At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos last week we heard Donald Trump deliver a rambling address suffused with his familiar blend of grievance and megalomania. We also heard Mark Carney, former central banker and now prime minister of Canada, deliver a brilliant speech on the end of the old order and options for “middle powers”. The latter was the bigger event.
Carney began by citing an essay by Václav Havel, writer, dissident and first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia. In this Havel argued that communism sustained itself, in Carney’s words, “through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false”. In a similar way, Carney argued: “We largely avoided calling out the gaps between the rhetoric and reality” of what we called the “international rules-based order”. But in today’s world of weaponised interdependence, “you cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination”. Today, he argued, marks a “rupture, not a transition”. He was right.
Carney insisted not only that the old order is not coming back, but that we “shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.” The following sentence, which is “we believe that from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, more just”, is a hope, but also not a strategy. A sober analyst must ask whether and how far it might become one.