Last week a friend sent me a summary from the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos, with the heading “RBC (Royal Bank of Canada) Thought Leadership.” The subtitle was “Davos 2020: The Race for Global Scale.” This did not sound like a gripping race to me, but as a former long-time attender of those meetings, and an occasional presenter (I succeeded the late Bob Maxwell, briefly, as leader of the media group, which was distinguishedly attended), I knew that it might be better than it sounded. There followed a snappily edited summary from Dave McKay, president and CEO of the Royal Bank. Having also been a director of a large Canadian bank (CIBC) for nearly 30 years, I am impressed that a bank CEO in this country could apparently blend into the spirit of Davos so seamlessly.
He credits capitalism with the triumph of globalization, and with it of freer and more prosperous societies, after what he bills as a close battle against communists, socialists and nativists. In my time at Davos, from 1979 to 2002, we soon had the upper hand in the Cold War and in domestic opinion in the principal Western countries, as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, Helmut Kohl and Brian Mulroney steadily strengthened the anti-communist side. I was a Canadian and then a British representative, and I spent most of my time raising reservations about the supposed benign steamrollering of all concepts of nationality, especially once I got a good look at the European Union.
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See Also:
(1) Global Warming’s 50 Years of Fraud
