“It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry – that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.” These were the grave reflections of Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, delivered in his January 22 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
With such Thucydidean tendences in international relations bothering the PM, Carney feared that “strong tendency of countries to go along, get along to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.” In abjuring this tendency, options beyond accommodation and grudging acceptance had to be considered. Who better to inspire than the meditations of Czech dissident author Václav Havel, whose 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” had conspicuously moved Carney?
Carney homes in on Havel’s reference to the greengrocer who places a sign in his window each morning with the slogan “Workers of the world unite.” Neither he, nor anyone else believes it. “But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along.” (Havel argues that such formulations help “the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides behind the façade of something high. And that something is ideology.”)
As every shopkeeper on the street follows the ritual “the system persists – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.” Such a performance bolsters the lie, nourishes it, and sustains the system. Its strength is also its signal weakness. “When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.”
The time had come, exhorted Carney, for the shopkeepers of the world to remove those slogans extolling the full, normative veracity of “what we called the rules-based international order.” Canada and other countries had prospered from it, joining its institutions, praising its values, profiting from predictability and conducting policy under its protection. To Carney’s credit, he acknowledged its duplicity, that such an order “was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”
Behind this order was its own lie or useful fiction: the guarantees offered by American hegemony, including “public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes” that led to Canada and likeminded powers to place the sign in the window, participate in the rituals and generally avoid “calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.”
With great powers now “using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities”, exploitation was inevitable. “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
These sentiments, voiced more in sorrow than anger, could only come from an ally and power long aligned with Washington. There were previous occasions when the ubiquitously displayed sign regarding fidelity to international rules could have been removed. There was the cynicism of US efforts in Indochina during the Cold War, most aptly captured by the conduct of former national security advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The administration of George W. Bush supplied the crude template for post-Cold War power politics in sneering at the United Nations, mocking the tempering dictates of international law, and launching the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 to destroy weapons of mass destruction it did not have.
Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, writing in May 2003, offered a description that, with the slightest tinkering, could be equally applicable in January 2025: “With terrorists, tyrants, and technologies of mass destruction posing a grave and growing danger, [Bush] believes that the best – if not the only way – to ensure America’s security is to jettison the constraints imposed by friends, allies and international institutions. The United States will act as it sees fit to protect itself and its interests. Other countries will either follow or get out of the way.”
Given the menacing musings by US President Donald Trump about acquiring Canada as a potential 51st state, his attempt to seize and control Venezuelan oil and his aggressive yearning for annexing the Danish island territory of Greenland, Canada has begun its own modest efforts to follow the Havál recipe. For the first time in over a century, its military is considering scenarios involving the seizure by US troops of vital land and sea points in over a two day to a week’s period. As with previous countries or opponents attacked by a power superior in numbers and arms, the suggested response, as reported by The Globe and Mail, is one for the ages: guerilla warfare.
The modelling for the insurgency envisages using tactics adopted by the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet intervention between 1979 and 1989 and, ironically, those used by the Taliban in their two-decade campaign against the US and its allies, including Canada, during their presence in the country. (Between 2001 and 2014, 158 Canadians died in that graveyard of empires, many perishing to improvised explosive devices.)
Given that the United States has tried twice, and failed on both occasions, to successfully invade their northern neighbour, contingency planning is only prudent. All alliances in international affairs, however praised and revered at the podium, are mutable off it.
The post Carney at Davos: Removing that Sign in the Window first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.