The Canadian prime minister’s speech in Davos yesterday was astonishing in its candour about the world of great power rivalry. It could be a blueprint for action by the European Union too.
From happy vassals to miserable slaves
Mark Carney has followed up his foreign policy pivot in Beijing with a remarkable speech in Davos in which he read the last rites over the Washington-led “rules-based international order” and called for a concert of middle powers as a counterweight to both the United States and China. Invoking Vaclav Havel, he said it was time to stop pretending that what the western powers called a rules-based order was not a self-serving sham.
“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 we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim,” he said.
Without naming the US and China, he said that great powers had begun to use economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion and supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. This has caused many countries to try to develop greater strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains.
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“That cost of strategic autonomy – of sovereignty – can also be shared. Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentation. Complementarities are positive sum,” he said.
“And the question for middle powers, like Canada, is not whether to adapt to the new reality – we must. The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls or whether we can do something more ambitious.”
Carney last week agreed strategic partnerships with China and Qatar, and Canada is negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur. He wants to build a bridge between the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the European Union, which would create a new trading bloc of 1.5 billion people.
As his engagement with China demonstrates, working with other middle powers doesn’t mean turning away from Beijing or Washington. But that engagement could be more successful and on more equal terms if middle powers come together to give themselves greater leverage.
“Great powers can afford, for now, to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating,” he said.
“This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination. In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: compete with each other for favour or to combine to create a third path with impact.”
What is true for Canada applies equally to the EU, where Donald Trump’s threat to seize Greenland appears to have woken up leaders to the reality that Europe is now on the wrong side of the Washington-led order. Belgian prime minister Bart De Wever put it well during a panel discussion in Davos when he said that Europe had to choose between standing up to the US and its self-respect.
“Being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else,” he said.
“If you back down now, you’re going to lose your dignity, and that’s probably the most precious thing you can have in a democracy, it’s your dignity.”
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