Business cards. Check. Contacts book. Check. Stylish ski jacket. Check. If it is mid-January, the global elite, and certainly anyone who aspires to membership of that slightly nebulous group, will be packing their bags and flying, preferably by private jet, to the chic Swiss ski resort of Davos. Over the course of a few days, they will sort out the world’s problems, between munching canapés, and bagging some lucrative contracts for their bank.
If globalisation has a spiritual headquarters, it is the World Economic Forum, to give it its full name. When the political scientist Samuel Huntingdon coined the term ‘Davos Man’, he turned it into a short-hand for the globe-trotting elite that moves seamlessly from business, to policy work, to academia and consultancy. They have, he argued, ‘little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations’.
With its mix of tycoons, political leaders and celebrities, Davos has been a great commercial success, turning policy-wonkery into a money-spinner. But
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