DAVOS, BETWEEN FICTION AND ACTION
How we are preparing to live in another lie
DAVOS, BETWEEN FICTION AND ACTION
How we are preparing to live in another lie
A Western prime minister has recently confirmed what everyone knew but no one dared to say: the rules that have guided us for decades were a lie, and international law an illusion!
The good days are over, and the powerful will divide up the world again!
My generation witnessed the fall of communism. Perhaps the same generation will also see the end of capitalism as we know it today.
Photo source: opb.org
A speech that says nothing new, but will make history!
A few days ago, in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney did something unusual for a political leader: he told the truth.
Not a new truth, but one that everyone knew, but no one had said publicly.
“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”
The confession is remarkable not so much for what it reveals, but especially for who is making it.
A former governor of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, now the prime minister of this country, publicly validates what the left and the global south have been criticizing for decades.
The difference is that now it comes from Goldman Sachs, not from Noam Chomsky, the famous MIT linguist and the best-known critic of American foreign policy, who has long argued that the “rules-based order” is a facade for hegemony, that international law is applied selectively, and that the powerful exempt themselves from obligations when it suits them.
Of course, he was dismissed as a radical, but now, when a former Goldman Sachs director and central bank governor says the same thing in Davos, he is applauded for his lucidity. Because in our world of “honest” and “intelligent” people, it is not the message that matters, but the “environment,” who conveys it, who delivers it!
What was radicalism in Chomsky, is now considered vision.
From Melos to Davos
In 416 BC, the Athenian fleet landed on the island of Melos and demanded unconditional submission from its inhabitants. The Melians invoked the justice of their cause, but the Athenians responded with a phrase that defined international relations for the next two and a half millennia: “You know as well as we do that justice in this world is only discussed between equals in power. The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
The Melians refused to submit, and the Athenians slaughtered the men and sold the women and children into slavery.
This seems to be the origin of political realism, not some academic theory! Just a brutal observation about how power works!
Carney quoted Václav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless,” published in 1978, at Davos.
In this text, Havel describes a grocer who puts a poster in his shop window every day, among the onions and carrots: “Workers of the world, unite!” The grocer does not believe in this slogan, just as no one believes in it. But he puts it there because that’s what you do, because everyone else does it, because otherwise he would get into trouble.
The grocer’s gesture communicates submission, obedience, not ideology. It says, “I am trustworthy. Leave me alone.”
This is exactly what the West has been doing for decades with its “rules-based order,” and we have accepted it!
We put up the poster in the window. We participated in rituals. We avoided naming and denouncing the gap between rhetoric and reality. And, in doing so, we were quite comfortable!
The fiction was useful, American hegemony delivered public goods; open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security. But now, says Carney, “you can’t live the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
The new fiction
The problem with Prime Minister Carney’s speech is that it comes with a new fiction attached. “Middle powers united by common values” with Canada at the center, of course. It’s still a poster in the window, only now it says something else.
But this time, no one will believe it! And that is probably where the fundamental difference will lie. The old fiction worked because there were many who stood to gain from it.
The new geopolitical construct, however, will be built on a foundation of universal cynicism. Rules, laws, norms, and treaties will be nothing more than a veneer of legitimacy covering the ugly face of brute force. Everyone will know this, and everyone will participate in this charade.
This power foam will fuel the new hegemons: the US, China, and, to some extent, Russia. They will divide their spheres of influence with the same naturalness with which Athens and Sparta divided theirs. The Melian dialogue will be repeated endlessly, in modern variations, with the same conclusions.
Action vs. fiction
On the same day in Davos, a few hours later, Volodymyr Zelensky also spoke.
If Mark Carney was the banker who announced the death of the system, Zelensky was the one who showed how to literally die while this system collapses.
“Everyone remembers the movie Groundhog Day,” he began. “But no one would want to live like that, repeating the same thing for weeks, months, and years. And yet that is exactly how we are living now.”
What are we to understand from this? Nothing could be simpler!
Where Carney proposes a new fiction, Zelensky calls for action.
Carney theorizes about “middle powers united by values”, Zelensky asks who will actually respond if Putin attacks Lithuania or Poland. “No one has really seen the alliance in action,” he said. “NATO exists because of the belief that the United States will act. But what if it doesn’t?”
He summed up Europe’s response in a single sentence, paraphrasing a bitter joke from Brussels corridors: “Maybe one day someone will do something.”
“Europe,” Zelensky concluded, “remains a beautiful but fragmented kaleidoscope of small and medium-sized powers. It feels more like a geography, a history, a tradition, than a real political force.”
The two speeches, by Carney and Zelensky, will belong in the history books. But they are the weights under which the order we thought was eternal is collapsing.
Carney tells us that the old fiction is dead.
Zelensky shows us exactly what it means to live without it.
Europe is on the menu, not at the table
For now, Europe has no place at this table.
It is not militarily relevant; at this moment, NATO without America is an institutional shell. It is not geopolitically relevant; it has no leaders, no strategies, no plans for the future.
Macron called for the restoration of a rules-based order at Davos. Carney responded, without naming him: that order is dead and will not return.
Between a European calling for the restoration of a corpse and a Canadian proposing a new fiction, the difference seems to be one of lucidity rather than substance.
Both avoid the real question: what do we do when the only currency that matters is force?
A kind of conclusion
Carney is right in his diagnosis of the current world; the old fictionis dead and burried, nostalgia is not a strategy, the world is reconfiguring itself around brute force. But his solution, a coalition of middle powers united by common values, seems like another fiction, perhaps weaker than the first.
At least American hegemony delivered something. The “united middle powers” deliver only rhetoric and hope. Still, it’s better than nothing!
SERGIU TOADER
Published in Romanian at https://sergiutoader.substack.com
Sources:
- Mark Carney speech-Davos https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mark-carney-speech-davos-rules-based-order-9.7053350
2. Full speech-video/Mark Carney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btqHDhO4h10
- “Vechea ordine nu se va mai intoarce” — Hotnews.ro
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Tucidide, Dialogul melian (416 î.Hr.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Melos
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Václav Havel, „Puterea celor fără putere” (1978): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless
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Vaclav Havel- original text https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23
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Michael Ignatieff despre Dialogul melian și Ucraina: https://ces.fas.harvard.edu/news/2025/08/the-strong-do-what-they-can-and-the-weak-suffer-what-they-must
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Zelenski-discurs Davos -HotNews.ro
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