World leaders in Davos confront a historic moment as critical to the future as the end of WWI

A U.S. isolationist temptation, bitter European disunity, and growing nationalism and populism within democracies amid rising authoritarianism, are among the issues confronting world leaders gathering in Davos.

A century ago this month, the Treaty of Versailles went into effect, bringing World War I to an end. Yet the dreams that paved its way were already evaporating. Among them was U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s vision of “a world made safe for democracy” and his hope that the League of Nations would emerge to prevent future conflict.

As world leaders gather in Davos next week at the dawn of the 2020s, they confront a similarly decisive historic moment and a comparable set of dashed hopes. One can hear the haunting echoes from the 1920s: a U.S. isolationist temptation, bitter European disunity, and growing nationalism and populism within democracies amid rising authoritarianism.

As with the end of World War I, the Cold War’s end in 1989 spawned premature declarations of democracy’s triumph. In his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama suggested that with Soviet collapse humanity had reached “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

What world leaders coming to Davos know is that history’s course is up for grabs again. Major power competition is heating up, inflamed by a systemic contest between democratic and state capitalism. The world is awash with uncertainty about how new technologies and rising environmental threats could remake our world. The international order of rules and institutions that the U.S. and its partners constructed after World War II is faltering and ill-equipped to navigate these challenges.

In the World Economic Forum’s program notes, it writes: “There are 193 sovereign nations, a proliferation of regional centers of power, and one increasingly obvious fact of life – we’re all in this together… We need to move from geopolitics and international competition to a default of consummate global collaboration. Nations are going to have to change.”

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Πηγή: cnbc.com