Carney at Davos: Removing that sign in the window |
“It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry – that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.” These were the grave reflections of Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, delivered in his 20th January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
With such Thucydidean tendences in international relations bothering the PM, Carney feared that “strong tendency of countries to go along, get along to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.” In abjuring this tendency, options beyond accommodation and grudging acceptance had to be considered. Who better to inspire than the meditations of Czech dissident author Václav Havel, whose 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” had conspicuously moved Carney?
Carney homes in on Havel’s reference to the greengrocer who places a sign in his window each morning with the slogan “Workers of the world unite.” Neither he, nor anyone else believes it. “But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along.” (Havel argues that such formulations help “the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides behind the façade of something high. And that something is ideology.”)
As every shopkeeper on the street follows the ritual........