while they will moderate another dozen with journalists also from the Emirates. It matters little that the country has just been downgraded from Reporters Without Borders to 138th place in the world for freedom of the press. But Davos also this: pure power and money, without pretense.