Each year begins with the same news — only its exact time varies. By 9:43 a.m. on January 3, Canada’s highest-earning CEOs had already earned the equivalent of the average annual salary in the country, or $58,800. Here, it was the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives that did the math and published a report that was picked up, of course, everywhere in this low news period. But the issue of ever-increasing wealth inequality also makes headlines elsewhere in the world almost every January.
Every January, the theme is also put back on the agenda because political leaders and business people from all over the world gather in Davos, in the heart of the Swiss Alps, for the World Economic Forum (WEF). This week, like every year for a decade now, Oxfam International is taking advantage of the Forum to publish a report that focuses on wealth inequalities. We learn in particular, in this latest edition, that the 1% of the super-rich has acquired twice as much capital over the last two years as the other 99% of humanity.
But the WEF itself — its setting, its guests, the beauty and inaccessibility of its site — has already raised questions about the world’s most privileged for decades. And exasperation with the Forum’s very existence has perhaps never been higher since the pandemic, when it has become the subject of particularly imaginative conspiracy theories within the populist right, first American, then international.
” The Great Reset – the theme of the Forum in 2020 – has been taken over by conspiracy theorists to evoke the specter of a world where the powerful and the ultra-rich would have used the pretext of the pandemic to inoculate people with vaccines with the power to deprive them of their free will, a question of establishing a new totalitarian political order. You see, it goes far. The disinformation professionals themselves, and the laxity of social media towards the phenomenon, will be blamed, rightly, for their role in the popularity of these outlandish hypotheses.
It should also be admitted that the context in which the WEF takes place does not help. Many of us feel that the billionaires of this world practically live in another galaxy than ours, or that they do not share, at least, the same human condition as ordinary mortals. With the increase in wealth inequalities, the impact of the decisions of these big capitalists on our lives only grows, and is accompanied by a growing feeling of powerlessness. The frustration, coupled with the impression of an incredible distance with these people, can become fertile ground for the imagination.
With the current inflation and the uncertain economic context, here as elsewhere in the world, the idea of elites gathered comfortably in the middle of the Alps is all the more shocking. This is probably why we feel the big meeting of Davos losing momentum, at least on the political side. This year, few Heads of State came, and those present are almost all from Europe. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is the only G7 leader there.
And while many Canadian prime ministers have attended the Forum in the past, it’s Chrystia Freeland — an active member of the think tank for several years — representing Ottawa at the conference this week. We feel that with the conspiracy theories on the right as with the frustration with wealth inequalities on the left, appearing at the Forum has become a thorny image problem for many political figures.
The ideas that have long been promoted by the organizers of the WEF are also falling into disuse. Although the Forum has existed since 1971, it took on its international dimension at the end of the 1980s, a period which of course coincides with the collapse of the USSR and the feeling of “triumph of democracy”. The implicit and explicit premise of the editions of the last decades is that the world is going in one direction, and that politicians, business people and civil society leaders from all over the world should be able to come together in one place to exchange ideas and develop personal affinities.
Thus, they will be better able to contribute to “progress” and to “meet the challenges of tomorrow” – one could insert here a whole series of fashionable hollow words, which of course have the function of erasing the ideologies at the works behind the governance and economic intervention strategies, the circulation of which has been amplified by the Forum over the years.
This view of the world no longer has the hold it once had. Europe is at war, and relations between China and Western powers are increasingly strained. Many countries in the South forcefully express their fed up with the “selfishness” that they perceive in the North, whether on the question of the distribution of vaccines at the height of the pandemic, or on reparations for climate change, as we have seen this fall during the last two COPs. Meanwhile, authoritarianism is on the rise, and democracies are weakening. Let’s say that criticisms of globalization are also more fashionable than a few years ago.
This changing context, the organizers of the Forum themselves take note of it, as demonstrated by a theme which focuses this year on the ways of dealing with these “polycrises”, according to their new expression. All the same, it seems that the golden age of Davos, and of all that the EMF represents politically, is behind us.