In 1971, Klaus Schwab, a German engineer, set up the European Management Forum in Davos. The Forum did exactly as its appellation indicated—it brought European business leaders to Davos to learn American management techniques.

In 1987, the Forum was renamed the World Economic Forum. Despite its global pretensions, the WEF remained a body anchored in the Western Hemisphere. This was primarily because trade itself was not globalised. There were many insurmountable walls for goods and services to climb. One of them defined the Cold War—the Berlin Wall. This was the brick-and-mortar metaphor for a divided world in the heart of the Western Hemisphere. Davos in those early days provided a rare platform where Cold War Continental........

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