What was the main message of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s now-famous speech in Davos earlier this year?
There are no fewer than three competing takeaways from Carney’s address — and a recent op-ed for The Economist co-authored with Finnish President Alexander Stubb has done little to reconcile them. Now, more than half a year after Carney’s speech and for all the focus on the current inflection point in the international order, there is little clarity on what the Carney government’s vision for a revised and more resilient order might look like. This is possibly because, despite considerable global turbulence, it is Canada’s relationship with its southern neighbour rather than the international order itself that has reached a breaking point.
The central theme in Carney’s address was his call to “take down the sign.” For years, Western countries claimed to act in defence of the “rules-based international order” when this was never verily a neutral description of the postwar world. In reality, appeals to the “rules-based order” were a discourse born out of anxiety over Western decline, aiming to write the rules of the future by shoring up the power structures of the past. Nor did it help that the most vocal defenders of this supposed order were prepared to tolerate a highly selective application of the rules.
But now that we have taken down the sign, what comes next?
The first possibility hinted at is more realism and less megaphone diplomacy. As we are constantly told, we must take the world as it is rather than as we wish it to be (as if a world in which non-Western actors have power and agency is somehow a lamentable fact).
Carney and Stubb rightly note that progress “can be signalled through monologue, but it will be achieved only through dialogue.” After Ottawa’s ties with Beijing and New Delhi rapidly declined under Justin Trudeau’s premiership, this is a message that Canadians need to hear. One wonders, of course, whether the Carney government will be committed to privileging dialogue over monologue when it comes to Russia, whose exclusion from the core of the post-Cold War European security order engendered a security dilemma that resulted in war. Still, employing the vocabulary of interests is a much welcome respite to erstwhile lectures about “who we are” that were of little interest to the rest of the world.
The second — and more idealistic — option that Carney called for in Davos involves “acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals.” This is a test that Carney appeared to fail after the United States launched a war of choice against Iran in violation of the United Nations Charter. It was one that he continued to shirk at the very outset of his op-ed with Stubb, where Russia is accused of “waging a war of aggression against Ukraine and actively interfering in other societies” while the United States is merely characterized as “reassessing its priorities and transforming all its commercial relationships” despite Donald Trump’s repeated threats to annex Canada and Greenland.
Between cynical realpolitik and a consistent commitment to international norms lies a third path — building a coalition of middle powers based on “values-based realism” and principled pragmatism. This approach views ad hoc minilateral partnerships — or “variable geometry” — as an alternative to what Carney in Davos called “naïve” multilateralism on the one hand and multipolarity, which Carney and Stubb associate with “chaos,” on the other.
Such calls for a via media are not particularly novel. Already a decade ago, then Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion was advocating for a foreign policy based on “responsible conviction,” which sounds an awful lot like Carney’s call to be both “principled and pragmatic.”
Leading Global South actors such as India and Brazil have long been pursuing multi-vectored foreign policies. It is rather the West that is beginning to emulate a trend already set by others — yet Carney and Stubb conclude their op-ed by inviting others to join them. It was not all that long ago, during Chrystia Freeland’s tenure at the top echelons of government, that cooperation with “likeminded” countries was the talk of the town. Carney and Stubb concede that “not every partner will share all of our values” but their proposed remedies centre mostly on working with the same group of friends: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union and the Group of Seven.
Whether a global coalition of middle powers is even possible at a time when great powers have demonstrated their willingness to wield considerable leverage to keep wayward states in line remains an open question. A more “variable” configuration may prove more feasible than a cohesive coalition. But the more germane question is what problem do such partnerships purport to solve? If the purpose is greater capacity for self-help and strategic autonomy in a Machiavellian world, then this may be desirable. But this is far from a panacea for the supposed “rupture” in the international order that we are told we are living through.
Carney and Stubb do not mince words: they claim that the “world order built after 1945 is unravelling.” But a crisis of authority within an international order is not the same as a crisis of the order itself. The so-called rupture at which we have arrived is the product of decades of contestation over the rules and who gets to write them. Unless we address the sources of these disagreements, we will remain on a pathway toward the law of the jungle that ad hoc coalitions alone may not be able to prevent.
The post-1945 order has gone through several phases, from hot rivalry to détente and from neoliberal globalization to renewed great power competition. Throughout this time, the legal and institutional architecture of the order has survived and even grown denser. Rules may be bent or broken but no one fundamentally challenges the legitimacy of international law and multilateralism as core organizing principles for interstate relations.
Canada’s relationship with the United States may be undergoing a rupture but this is not necessarily so for the international order. This is because American hegemony was never synonymous with the postwar order writ large — a revisionist belief that the unipolar moment of the 1990s helped to foster. Rather, it was a feature of the post-1991 order based on a revived standard of civilization that liberal states sought to substitute for the post-1945 order.
While it may be a useful message for domestic audiences that have grown unaccustomed to the necessity of strategic choices and trade-offs, being both principled and pragmatic is a formula for justifying almost any policy. We have not yet reached a complete rupture in the international order but we may yet unless we seize what Carney’s co-author calls our “last chance” to treat rival powers and the global majority as sovereign and equal rule-makers.
