NEWT GINGRICH: America And The World Economic Forum

Davos, Switzerland is a relatively small town. Its population is roughly 11,000 people. Once a year, this grows to 30,000 as the World Economic Forum meets. This year, there are 3,000 active participants. About 800 are Americans, so roughly every fourth person is from the states. The remaining 27,000 include security, restaurant workers, news media, and support staff. With the growing violence around the world, this week has a strong contingent from the Swiss military protecting everyone.

There are more than 60 heads of state coming to this World Economic Forum, including President Donald J. Trump. An American President brings a huge contingent of people (The President has 24/7 security, no matter where he or she is). This includes cabinet members, support staff, security, communications, and the White House Press corps.

As U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, Callista is giving four different speeches. (This includes one on apprenticeships, which I am going to share in a shorter newsletter). She is in a lot of meetings. I go to some but not all of them.

A major function of this week is people seeing each other. As someone from Coca-Cola said to me, there’s great efficiency in seeing so many people in one place in one week. Since Coca-Cola is in more than 200 countries, you can imagine how many contacts its team makes in one brief week with people coming from all over the world. People at the forum describe these brief meetings as “touch points.” It is a strange little world.

President Trump’s speech will inevitably be the high point of the week. Callista and I will be there, and I will write later this week about his speech and the various reactions to it.

The World Economic Forum is a remarkable social invention and a tribute to one man, Klaus Schwab. Schwab’s parents moved from Germany to Switzerland when the Nazis rose to power. He graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He later got a doctorate in economics from the University of Fribourg and a Master’s in Public Administration from the Kennedy School at Harvard, where became close to a young professor named Henry Kissinger.

While teaching at the University of Geneva, he came up with the idea of a European Management Forum which had its first meeting in Davos in 1971. Davos is a major ski resort, so asking leaders to come to a place where they could ski and talk comfortably with minimum distraction was a real winner.