On Mark Carney and the West Pulling Down the Sign in the Window

Calm, eloquent, and scathing, Mark Carney’s speech at Davos this week was a much needed liberal antidote to US President Donald Trump’s beginning-of-the-week bellicosity. Trump had said he may use military force to take Greenland, and (temporarily) knocked financial markets off-kilter with tariff threats against western Europe.

For Carney, Canada’s Prime Minister, this was the last straw, a “rupture de l’ordre mondial.” Switching to English, Carney told the story of Václav Havel’s greengrocer, paraphrasing the former Czech president’s 1978 essay, The Power of the Powerless.

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.

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.

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.

This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

The candour drew a standing ovation—and went viral, a rarity for usually staid speeches in the Swiss mountains.

But Carney is not a greengrocer. And unlike greengrocers, Western leaders over the centuries were not coerced into maintaining a fiction. They were rewarded for it.

And the reward was the West itself, whose wealth, legitimacy, and moral authority—the platform on which Carney stood—rest on more than 250 years of useful fictions that did to the world far worse than Donald Trump is ever going to do to Greenland or anywhere else: countless massacres, genocides of entire peoples, well over 100 million deaths, engineered famines, and the systematic destruction of vast regions whose poverty would persist for centuries—all underpinned by white supremacy.

For centuries, Western domination was cloaked in virtue, sustained by useful fictions. Colonialism was civilization, railways were gifts, famines were weather, trade was free. The West’s great statesman Winston Churchill happily said that there was no wrong in a “stronger race, a higher-grade race” taking another’s place in the name of progress—especially, apparently, when doing so enriched himself and his friends.

The colonial era may have tapered, but its patterns continue. Western states still arm allies whose conduct they would condemn in adversaries, still extend legal frameworks selectively, still treat some civilian deaths as tragedies and others as statistics. Carney’s Canada is no exception. Carney is not perched at the fulcrum of modern humanity, but firmly weighs down one side of it. Canada under his leadership continues to provide intelligence, weapons, and support to wars widely regarded as unjust and, in at least one recent case, genocidal. That’s quite a lot more than putting up a poster.

Billions of people live on the wrong side of Carney’s “asymmetry of enforcement.” They have been gaslit for generations by his—and his forebears’—fictions. We knew it, they can now say, and point to the messenger.

The greengrocer had a moral excuse. Western leaders have moral responsibility.

Carney is not wrong about the fiction, and I applaud him for naming it. But those who were never invited inside the system have every right to feel anger when the lie is articulated only once it stops serving its beneficiaries.

The messenger need not be shot. But we are entitled to question the moral authority of a decision to remove the sign from the window only when it stops being valuable for a handful in power to keep it there.