Mark
Carney: The New Leader of the Western World Who Conquered Davos
Written by Justine Frangouli-Argyris
They say that
no adviser or speechwriter assisted the Canadian prime minister in crafting the
address that left the global audience stunned, as he drew on Thucydides (Carney
is known to be an admirer of antiquity) and a simple human allegory to
demonstrate that “everything flows, everything changes, nothing remains.”
The Canadian
prime minister’s speech in Davos was not yet another technocratic intervention
on the global economy; it was a public diagnosis of crisis, delivered in a tone
that resembled a warning more than an analysis. Mark Carney described a world
in which rules have eroded, institutions have weakened, and the international
order functions more as a backdrop than as a reality. His statement that “the
old order is not coming back” was not merely an observation about our era; it
was a direct denunciation of the unilateral power exercised by certain major countries,
as international reports noted.
His critique,
though he named no one, clearly targeted the policies associated with American
leadership in recent years. The weaponization of economic interdependence, the
devaluation of international agreements, the logic of power over cooperation —
all these formed the underlying axis of his speech. His reference to the
Greenland episode, which he used as an example of arbitrariness, served as a
symbol of an era in which geopolitical behavior is no longer constrained by
rules but by the will of powerful countries.
The sharpness
of his speech did not lie in individual phrases but in its overall
architecture: he presented a world where destabilization is not accidental but
the result of deliberate choices. And he called on the “middle powers” to stop
acting as passive observers and to assume an active role in shaping a new, more
stable international reality.
Carney’s
intervention in Davos was, essentially, a warning: that the age of
arbitrariness carries a cost, that the abolition of rules is not an abstract
notion but a threat to global security, and that the international community
can no longer rely on an order that has ceased to function. In this sense,
Carney’s speech was sharp not because he attacked anyone, but because he
described with precision a reality many avoid saying aloud.
Although
Carney did not name Trump, the severity of his speech was unprecedented:
• He spoke of “weapons of economic integration”
• Of the “death of the international order”
• Of “rupture” rather than “transition”
• Of “hypothetical rules” that no longer apply
The target of
these phrases is clear: the Trump-era approach is viewed by the Canadian prime
minister as a key factor in destabilizing the global order.
Carney
appeared as a leader calling for unity in the face of an era of arbitrariness,
unilateralism, and the dismantling of rules — an era which, in his analysis,
has been accelerated by the choices of the American command, behaving
imperially in ways reminiscent of kings and emperors.
