Davos is not the future. For almost thirty years, the forum in Davos, a city in the Swiss mountains, has marked changes in the globalized world. In the 1990s, it was in Davos that the impact of the digital revolution was understood. During the forum, you could meet Nelson Mandela and Frederick de Klerk, Yasser Arafat and Simon Peres. But all this no longer exists. The world dreamed of in Davos that of the free movement of goods and capital and that of technology for the common good has collided with dangers that it could not or could not foresee.
The 2023 edition of the Davos forum takes place on the same continent where Covid and geopolitical rivalries have prevailed over a certain model of globalization. Davos has accompanied the expansion of China as a “world factory” but has not understood the growing need for regionalization of production and separation of Beijing in the field of technologies. The forum is like a cartoon character who keeps running even when the ground disappears under his feet before realizing, now too late, that he is advancing in the void.
Old conference for old models
The annual meeting in Switzerland remains an opportunity for world leaders to forge alliances and exchange information. Still, it has lost its role as a compass to globalization. The anti-globalization movements and the close relatives who are recently marking their protest on historic buildings and monuments around Europe have also experienced a profound downsizing. The reason? We are living in a moment of suspension and global unease about what the future holds, with which alliances and hegemonies. Globalization remains a legacy of the last twenty years and is no longer a promise for a better tomorrow. Climate change and geopolitics have called into question what Davos had taken for granted in recent years. A turnaround that must be understood in order not to cling to outdated models.
Chinese technological growth, Russia’s decisions and world states towards Ukraine are a mad compass whose hands can change from one moment to the next as if we were going quickly from one pole to another. It is not from Davos that the answers to the many questions the world is asking today will come. Still, it is from Davos that a new, less elitist way of designing the future can start, one that gives space to the communities that today guide the thinking of so many people to achieve a more human and inclusive dimension.
