FAREED ZAKARIA: The World Economic Forum in Davos
is usually fixated on the future.
Most years, the attendees are dazzled by some country,
company, or technology promising to burst forward, force change,
dominate the next decade.
This year, the focus was not on the future, but the past.
People delve back into history to debate what caused
Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The Swedish finance minister explained
why his country, which hasn't been
at war since the Napoleonic wars,
was breaking its 200-year tradition of neutrality
with his bid to join NATO.
The Finnish foreign minister recalled Finland's resistance
to Moscow's aggression in the Winter War of 1939 and 1940.
In past years at Davos, companies took storefronts
and plastered them with jubilant signs,
cheering on dynamism, acceleration, and disruption.
This time, there were far fewer placards and slogans,
some of them meekly promising sustainability
or progress on climate change.
The one genuinely cheerful sign I saw
said, "Will the Saudi GDP now be fueled
by YOLO, FOMO, and WYWH?"
With oil at over $100 a barrel, the Saudi regime
has much to be excited about.
The storefront that dominated detention
was one that used to be booked for years by Russians who
hosted lavish cocktail parties and caviar
tastings there with the country's moneyed elite.
Now, it has a sign in the window that reads in small cleartype
"This used to be the Russian house in Davos.
Now, it's the Russian war crimes house in Davos."
Sponsored by the Ukrainian businessman Viktor Pinchuk,
the rooms are filled with striking images
and stories of Russia's barbaric actions
in its campaign against Ukraine.
Ukraine dominated Davos this year,
and most people I spoke to were quite
unsure how this war would end.
That played into a larger sense of uncertainty about the world
that we are heading into.
A world of multiplying risks.
Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Singapore's senior minister,
said to me, "We know the risks that are out there are large.
They're not about black swan events, coming out of the blue.
A pandemic was predicted.
Russia's invasion was a known possibility.
Another pandemic or more frequent climate crises--
these are not just possible, but likely.
We can't keep expecting and planning for a return
to calm, untroubled times."
A former central banker told me that
economic policymakers felt that they
were in uncharted territory.
"The old model-- where inflation moves up ever so slightly,
and then you raised rates a tiny bit and all was well-- that's
dead.
We're in a new world, and we're all just experimenting."
There is a broader foreboding, a sense that the era we have just
lived through, the three decades since 1990,
may have been an unusual, perhaps, even unique
one in which great power politics
and geopolitical tensions that normally dominate and define
international life were absent.
The giddy trends of recent times--
globalization, the information revolution,
even democratization-- were trends
built on an edifice of power, America's superpower status.
But that strength has been waning
for some years, caused by Iraq, the global financial crisis,
COVID.
Now, it is being challenged-- first
by China, and then Russia.
In all this gloom, there's one distinctly hopeful sign.
Europe is acting with a greater sense of unity and purpose
than I've ever seen before.
Every European leader I spoke with
believe that Russia's aggression has sparked a revolution
of sorts across the continent.
The EU has shown remarkable unity on sanctions,
and is slowly but steadily coming
together on energy policy.
These successes could evolve into greater
coordination on foreign, and even defense policy.
Europeans have realized at a fundamental level
that they were taking peace and stability for granted.
That it might now have to be created and sustained
by hard work and commitment, in part,
by building hard power of their own and deploying
it strategically.
There are serious debates about ending
the slow, consensual process of EU decision making
that allows one country like Hungary to veto its efforts.
The most lasting legacy of this crisis
could be a new role for Europe as a more
purposeful, strategic actor on the world stage.
But for that to happen, this experience in uniting
against Russia has to work.
Only success can breed more success.
Failure will doom this experiment.
The founding fathers of the European Union,
like Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, were steeped in history
and determined to ensure that war did
not break out again in Europe.
Today's statesmen need to infuse their day to day decisions
with a similar sense of history.
50 years from now, no one will remember whether growth slowed
on the continent for a couple of quarters in 2022
or if Brussels had to pay extra for natural gas from the US.
What they will recall is the answer to one question.
Who won the war in Ukraine?
Putin or the West.