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. In the Carnegie view, Westlessness was fundamentally a nonissue in Munich given the undeniable “persistence of a community of nations that sees itself as such, and that attaches present values to a particular shared history”.
