In February 2020, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace produced a report on “Who and What Was and Wasn’t at the Munich Security Conference” – an annual event attended by political, military, and business leaders and marketed on Twitter as “the world’s leading forum for debate on international security”.
According to the Carnegie dispatch, the “Who” at the 2020 conference included “a lot of old white men among the hundreds of invited attendees, but a lot of other people too”. Among the “What” that allegedly wasn’t there, meanwhile, was the very theme of the conference itself: “Westlessness”, defined on the website of the European Council on Foreign Relations as the “growing uncertainty about the fate of the transatlantic alliance” between Europe and the United States. . . .
Fast forward to the 58th Munich Security Conference this year, held February 18-20 at the city’s Bayerischer Hof hotel, and it seems that there is still a persistently “Westful” community of shared values – at least in terms of commitment to, like, white patriarchy.
Though the event’s organisers took care to stress that 45 percent of the speakers were female, a photograph of a CEO lunch at the conference suggests that “a lot of old white men” are still running the show. The photo features some 30 monochrome males seated around a long white table with bottled water and wine (and no face masks, I might add – so much for “security”). READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.