A New Global Platform?
“If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” Spoken in Davos on behalf of the “middle powers,” those words of Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, were hailed and repeated across the globe. Since the rest of Carney’s January 20 speech is also worth lingering with, I reproduce large chunks from it.
“I will talk,” said Carney, “about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where the large main power... is subject to no limits, no constraints.
“I would like to tell you that the other countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, [and the] sovereignty and territorial integrity of the various states.
“The power of the less powerful starts with honesty. [E]very day we’re reminded that... the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.
BUYING SAFETY
“This aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations... Faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along, to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety. Well, it won’t. So, what are our options?
“In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? [H]is answer began with a greengrocer.
“Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn’t believe it -- no one does --, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Havel called this ‘living within a lie’.
“The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.
“Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.
SELECTIVELY APPLIED
“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient... [W]e knew that international law [has been] applied with varying rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim...
“The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied – the WTO, the UN, the COP [on climate change], the very architecture of collective problem-solving -- are under threat. [A]s a result, many countries [have concluded] that they must develop greater strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains...
“Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses... 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.
“We aim to be both principled and pragmatic – principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights -- and pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.
“[W]e are pursuing... different coalitions for different issues... [O]n Ukraine, we’re a core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per capita contributors to its defence and security.
FIRMLY WITH GREENLAND
“On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark, and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland’s future. Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland...
“On plurilateral trade, we’re championing efforts 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...
“The middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.
“[G]reat 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. [W]hen 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.
“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 combine to create a third path with impact.
“[T]he power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong, if we choose to wield them together – which brings me back to Havel.
NAME THE REALITY
“What does it mean for middle powers to live the truth? First, it means naming reality. Stop invoking [the] rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is – a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.
“It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals. When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction, but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.
“It means building what we claim to believe in, rather than waiting for the old order to be restored. It means creating institutions and agreements that function as described. And it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion – that’s building a strong domestic economy.
“Diversification internationally is not just economic prudence, it’s a material foundation for honest foreign policy, because countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.
“Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world’s largest and most sophisticated investors. In other words, we have capital, talent… we also have a government with immense fiscal capacity to act decisively. And we have the values to which many others aspire.
“Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but.
“We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We... can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation.
“The powerful have their power. But we have something too – the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together. That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently, and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.”
Carney’s speech in full can be found here.
Now my comment. Agreeing with Carney that the US’s alliance with Europe and the UK has ended at least for now, I would also like everyone to remember that the UN Security Council lacks teeth. The vetoes of the “permanent five” have removed them. Fortunately, some UN agencies continue in irreplaceable ways to serve the world’s needy.
BRICS DOESN’T CUT IT
I want to focus on “the more ambitious” global coalition that Carney hinted at in Davos: a coalition with strength, leverage – and values. Many in the global south placed their hopes in BRICS, but that global platform suffers from a major flaw. It does not demand that nations are run democratically. Freedom of belief and expression, and free and honest elections, seem dispensable at BRICS.
Countries of the grouping known as the Commonwealth, chaired by King Charles of the UK, seem, by and large, to respect pluralism in religion, an independent media, and free and fair elections. However, vast sections of the world -- above all Europe, Latin America, and east Asia – live outside this Commonwealth.
A global forum or platform where democracy, equality, acceptance, tolerance, and national autonomy are emphasized, and where countries from Europe as also nations like Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and Brazil mingle with the Commonwealth, which includes Australia, Canada, India, Nigeria, and South Africa, would convey the united force – the economic as well as ideological strength – that Carney is scouting for.
Even before presidents and prime ministers agree to build it, citizens from these lands can put together their own Global Alliance for Human Rights and National Sovereignty, and they can speak from that platform. This is how I would tweak Carney’s call for a global coalition of the middle powers.
MINNESOTA PROTESTS
Margaret Smith, our esteemed colleague at We Are One Humanity, is writing on the incredible expressions on icy streets of the unhappiness of Minnesotans at the manner in which agents of ICE, the federal department for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have acted against presumed violators of immigration laws in their state. The deaths this month from ICE’s bullets of Rene Good (January 7) and Alex Pretti (January 24) have not only brought thousands of Minnesotans out from their homes to the cold streets of Minneapolis; they seem to have compelled Trump to speak in friendlier tones to two Democrats about whom he has long been publicly derisive: Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz and the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey.
Adding to the anguish and anger of Minnesotans were the arrests of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, migrants from Ecuador seeking asylum in the US, and the allegation that the five-year-old was used as bait to capture his father. On January 26, Fred Biery, a federal judge in San Antonio, Texas, the city to which ICE agents shifted Liam and his father, issued a temporary order prohibiting their removal from the US while courts examine their requests.
Robert Worth’s latest article in the Atlantic, “Welcome to the American Winter: In the frozen streets of Minneapolis, something profound is happening,” paints a sad and grim picture lit with a glimmer of hope. It suggests that the midwestern state has been witnessing resolve, ground-level training, and mobilization.
Other stories and images from Minnesota indicate that ICE’s more-than-stringent actions have hurt Trump’s standing even among sections ardently loyal to him hitherto. It appears that the president has had to modify his rhetoric and also some of his directives to ICE.
MYSTERY RESOLVED
An incisive saying widely attributed to Mahatma Gandhi goes like this: “There’s enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed. If everyone cares enough, and everyone shares enough, everyone will have enough.”
I have known for decades that the saying actually came in the year 1953 from the American founder of Moral Re-Armament (or MRA), Frank Buchman (1878-1961), whom I had often met in the last six years of his life. It was also clear that the words could have come from Gandhi, for they seemed to sum up his understanding of the economic life of our earth’s humans. Now I’ve come across these interesting words that Gandhi wrote, perhaps in 1929:
“I venture to suggest that it is the fundamental law of Nature, without exception, that Nature produces enough for our wants from day-to-day, and if only everybody took enough for himself and nothing more, there would be no pauperism in this world, there would be no man dying of starvation in this world.” (Speeches and Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Navajivan, Ahmedabad, 4th edition, pp. 384-85)
Frank Buchman had met Gandhi in India in 1915 and 1924 and in London in 1931. In 1952-53, more than four years after Gandhi’s assassination, Buchman spent several months in India. There he may have run into the foregoing sentence, with the thrust of which he was in complete accord. It is plain that Buchman turned that thought into the crisp saying quoted above, adding the notion of sharing.
Students of Gandhi and Buchman will be glad, I believe, that the little mystery of the quote’s authorship is now resolved. I may add that from 2001 MRA has been known as Initiatives of Change.
