Mark Carney may have been a hit at Davos but history may judge his speech differently. This is a brilliant contextualisation of Carney’s address this year to the Davos audience of company chief executives and government leaders
Mark Carney’s surprise manifesto at Davos got a lot of attention for presenting a big
vision for the world but also, can I just say: Thucydides and Vaclav Havel in the same
speech? The guy sure knows how to tug at my heartstrings. Is this what it feels like being
pandered to? Let me just bask in it for a moment.Usually it’s dangerous to have an intellectual in office, but Carney comes from the
world of finance and therefore has the requisite amount of cynicism.
So it’s only right he opened his speech by quoting Thucydides:
“The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” This aphorism, he added,
“is presented as inevitable, the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.”
As the rest of his speech suggests, there’s nothing natural about it. People who consider
themselves tough-minded pragmatists love to pluck this line from the Melian Dialogue.
They invoke it as timeless wisdom about power politics and a corrective to liberal
delusions.
“We live in a world, in the real world that is governed by strength, that is governed
by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller said in a recent CNN interview.
“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
This is the governing philosophy of Trump’s second term, and it’s also exactly what
brings down hegemons. The year after Athens delivers that famous ultimatum and
brutalizes Melos, it launches the Sicilian Expedition. This act of imperial overreach
destroys a massive portion of its fleet and army. Its alliance begins to fracture as the
subject states, tired of Athenian arrogance (like the kind echoed by Miller), sense
weakness and revolt. Within a decade, Athens has lost the war. Its walls are torn
down and its empire is dissolved.
The Melian Dialogue is not endorsing a timeless law of global politics. It’s showing
us Athens at the precise peak of its imperial hubris: the moment when a great
power becomes so convinced of its own invincibility that it can no longer perceive its
limits. Does that sound like anyone else right now? But their fall only proves the point,
someone inevitably responds. They became weak and suffered what they must, right?
No. The Sicilian disaster was not just some unrelated streak of bad luck.
The same hubris that led Athens to dismiss diplomacy as irrelevant to the strong is
what led them to believe they could conquer Sicily.
The failure of self-knowledge, and the inability to see your own limits — or worse,
seeing yourself as exempt from these limits — is what destroys great powers.
If there’s one timeless lesson of history we can extract from the Peloponnesian War,
that would be it. But it’s not the lesson Trump or Miller have internalized.
Despite what self-proclaimed realists like Miller believe, rejecting imperial hubris does
not require the embrace of mushy liberal beliefs about morality or global justice.
It’s not about the weak eventually prevailing over the strong, or some other feel-good
nonsense. For all their faults, actual realists (the ones who write books but don’t make
policy) recognize the quote for what it is: pragmatic caution about strategic over-reach.
The Greengrocer’s Revenge
Carney then pivots to something clever: Václav Havel’s greengrocer. Every morning,
the greengrocer places a sign in his window: Workers of the world, unite! He doesn’t
believe it; no one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal
compliance, to get along, etc. And because every shopkeeper on the street does the
same, the system trudges on.
“Not through violence alone,” Carney says, “but through the participation of ordinary people
in rituals they privately know to be false.”
Carney’s argument is that for decades, middle powers like Canada have played the
greengrocer. They placed the “rules-based international order” sign in the window.
They knew the story was partially false, that in many places the liberal order was not
liberal or even orderly. That “the strongest exempted themselves when convenient,
that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, that international law applied with
varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused.”
But it was a useful fiction so long as American hegemony provided public goods:
open sea lanes, stable finance, global trade, collective security, frameworks for
resolving disputes. It provided a sense of stability or at least acquiescence to weaker
states. Not every time, but enough that they would keep the sign in the window.
“This bargain no longer works,” Carney said. “We are in the midst of a rupture,
not a transition.”
What Havel knew, and what American MAGA triumphalists have forgotten, is that power
built on performed compliance is fragile in a very specific way. It depends on the continued
willingness of the powerless to keep performing. The moment the greengrocer removes
his sign, the illusion begins to crack, because his refusal reveals that the whole edifice
rests on a mutual agreement. For countries like Canada, their part of the agreement was
to ignore the liberal order’s partial hypocrisy in order to reap the benefits of cooperative
coexistence. But that lasts only as long as the hegemon makes cooperative coexistence
possible.
The self-proclaimed pragmatists who quote “the strong do what they can” imagine this
as a stable equilibrium, a description of how power works forever. But the Athenians
who deliver that ultimatum to Melos are not wise statesmen seeing clearly.
They’re men drunk on their own power, ready to sail into catastrophe.
Carney seems to be betting, I think correctly, that America under Trump has reached its
Melian moment: maximum confidence, minimum self-knowledge.
Trump’s tariffs-as-leverage obsession assumes permanent asymmetry, that the United
States can weaponize economic integration indefinitely while its targets have no choice
but to comply.
But the greengrocer can remove his sign. Supply chains can diversify. Alliances can
hedge, as they have already. Each act of coercion accelerates the erosion of the compliance
that made America’s global order effective to both its originator and its subjects.
What does it mean for middle powers to take down the sign?
Carney lays out a proto-doctrine for middle powers. To begin with, refuse to live in the lie.
Stop invoking the rules-based order as though it still functions. Call the emerging system
what it is: a world where the most powerful increasingly pursue their interests using
force and economic statecraft as weapons of coercion. But most importantly,
reduce the hegemonic leverage enabling this coercion. Countries earn the right to principled
stands, he said, by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.
Rather than waiting for the hegemon to restore an order it’s busy dismantling,
create your own institutions and agreements that function as intended.
“Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships,” Carney continued.
“Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. Buy insurance. Increase options.”
He got a standing ovation at the end of his speech, which I’m told is an unusual
reaction at Davos. I think it resonated not just because he’s offering a bigger vision,
but because it names what everyone in the room already knows but still hesitates to
say out loud: the old bargain is dead and the grocer’s sign must be taken down.
This is the insight that Melian Dialogue quote-mongers typically miss.
Power that rests on the performed compliance of others is more fragile than it looks.
The strong do what they can, until the moment they discover that “what they can”
was always bounded by what others were willing to tolerate. Athens found out in Sicily;
the question is where America finds out.
But my favourite blogger (a Canadian citizen from from Sri Lanka) sounds a
different and overdue note
People like Canada's Mark Carney are crying foul about the demise of the ‘rules-based
order’ now, over fucking Greenland, and not over the whole Palestinian genocide he
just merrily supplied and supported, or any number of atrocities Canada has been
involved in, including Canada. White people really want to do crime and high-fives
for confessing. I hope America does take Canada, to cure them of their delusion of
being the ‘good guys’ of colonialism. I say this as a passport-carrying Canadian.
Carney's ‘speech of the century’ isn't worth the dust on a Palestinian fighter's
sandals. His resistance isn't worth a drop of sweat from the actual resistance,
which Canada still condemns as terrorists. Canada is still on America's side in
every imperial war, they're not on our side at all. Remember that Canada is a
card-carrying member of the White Empire and is only complaining now that its
white privileges are being threatened. Remember that Carney was Central Banker
for the UK also, he's a ripe example of how Canada is not a real country and how
the White Empire is one.
What he's complaining about here is not a loss of human rights but white privilege. The privilege to invade other people but to keep your own stolen home. Even within the speech, Carney is proudly talking about funding the corrupt Ukrainian dictatorship, all to further American interests. He's only complaining now that America is interested in his territory, he has no actual principles. Carney is still part of the imperial tail proudly wagging even as the big dog shits on them. Carney just another historical vandal trying to white himself out of history as White Empire becomes a scandal to white people. As Aimé Césaire said,
What he cannot forgive [Trump] for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is
not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation
of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which
until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India,
and the “niggers” of Africa... And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism.
It's honestly funny watching these colonizers scurry for cover as they discover that
they're Euro-peons and the 51st State to Americans. ‘The Coalition of The Willing’
is baffled that the country that invaded so many countries with might turn around
and invade them. Remember that colonizers always lie and hide in abstractions,
there's no general principle at work here, it's just the usual racism.
Hence Carney proposes a whites-only non-aligned movement like he just came
up with the idea of ‘middle powers,’ when he could just join colored people.
But he won't. Canada still supports America's war against Russia,
still exploits Africa via mining, and still backs the death cult 'Israel'.
Canada has no problem with white supremacism as long as it benefits them.
That's the only principle at play here, they only speak out when it threatens
their capital. As Césaire said, continuing,
And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has
diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been
—and still is—narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered,
sordidly racist.
Mark Carney is just another hand-wringing White guy, his hands
dripping with blood and his mouth redolent with bullshit.
As Césaire said (honestly, just read Discourse On Colonialism),
“Before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before
it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because,
until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.”
Even worse is the Kingdom of Denmark, which is further up shit creek and furiously
peddling bullshit. Their Ambassador to the US, Jesper Moller Sorensen, piously
and pathetically said,
“The Kingdom of Denmark has always stood shoulder-to-shoulder w[ith the USA] After 9/11,
Denmark answered the US' call. We lost more soldiers in Afghanistan per capita than
any other NATO ally.”
He's seriously saying we helped you occupy non-Europeans, why would you do it to us?
Their Ambassador is fondly remembering the murder tour they took of Afghanistan
together, and wondering where the bromance has gone.
These people are not mourning the loss of the ‘rules-based order’ here,
they're bemoaning the fact that the actual rules might apply to them.
That they might be invaded because they're weak, despite their White skin.
Europeans are discovering they're the rump end of White Empire, as they get
slapped
Peter Oborne has also been on Carney's track https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/carney-wants-new-world-order-only-west
