During her speech to the World Economic Forum today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made headlines by siding with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s calls for a new system of multilateralism in implicit opposition to U.S. President Joe Biden’s effort to form a global anti-China bloc. Biden has called for a “Summit of Democracy” of nations which would align with each other to oppose what he characterizes as authoritarian regimes, singling out China and Russia. Others, including Boris Johnson, have dubbed such a bloc the “D-10.” In his keynote speech at Davos, Xi Jinping responded directly to such a proposal, warning, “To build small circles or start a new Cold War, to reject, threaten or intimidate others, to willfully impose decoupling, supply disruption or sanctions, to create isolation or estrangement, will only push the world into division and even confrontation... History and reality have made it clear, time and again, that the misguided approach of antagonism and confrontation — be it in the form of cold war, hot war, trade war, or tech war — will eventually hurt all countries’ interests and undermine everyone’s well-being.” President Xi instead called for all nations to “jointly follow a path of peaceful coexistence, mutual benefit and win-win cooperation,” and to join together “to act on the vision of a community with a shared future for mankind.”
In her speech, Angela Merkel explicitly stated her agreement with Xi Jinping and opposition to Biden’s proposal, saying, “The Chinese president spoke yesterday, and he and I agree on that. We see a need for multilateralism... I would very much wish to avoid the building of blocs. I don’t think it would do justice to many societies if we were to say this is the United States and over there is China and we are grouping around either the one or the other. This is not my understanding of how things ought to be.” She went on to state, “I think we will have more values that we share, more positions that we hold in common, but there will also be differences in opinion and different interests. I’m not in favor of a total decoupling of all digital activities, we should not strive for that. Because it would feed into a division of the world.” Elsewhere in her speech, Merkel came back to that theme, asserting that the COVID pandemic has proven that “we need to choose a multilateral approach, shutting ourselves off against others will not help us to solve our problems...”
