By Adagbo Onoja
Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, managed to get the world stirring with his speech to the 2026 Davos audience. It is no mean achievement for a medium power to seemingly so easily get a global acclamation against the status quo great power and its giant neighbor, the United States of America whose president’s speech was derided even by American media as an exercise in rambling.
Given how the Western dominated global order works, Carney, the leader of America’s neighbor and the only other G-7 member from North America, must have been selected by other members of the Western alliance to make that speech. It was, indeed, Carney’s speech but it would not be surprising if the speech was crafted by a leading Western think tank, university department of International Relations or a research institute just as it could equally have been the prime minister’s jottings, being a system insider as a former governor of the Bank of England for such a long time. Whether he was picked to deliver a counter to Mister Trump by and on behalf of the Western alliance or it was an act of independent mindedness, he scored a goal, and in a striking manner.
PM Carney with French president, Emmanuel Macron
Carney’s global endorsement certainly came from his expertise in frame game: his reference to the phrase ‘Thucydides’ trap’ and the argument that what is going on in international politics is a rupture, not a transition. In whichever camp of reasoning, rupture is a frightening lexicon. Kuhnians call it paradigm change. Every (social) scientist watches out for it in fear because a paradigm change sweeps so much away. Marxists call it a revolution. Even revolutionaries fear a revolution because it can go in a completely different direction. Post-Marxists call it dislocation. They mean that frightening moment when the social order crumbles because there is a new narrative in town which has undercut the subsisting narrative and everything is starting anew, including new winners, losers and Others.
Rupture is not the language associated with conservatives or right wing elements. Right wing elements are more about an infectious self-assuredness informed by their self-understanding, individually and collectively, as the ones properly moderated in terms of the right patterns and codes, credibility, correct sense of propriety, balance, discipline, reasonableness, patience and, on the whole, seriousness. So, they don’t grumble or express bitterness, much less shout, not to talk of carrying placards.
Mark Carney has swept all these away in one speech. He did not just attack the subsisting narrative, he derided it as falsehood which had been masquerading as a framework with something for everyone. Above all, he calls for its jettisoning, including the category of players who should spearhead what should succeed the ruptured order.
The seriousness of the situation at hand probably excuses Mister Carney for not sparing even a second to acknowledge that an African country called Nigeria once bandied about this concept of medium powers and they deserve credit for throwing it up, even though Nigeria has no copyright to it. Anyway, Nigeria has itself to blame for disappearing from where it ought to be to its current non-descript location in the international system.
Read from a subaltern location in Nigeria rather than a prosperous Asian industrial economy or somewhere in the West, Carney was, though indirectly, endorsing the contending analogy that power is what counts in life. It determines who, what, when and where matters. Power is truth, meaning or action. Truth is not the opposite of a lie but the position privileged by the power configuration at a particular point in time. It is only as such that what was the truth yesterday could transform into a lie today. These are what he is saying, not minding the mix up in him saying that communism or the rules-based international order were lies all along. Every other truth is also a lie too and will, in time, consolidate or exhaust itself.
Mr Carney with Chinese president, Xi Jinping
Rome was the truth until it exhausted itself. The British Empire was the truth until it exhausted itself. The lifetime of the American Empire is coming into view now because American power has declined. No matter how solid any truth appears, it is only a matter of time before it confronts its exhaustion. Its exhaustion does not come from class contradictions as Marxists believe, for example but from radical contingency or reactivation.
Radical contingency is what explains what Trump is doing. The so-called rules-based international order was a hegemonic narrative which had no meaning whatsoever for a large chunk of humanity. Over a hundred out of the nearly 200 countries in the international system produce nothing to trade with. They are locked into a system of that memorable phrase – unequal trade – a phrase reflecting their location in global power relations. Some of them end up consuming what they do not produce and producing what they cannot consume. So, the rules-based international order was neither true nor false but a narrative held in place by power. Nothing more.
Then Donald Trump came along with a reactivation of the order in the new narrative of an America that has been cheated by the rules-based order. In its place, he is emphasising an insular sense of America. What followed has been the instant demystification of the rules-based international order. Once its mystique or hegemony was torn off, the gradualism of American decline gave way to an accelerated declinism. That is what we saw Carney articulating in favour of a new narrative that he hopes would win hegemonic consent and become the new driver of global interaction. In other words, we are witnessing the international version of the domestic analogy that the people do not obey the law because they fear the police. People obey the law only because the law is convincingly presented to them as being in their interest. That is why law-obeying citizens are also the citizens who hit the streets in revolt as soon as they feel the system has left them high and dry. America has ruptured its own mystique and with it, the narrative of rules-based international order.
The point being made here is that, of the four sources of power – structural power (power that comes from resources); institutional power; coercive power from control of repressive state apparatus and discursive power – the cheapest but the most enduring of them is discursive power or hegemony. But, like all good things, hegemonic power comes with a major deficiency: it is vulnerable to reactivation or radical contingency. It comes with the problem of the constitutive outside. In other words, every argument which won and became consensual or common-sensical defeated and expelled many other contending arguments. The rules-based international order could not have been the only argument about how to remake the world order in 1945. There were other positions which were defeated and made outsiders. Some of these positions have come back once in a while to haunt the rules-based international order until the Trump version came to the fore. Trump’s version could equally meet its Golgotha sooner than later, either at the midterm elections or something like that.
Nothing is ever true or false. Anything can be true as long as it is invested with the status of a self-evident truth in popular consciousness. That is what the Americans did in 1945. The rules-based international order sedimented thickly into global consciousness that even its victims were defending it without knowing what they were defending. From within the same rules – based order narrative has come an apparatchik rather than class struggle, a new narrative, led by the same US establishment, leading to the unravelling of the system.
The lesson of Carney’s intervention in Davos for all students of social change is the question of how it happens? Does it come from private investment as classical political economy tells us or from class struggle as Marxists submit or from discourse/hegemony as post-Marxists argue?
