The globalist “managerial” philosophy favoured by the European Union has lost, and Trump has “won”, a panellist at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos admitted.
A sombre mood appears to have descended upon the Swiss ski resort town. While the WEF typically hosts an orgiastic celebration of international elitism, this year’s festivities sit in the shadow of the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the rejection of neo-liberalism by the American people.
In a WEF panel discussion on the incoming administration, Yale University Professor Walter Reed said that the Davos class needs to understand “who’s won, which is Trump, but who’s lost, which is to say us.”
“Who is losing here is Europe. The European Union, and by and large, it’s member states, have misread the direction where events were going.”
“The causes that it is interested in; climate, human rights, some others, as well as the methods of diplomacy that it prefers, are simply being gradually kind of marginalized as something new — not necessarily something better — but something new, moves into the centre.”
Professor Reed pointed to a general failing at the heart of the globalist philosophy, that modern man had somehow reached the “end of history” and, therefore, merely needed a group of international bureaucrats to manage and tinker with “incremental shifts”.
“That’s not how things work and especially not how things work at this kind of moment when a technological transformation is really biting into the economy on all kinds of levels in a transformational way,” he said.
Fellow panellist Graham Allison, a political scientist and Professor of Government at Harvard University, said, “Trump has done something no person in the world has ever done before; a dead man, a dead politician has risen.”
“This is the greatest comeback in political history of a politician and then, therefore, he thinks he can do anything. There’s a supreme confidence about that,” Prof Allison said.
“This is a phenomenon that we shouldn’t try to understand only in the terms that we’re traditionally accepting. We should say something strange, new, and amazing is happening here, and we should study it.”
Although Davos is usually the hot ticket for world leaders in January, Trump also undercut the WEF by becoming the first American president to invite international leaders to attend his inauguration in Washington, D.C., this week.
While rising right-wing political stars such as Argentine President Javier Milei and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni attended the swearing-in ceremony, other leaders of American ally nations were not as fortunate.
One such leader who did not receive an invite was German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose leftist government collapsed the day after Trump’s victory in November and who is widely expected to be removed from power following the federal elections in February. Adding insult to injury, in another apparent slight to Scholz, Trump did invite top members of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
This left the German Chancellor with the consolation prize of an appearance in Davos, during which he demonstrated his censorious leanings and chastised X boss and Trump ally Elon Musk for expressing his political opinions about Germany and Europe.
“We have the freedom of speech in Europe and in Germany. Everyone can say what he wants, even if he is a billionaire. And what we do not accept is if this is supporting extreme-right positions,” Scholz said at the WEF on Tuesday.
However, it is unclear how much sway the likely outgoing Chancellor has, with a reporter from leading German newspaper Welt Holger Zschaepitz sharing a picture seeming to show the audience at Scholz’s Davos appearance being half empty.
Rather than attend the event in person this year, as he previously did in 2018 and 2020, President Trump will address the meeting virtually on Thursday.
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