The eyes of decision-makers on domestic and foreign policy shift to Davos this week, as they have since 1971 when Klaus Schwab introduced the “better management techniques” of US corporations to European corporations. The inceptive principles of the European Management Forum would become universalised with the World Economic Forum (WEF).
A little less prominently, and arguably far more importantly given the current state of world affairs, next month’s Munich Security Conference becomes the second of the two pillars that hold the world up — more so, perhaps, than the UN system these days. The Munich conference is where arms dealers will sit down with politicians and bureaucrats, military and intelligence people, to discuss the trade in war, in military hardware and software, and geostrategic shifts around the globe.
Together the WEF and Munich have in effect replaced the UN system and institutions of global economic relations, collaboration and co-operation, where tariffs and trade wars, and hot wars, have been discussed for decades. The UN Security Council, the World Trade Organisation and its legal documents, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) suddenly seem anachronistic in a world dominated by untrammelled tariff and territorial wars.
Together the WEF and Munich have in effect replaced the UN system and institutions of global economic relations, collaboration and co-operation, where tariffs and trade wars, and hot wars, have been discussed for decades.
Notwithstanding pacifists at the origins of the UN system, war has entrapped us in its cruel imperatives, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War in 1997. War is still interested in us.
A particularly apposite frame is the interregnum in the shift from a world dominated by liberal internationalism to something that has yet to fully take shape. This frame, if we consider the old order as dying and the last kicks of the horse it rode into the place, is especially damaging and destructive. For example, when the French empire stared death in the eyes in the 1950s and 1960s it used especially brutal violence (against Algerians), with extrajudicial killings, torture and a scorched-earth campaign led by the Organisation Armée Secrète — a secret force of officers of the French empire.
When Germany’s imperial dreams shattered in 1904 that country launched the most vicious and cruel (scorched earth) campaign against native people in Namibia. Lt-Gen Lothar von Trotha of the German supreme command issued the infamous vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order) that “within the German boundaries every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, shall be shot”.
Over the past year or so the world has witnessed extrajudicial killings, the killing of unarmed civilians from the waters off the Venezuelan coast, on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and on the Great Steppes. So, there is sufficient evidence to help support the idea that the interregnum is morbid.
The empire that is fading is not as much a single-country imperium (this may be what it aspires to be under President Donald Trump), as it is the post-war liberal international order established and policed by the US. It is, in this sense, not a tout court replication of the British empire that died after World War 1, but an order that began to take shape at Versailles in 1919 and found greater expression in the Washington Naval Conference of 1921.
The conventional narrative is that with the Washington Conference, the US gained naval “parity” with Britain. This narrative glosses over two important facts. Britain was, at the time, in serious decline as a global naval force and European countries were heavily indebted to the US. In 2025 things changed dramatically.
The US is being challenged as a naval power by China and is scrambling to secure maritime superiority in the Western Hemisphere. The US has also launched a war of trade and tariffs on the world. And now it is the US that is heavily indebted. Forbes Magazine reported (earlier this month) that the US national debt had surpassed $38-trillion. Whereas France, Britain, Italy and Japan were heavily indebted to the US in the 1920s, the US now owes China $750bn; the UK $80bn and Japan $1.13-trillion.
Reflecting on the much-discussed decline of the US (as a global hegemon) and global “shift to the East”, the changing dynamics in naval military power and influence, the switch from holding debts of European countries (in the 1920s) to now being indebted to Britain, China and Japan, the gaze shifting to Davos and to next month’s Munich conference becomes a significant marker of institutional change in international co-operation and collaboration.
When the US established the institutions of global governance, notably the UN (1945) and the GATT (1947), it marked an end to overt political economic control by a single state. This order prevailed with many faults over the past seven or eight decades. What we are faced with now is a more flagrant exercise of power, with tariff and military war, and the exclusive clubs of the WEF in Davos and the Munich Security Conference now in place of the UN system.
What the next world order will look like will be determined at Davos and Munich, where the European world has held sway since 1971. Any one or more country that imagines a better world and wants to establish a new order will no longer have to go through the UN system. Any future world order may well depend on the power wielded at Davos and Munich.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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