"Davos Man" Is Dying: Why A Universalist Mindset Has Failed

Samuel Huntington's book The Clash of Civilizations was partly inspired by Oswald Spengler’s great Decline of the West (1918), which bemoaned Europe’s assumption that it was at the center of world history and represented ‘progress’ .

This idea of the melding together of cultures and civilizations into a common set of values and increasing sense of world oneness Huntington calls ‘Davos culture’, after the annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland of businesspeople, politicians, and intellectuals.

These English-speaking, globetrotting, well-off and well-connected people control most of the world’s governments and important institutions, yet they represent an outlook and culture that is shared by perhaps 1 per cent of the world’s population.

The ‘universal civilization’ idealists point to the global spread of Western culture, films, news media and products as evidence of Western ideas, but they could not be more wrong. The essence of Western culture is not the Apple Mac, Huntington says. It is the Magna Carta.

He correctly predicted that a network like CNN would not become the default news network of the world, but rather that each civilization would throw up local variants (Al-Jazeera, Russia Today) that reflected its values.

“In the post-Cold War world flags count and so do other symbols of cultural identity, including crosses, crescents, and even head coverings, because culture counts, and cultural identity is what is most meaningful to most people.” - Huntington

Just because English has become a sort of world language does not mean that Western ideals will permeate the world. It is simply a language of convenience. In India it is accepted only because it allows the various cultures within India to maintain their strong identities.

Things that characterize the ‘the West’ are the separation of church and state; the rule of law; social pluralism; representative or democratic bodies; and individualism - all of which have been rejected in various degrees by non-Western countries.

Modernization and technology is not the same as Westernization. “In fundamental ways, the world is becoming more modern and less Western” (Huntington). The big discord of the 21st century will be the West’s desire to promote "universal values" and its lessening ability to do so.

When the Cold War finished the West thought it had won the argument over the best form of government (liberal democracy combined with free markets), but “What is universalism to the West is imperialism to the rest”, Huntington says.