Mark Carney’s words and how to start shaping the future
Although Donald Trump’s appearance was undoubtedly the most anticipated, it was instead the speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney that left the deepest impression among the many delivered at the Davos Forum this January 2026. While conferences like the one recently concluded in Switzerland offer content of varying depth—or perhaps directed at specific interest segments like business and finance—this time, the Forum became a stage for clashing visions of diplomacy and international relations, occurring amidst the height of transatlantic tensions over Greenland.
Carney’s words resonated globally, primarily due to what can be defined as lucid self-criticism: a critique of the “rules-based order”. This system of relationships, practices, and institutions designed by the West in the XX century has affected and to an extent molded the global landscape since the fall of the USSR, yet it has remained largely incomplete and inconsistently pursued. The Canadian Prime Minister accused the West of hypocrisy and bias, acknowledging that rules and principles were not applied to everyone equally. However, many countries continued to adhere to it out of convenience, habit, or a lack of courage or credible alternatives.
It is here that Carney draws a stark parallel with “living within a lie”, as described by Czech dissident Václav Havel regarding the consensus of authoritarian regimes. Everyone seems to comply, but not sincerely; the consensus is fragile because it is illusory. As soon as someone withdraws their support, the entire edifice cracks and collapses. This, he argues, is what has happened to the international rules-based order.
The Degeneration of the Liberal Order
Carney’s analysis goes further, offering an equally interesting interpretation: the degeneration of the liberal order into a system where some superpowers have begun to use integration—the demand for political, economic, and financial alignment with the hegemon—as a weapon of coercion. Integration thus becomes a tool for submission and subordination. The sovereignty of interlocutors is no longer measured by their adherence to mutually accepted rules, but by their capacity to resist or exert reciprocal pressure.
Carney does not name names, but the critique is clearly aimed at the two world powers that have repeatedly sought the coercive integration of neighbors and allies: Putin’s Russia and Trump’s United States.
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Indeed, while the speech was delivered during an acute crisis over Greenland, the Prime Minister cannot ignore the pressures—at times sounding like outright threats—that the American administration has directed at his own country regarding a form of annexation to the US since its first day in office. In parallel, looking far beyond the Western Hemisphere, Carney also reaffirmed a maximum commitment to Ukraine and its full sovereignty.
The Options for the “Middle Powers”
Sovereignty is one of the keywords of the speech. Carney notes that it is understandable for many countries, faced with the authoritarian demands of superpowers, to act like the frightened citizen of a dictatorship: there is no benefit in rebelling alone. One pretends nothing is wrong, adapts, and tries to slip away to avoid the storm. But this leads nowhere.
He argues that we must be more ambitious than mere survival. Middle powers, if they form coalitions, can succeed. A new system of rules and institutions based on shared values—human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, territorial integrity, and honesty—can be built. These powers can form flexible, ad hoc coalitions to balance and steer authoritarian or highly assertive superpowers toward more moderate behavior.
Carney calls for a new international code of conduct involving not just political institutions, but economic and financial ones as well. To illustrate this, he cited the series of agreements Canada has signed over the past year with the European Union, Mercosur, ASEAN, and key states like India, Qatar, and China.
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The Great Powers present the “law of the strongest” as inevitable. In that vision, the weak must suffer and submit. Carney, addressing Europe directly, retorts that middle powers have the resources to overturn this paradigm, if they build “coalitions that work”.
This is a combination of principled positions and pragmatic choices: we cannot afford the luxury of moral lessons without the practical tools of power to exert influence. Of course, one can easily argue that “power” is the only thing that matters here – after all, a pecking order is implicit in the very concept of “super” and “middle” powers. Yet, even the biggest actors often make major mistakes, in both designing and executing policy: think of China and the “one child policy”, the US and Iraq in 2003, Russia and the failed blitzkrieg against Ukraine in 2022. The second Trump administration may end up in a league of its own in this respect. In any case, policy mistakes result in vulnerabilities, i.e. opportunities for the less powerful. This is one reason why they are not powerless.
Carney’s reasoning is an operational proposal – currently in an embryonic stage – aimed at the European Union and the United Kingdom (recalling his tenure as Governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020). It is a constructive political vision to counter today’s prevailing disorientation and purely reactive “damage control”, to move beyond the rupture in the (old) world order and start shaping the next world order. This represents an intellectual and political opportunity emerging from Davos.
