WASHINGTON: Decades before the Swiss village of Davos became famous as a pilgrimage site for global elites attending the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, it was best known as a destination for well-to-do invalids seeking respiratory relief in the crisp Alpine air.
It was that reputation that brought Thomas Mann to Davos (where his wife was convalescing) for a three-week visit in 1912, inspiring his great novel, The Magic Mountain, published 12 years later.
The book is set in the years before World War I, and one of its aims is to address the moral and psychological unraveling of European civilization on the eve of its catastrophe. At its heart lies a long argument between two fiercely held and fatally flawed worldviews.
The first is represented by the character of Lodovico Settembrini, an earnest but naïve pacifist and internationalist. The second comes from Leo Naphta, a proto-totalitarian figure who thinks that the ideals of freedom are an illusion and that humanity’s “deepest desire is to obey.”
Both men are dying of tuberculosis. In the book’s climactic scene, they face off in a duel in which Settembrini fires his gun in the air and Naphta shoots himself — emblematic of the soft liberalism that lacks the nerve to defend its values, and the despotic will to power that ultimately destroys itself.
That could almost be Davos this week. Officially, the theme of this year’s meeting is “A Spirit of Dialogue.” The underlying spirit of Davos this year is fear.
That spirit arrived with President Donald Trump, whose hourlong speech to a packed audience on Wednesday sounded, in places, as if it had been ghostwritten by Mario Puzo.
Wrapped in self-aggrandizing boasts and exaggerations, along with ugly jibes, meandering asides and shopworn grievances, lay a premeditated threat worthy of a padrino: “You can say ‘yes’ and we will be very appreciative,” Trump said, in reference to his demand for Greenland. “Or you can say ‘no’ and we will remember.”
The line didn’t get the attention it deserved in news headlines that focused on Trump’s promise not to use force to take the semiautonomous Danish territory — a reassurance that also sent stocks soaring after the previous day’s sell-off. But the idea of Trump sending troops to seize Greenland was never very plausible in the first place. The president is not a boots-on-the-ground guy.
More worrisome was the implied threat to NATO itself. Trump cast the cession of Greenland as a sort of token of appreciation from Europe, “a very small ask compared to what we have given them for many decades.”
And while he didn’t make it explicit, the “we will remember” line suggested a willingness to harm Europe in ways that could really hurt, perhaps by cutting off arms to Ukraine or withdrawing many, if not all, of the roughly 80,000 US troops still stationed on the Continent.
Whether Denmark folds, or the administration makes good on Trump’s threats, or the two sides find some sort of off-ramp remains to be seen. It was a hopeful sign to see the president back away from the latest tariff threats against eight European countries, though with this president, respites tend to be temporary. The “framework of a future deal” that Trump claims to have reached over the territory with Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary-general, remains unspecified and, for now, more rhetorical than real.
But it was also telling to attend a panel meeting on European defense that included Rutte, along with the presidents of Poland and Finland, and hardly hear the word “Ukraine” mentioned until the session was all but over. It was left to the NATO leader to exclaim, almost plaintively: “The main issue is not Greenland. Now the main issue is Ukraine.”
Except that’s not exactly right. Where Europe had once faced a single menace, it now faces a double one — a Scylla of unyielding Russian brutality and a Charybdis of American abandonment and territorial avarice. The danger is not only external but psychological: a corrosion of confidence in the assumptions that have undergirded European security since 1945.
That can only help Vladimir Putin, since a crackup of the Atlantic alliance has been a core goal of Russian foreign policy since the 1940s. It can also only help China, because a Europe that feels abandoned by the US will almost inevitably lean more heavily on Beijing as an alternative economic partner. Not surprisingly, the Chinese vice premier, He Lifeng, was in Davos, offering what he called “win-win cooperation.”
A day before Trump’s speech, the forum heard forceful addresses from Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister; Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission; and Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. Each stressed an irreparable break with the past — “nostalgia will not bring back the old order,” said von der Leyen — and the need to find their way in a world of fading niceties and harder realities. “We are no longer relying on just the strength of our values, but also on the value of our strength,” said Carney.
But nearly every centrist leader in the West faces the same dilemma: electorates that either don’t want to move at all or want to move much too sharply. Pandering to either would result in immobility, for the sake of maintaining existing social protections, or radicalism, for the sake of overturning the liberal political order altogether. And Europe’s broader political culture — which for three generations has inculcated habits of cooperation and pacifism of the sort Settembrini would have admired — is ill-suited for an era defined by confrontation, rearmament and war.
Critics of the forum meetings like to point out that what happens up here is very far from the real world; that an annual confab of the very rich, powerful and influential (and the journalists dispatched to write about them) isn’t the real world; that nothing good that happens in Davos is real and that nothing real that happens here is good. Yet the Davos that Mann wrote about was not just a microcosm of civilization as it was, but also a portent of what it was becoming.
It feels very much the same today.