Anxiety in the Alps

The Davos confab is certainly not going to have a business-as-usual vibe about it this year:

The global economy is in better shape than it's been in years. Stock markets are booming, oil prices are on the rise again and the risks of a rapid economic slowdown in China, a major source of concern a year ago, have eased.

And yet, as political leaders, CEOs and top bankers make their annual trek up the Swiss Alps to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the mood is anything but celebratory.

Beneath the veneer of optimism over the economic outlook lurks acute anxiety about an increasingly toxic political climate and a deep sense of uncertainty surrounding the U.S. presidency of Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated on the final day of the forum.

Last year, the consensus here was that Trump had no chance of being elected. His victory, less than half a year after Britain voted to leave the European Union, was a slap at the principles that elites in Davos have long held dear, from globalization and free trade to multilateralism.

Trump is the poster child for a new strain of populism that is spreading across the developed world and threatening the post-war liberal democratic order. With elections looming in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and possibly Italy, this year, the nervousness among Davos attendees is palpable.

"Regardless of how you view Trump and his positions, his election has led to a deep, deep sense of uncertainty and that will cast a long shadow over Davos," said Jean-Marie Guehenno, CEO of International Crisis Group, a conflict resolution think-tank.

Moises Naim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was even more blunt: "There is a consensus that something huge is going on, global and in many respects unprecedented. But we don't know what the causes are, nor how to deal with it."

The titles of the discussion panels at the WEF, which runs from Jan. 17-20, evoke the unsettling new landscape. Among them are "Squeezed and Angry: How to Fix the Middle Class Crisis", "Politics of Fear or Rebellion of the Forgotten?", "Tolerance at the Tipping Point?" and "The Post-EU Era".

The list of leaders attending this year is also telling. The star attraction will be Xi Jinping, the first Chinese president ever to attend Davos. His presence is being seen as a sign of Beijing's growing weight in the world at a time when Trump is promising a more insular, "America first" approach and Europe is pre-occupied with its own troubles, from Brexit to terrorism.

British Prime Minister Theresa May, who has the thorny task of taking her country out of the EU, will also be there. But Germany's Angela Merkel, a Davos regular whose reputation for steady, principled leadership would have fit well with the WEF's main theme of "Responsive and Responsible Leadership", will not.

It will indeed take the passage of some time to fully parse the implications of our present juncture.

Certainly, the presence of China's Xi is a new element, but even that is not a slam-dunk portent of his country's ascendancy. It has structural economic problems at home, and the above-cited world developments that it surely didn't foresee, at least in their entirety.

But let's look at the West. For years, there's been a gathering confluence of factors that originally seemed at odds with each other. The West's huge multinational corporations, once seen as the repository of a tunnel-vision focus on making products and profits, have now embraced such "values" as "diversity," care for the "global climate," "sustainability" and an increasing irrelevance of borders - "values" that have their roots in the stringy-haired counterculture that stood as the corporate world's foil a half-century ago.

Meanwhile, factors ranging from automation to the migration of both low-skill and high-skill work forces to the basic desire to ditch the hamlet in the holler for the bright lights of the big city have left a large swath of the populations of America, Britain and other such countries with the the expectation of continuity of the forms of opportunity that served as the foundation of its life crumbling beneath them.  The civic fabric of flyover country has been fraying, and millions of people are clamoring for stability and a sense of identity.

So it must be unsettling indeed for the pointy-heads meeting in Davos to see that the blueprints by which they used to guide the world's overarching economic and cultural directions suddenly won't work.

It will be interesting to see the degree to which they get that at the conclusion of the conference this year. If the papers and speeches that come out of it are predicated on the assumption that they still do all the shaping of world-stage events, this pow-wow's ongoing relevance will take a significant hit.