The Davos Symbol

In Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain there is a sense of the decadence of European civilization, symbolically gathered in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. The protagonist, Hans Castorp, is a slightly ill and painfully wounded young man who rests and tries to regain oxygen while living with a series of bourgeois types and characters of old Europe, whose fate is associated with the preservation of a life dissociated from the real world and fatally linked to the distance that separates them irreversibly, in the cold mountain, from any other possibility of salvation.

As it was in Thomas Mann's novel a century ago, the mountain of Davos is now once again a refuge for economists, corporate leaders and the last managers of globalization, distant from a world deconstructed from the extremes of the corrosive left and the populist right, which converge in a single common idea: to provoke the exile and death of liberal values.
The same criticisms that 20 years ago were shouted by the guerrillas with backpacks and masks of the so-called anti-globalization movement, are now being put forward with demagogic arguments by the new populists. The perverse consequences of commercial liberation for the peoples subjected to the tyranny of the economic powers; the denationalization and dehumanization of society, supposedly lost in the insubstantiality of such confused values as progress, work and prosperity; the mortal destiny of nations and humanity when they lose their identity at the hands of the insatiable greed of the men and women of Davos. Evil, wicked, false and uncivilized. And naturally, undemocratic. 

The similarity between the weaknesses of interwar Europe and today's liberal order is obvious. But the essential difference is that while the genius of Thomas Mann was able to anticipate the arrival of fascism and communism from the refuge of decadence, today's liberal values, which represent the vast majority of democratic societies worldwide, do not contemplate the possibility of decadence but promote the need for urgent reforms to dynamize and harmonize complex, globalized economic and social relations that take place in a real and digital environment. They do not conceive of an ailing order, without firmness, as was the European order after the First World War, but of a better coalited international order. 

In this sense, the new U.S. Security Strategy published in October 2022, points out as one of the main efforts for the next decade to "build the strongest possible coalition of nations to enhance our collective to shape the global strategic environment and to solve shared challenges". And it highlights the benefits generated by the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for global progress, reaffirming the work of various multilateral organizations, which continues to be essential for reforming the current order and adapting it to the new framework of global transformation.

In addition to the network of international organizations, traditional alliances and new ad hoc coalitions, the security document focuses on business and public-private partnerships to address the transformation of technology and critical sectors such as energy, infrastructure and the defense industry. And it calls on the private sector to develop investment and innovation projects that incorporate a strategic orientation so that U.S. leadership and democracy can be prolonged and strengthened in the coming years in areas such as cybersecurity, advanced computing, semiconductors, next-generation communications, clean energy and biotechnology

Security and prosperity go hand in hand in an approach where public-private collaboration is essential. "Markets alone cannot respond to the rapid pace of technological change," the U.S. security document states. But the political effort cannot be oriented towards the deterioration of civil society or the weakening of forums for debate and economic analysis such as the one that the prestigious World Economic Forum has been developing in Davos for decades. Rather, it should take oxygen to undertake the reform of liberal principles in search of greater social equity and a better integration of companies and entrepreneurs in projects to face global problems.