It was in 2004 that the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington – best known for his thesis about the coming “clash of civilisations” – coined the phrase “Davos man” to describe a “global superclass” of economic transnationals, many of whom convened at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland each January. These “dead souls”, who made their fortunes through the globalisation of the international economy, had “little need for national loyalty”, viewed state boundaries as “obstacles that thankfully are vanishing” and saw national governments as “residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations”.
After the end of the Cold War, Davos man had every reason to think he was on the right side of history. He (or she) was likely to be a talented and successful individual, boasting skills for which there was a global demand. What concerned Huntington was the extent to which the Davos understanding of the world had captured the minds of many in the international political class, in a way that was incompatible with the worldviews of a large number of those whom they claimed to represent. This was particularly the case in the West, where elite faith in globalisation as the vehicle for domestic social progress and the soothing of tensions between great power rivals verged on the cultish. Away from Davos, most people still held on tenaciously to national or local identities that they felt were under threat. Thus began the malign creep of “unrepresentative democracy”, reflected in the growing divide between a cosmopolitan upper crust and the average voter, that would come back to bite before long. Even on home turf, the foundations of the “liberal international order” were not quite so strong as they seemed.
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