Decades before this Swiss village 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” — emollient pablum to suit a modern-day Settembrini. Unofficially, we have entered the territory of Naphta — of open menace and nervous apprehension and calculations of available power. The underlying spirit of Davos this year is fear.
That spirit arrived with 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,” the president 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 (which also sent stocks soaring after the previous day’s sell-off). But the idea of Trump sending troops to seize Nuuk 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 U.S. 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 this latest tariff threats against eight European countries, though with this president the 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.
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.
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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 — infinitely more valuable than whatever advantages Moscow may hope to find in the Arctic. It can also only help China, because a Europe that feels abandoned by the United States 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 “win-win cooperation.”
A day before Trump’s speech, the forum heard forceful speeches from Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister; Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission; and Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. They each stressed an irreparable break with the past — “nostalgia will not bring back the old order,” said von der Leyen — and a 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.
The words are eloquent and the resolve is admirable. If there’s a silver lining for the rest of NATO to having Trump back in the White House, it’s that he has underlined the legitimacy of longstanding American complaints that those nations spend too little on their militaries and that they have forgone economic dynamism for the sake of social equity and environmental considerations. Now they are being forced to recognize these truths as never before, including through meaningful increases in defense spending and a reconsideration of their costly green-energy ambitions, which have slowed growth and spurred populist backlashes.
But nearly every centrist leader in the West faces the dilemma of 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. And Europe’s broader political outlook, which for three generations has inculcated a culture of cooperation and pacifism of the sort Settembrini would have admired, is ill suited for an era of confrontation and war.
France has had four prime ministers in the last two years as its parliament struggled to pass a budget. Germany’s unwieldy left-right coalition government has failed to lift the economy, which last year grew at an anemic 0.2 percent rate. In Britain, Keir Starmer, the country’s latest hapless prime minister, has an unfavorability rating of 75 percent. And in each country, far-right parties are at or near the top of the polls, checked only by the resolve of mainstream parties to keep them out of government. Should that resolve fade, as it probably will, Europe will not be anyone’s bulwark against the illiberal tide sweeping the world at large.
All this recalls the diseased Europe that Mann sought to capture in “The Magic Mountain” — the one in which old conventions and pieties were evaporating under the heat of new ideas and new technologies, unfulfilled longings and uncontrollable rages. The cultural historian Philipp Blom called the era “the Vertigo Years” and noted the similarities to the present: “Then as now, the feeling of living in an accelerating world, of speeding into the unknown, was overwhelming.” What it wound up speeding into was, of course, a colossal civilizational tragedy.
Critics of the forum meetings like to point out that what happens up here is very far from ordinary life; that an annual confab of the very rich, powerful and influential (and the journalists dispatched to write about them) isn’t representative; that nothing good that happens in Davos is real and that nothing real that happens here is good.
But 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.
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