In Search of Davos Man
Peter Gumbel
1 William Browder was born in Princeton, New Jersey, grew up in Chicago，
and studied at Stanford University in California. But don't call him an American.
For the past 16 of his 40 years he has lived outside the U.S., first in London and then,
from 1996, in Moscow, where he runs his own investment firm. Browder now manages $ 1.6
billion in assets. In 1998 he gave up his American passport to become a British citizen,
since his life is now centered in Europe. "National identity makes no difference for me,"
he says. "I feel completely international. If you have four good friends and you like what
you are doing, it doesn't matter where you are. That's globalization."
2 Alex Mandl is also a fervent believer in globalization, but he views himself very differently.
A former president of AT & T, Mandl, 61, was born in Austria and now runs a French technology
company, which is doing more and more business in China. He reckons he spends about 90% of his
time traveling on business. But despite all that globetrotting, Mandl who has been a U.S. citizen
for 45 years still identifies himself as an American. "I see myself as American without any
hesitation. The fact that I spend a lot of time in other places doesn't change that," he says.
3 Although Browder and Mandl define their nationality differently, both see their identity as a
matter of personal choice, not an accident of birth. And not incidentally, both are Davos Men,
members of the international business elite who trek each year to the Swiss Alpine town for the
annual meeting of the world Economic Forum, founded in 1971. This week, Browder and Mandl will
join more than 2,200executives, politicians, academics, journalists, writers and a handful of
Hollywood stars for five days of networking, parties and endless earnest discussions about
everything from post-election Iraq and HIV in Africa to the global supply of oil and the
implications of nanotechnology. Yet this year, perhaps more than ever, a hot topic Davos is
Davos itself. Whatever their considerable differences, most flows of capital, labor and
technology across national borders, is both welcome and unstoppable. They see the world
increasingly as one vast, interconnected marketplace in which corporations search for the most
advantageous locations to buy, produce and sell their goods and services.
4 As borders and national identities become less important, some find that threatening and even
dangerous. In an essay entitled "Dead Soul: The Denationalization of the American Elite,"
Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington describes Davos Man (a phrase that first got widespread
attention in the 1990s) as an emerging global superspecies and a threat. The members of this class,
he writes, are people who "have 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. " Huntington argues
that Davos Man's global-citizen self-image is starkly at odds with the values of most Americans,
who remain deeply committed to their nation. This disconnect, he says, creates "a major cultural
fault line. In a variety of ways, the American establishment, governmental and private,
has become increasingly divorced from the American people."
5 Naturally, many Davos Men don't accept Hutington's term. Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive
chairman of the World Economic Forum, argues that endorsing a global outlook does not mean erasing
national identity. "Globalization can never provide us with cultural identity, which needs to be
local and national in nature."
6 Global trade has been around for centuries; the corporations and countries that benefited from
it were largely content to treat vast parts of the world as places to mine natural resources or sell
finished products. Even as the globalization of capital accelerated in the 1980s, most foreign
investment was between relatively wealthy countries, not from wealthy countries into poor
ones. U.S. technology, companies and money were often at the forefront of this movement.
7 However the past two decades have witnessed the rise of other significant players.
The developed world is beating a path to China and India's door – and Chinese and Indian companies,
in turn, have started what it calls a "Going Out" policy that encourages Chinese firms to
buy assets overseas. Asian nations are creating "a remarkable environment of innovation,"
says John Chambers, chief executive of Cisco System. "China and India are graduating currently
more than five times the number of engineers that we are here in the U.S."
That means U.S. and European companies are now facing high-quality, low cost competition from
overseas. No wonder so many Western workers worry about losing their jobs. "If the issue is the
size of the total pie, globalization has proved a good thing," say Orit Gadiesh, chairman of
consultants Bain & Co. "If the issue is how the pie is divided, if you're in the Western world
you could question that."
8 The biggest shift may just be starting. A landmark 2003 study by Goldman Sachs predicted that
four economies – Russia, Brazil, India and China – will become a much larger force in the
world economy than widely expected, based on projections of demographic and economic growth,
with China potentially overtaking Germany this decade. By 2005, Goldman Sachs suggested,
these four newcomers will likely have displaced all but the U.S. and Japan from the top six
economies in the world.
9 It's also entirely possible that the near future may see the pendulum of capital swing away
from Davos Man-style globalization. One counterpoint is Manila Woman – low-paid migrant
workers from Asia and elsewhere who are increasingly providing key services around the world.
Valerie Gooding, the chief executive of British health care company BUPA, says the British
and U.S. health care system would break down without immigrant nurses from Philippines,
India, Nigeria and elsewhere. unlike Davos Man, she says, they're not ambivalent about
being strongly patriotic.
10 Not all Davos Men seek global markets, either. Patrick Sayer runs a private equity firm
in France called Eurazeo, and complains there are still too many barriers to cross-border
business in Europe, let alone the world. So he's focused Eurazeo on its domestic market.
"I profit from being French in France. It's easier for me to do deals," Sayer says.
"It's the same elsewhere. If you're not Italian in Italy, you won't succeed."
11 That may sound like a narrow nationalism, yet it contains a hidden wisdom.
Recall that Italy itself was, until 1861, not a unified nation but an aggregation of city-states.
Despite tension between its north and south, there's no contradiction between maintaining a
regional identity and national one. Milanese and Tronchetti Provera, chairman of Telecom
Italia,for example, can feel both Milanese and Italian at once, even as he runs a company that
is aspiring to become a bigger international presence. The question is whether it will take
another 140 years for Davos Man to figure out how to strike the same balance on a global scale.