What Václav Havel Would Ask Mark Carney About Power and Truth
Mark Carney’s speech at Davos this past week, heard around the world, was unusually clear-minded about the moment we are in. Speaking to an audience fluent in the language of global cooperation, Carney stripped away the comforting myths that have long sustained the rules-based international order and named its quiet collapse. The unresolved question his speech leaves hanging is whether Canada and the middle powers will repeat this failed pattern of power among themselves and at home, or take the harder lesson and change how power is shared.
The rules-based international order was the postwar system meant to replace raw power with shared rules and institutions, underwritten by U.S. leadership. It relied on bodies such as the UN, global trade rules, and international financial institutions to create predictability, limit the use of force, and give smaller states some protection from great-power coercion. In theory, disputes were settled by process rather than pressure, and economic openness was balanced by collective security.
Carney argues that for decades countries like Canada went along with this order even though we knew it was only partly true. We knew the strongest states exempted themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and that international law was applied unevenly depending on who was accused and who was harmed.
We accepted this unevenness because we prospered under the arrangement. But the bargain no longer holds. We are now in the midst of a rupture. Carney did not name the United States, but his meaning was clear. The U.S. is using economic integration as a weapon, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, and supply chains as vulnerabilities to exploit.
Carney said that we tolerated the system’s inconsistencies because it served our own prosperity. Canada went along with the unevenness, discrepancies, and injustices because it worked for us. It worked for us. Don’t miss that.
This makes Carney’s invocation of Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless especially interesting. Havel argued that the power of a system often rests on shared rituals and unspoken compliance, and that late communism endured partly because people acted as if they believed in it. The rules-based order functioned in much the same way. But Havel would have insisted that naming the lie is only the first step. The real test is whether those who benefit from a system are willing to stop performing belief in it themselves. For Havel, truth was not a rhetorical insight but a lived risk. He might have asked whether Carney’s use of the story leads to genuine relinquishing of power.
The hard question is what this rupture means in practice, both among middle powers and at home. Have they learned the lesson of failed rule-based orders, or will they reproduce the same dynamics in a new alignment?
Carney declared that Canada was among the first to hear the wake-up call. Will Canada emerge as a leader of the middle powers, offering yet another convenient fiction of cooperation for as long as it suits us? Or will we fundamentally change how we cooperate with other nations?
And what lesson does Carney bring home to Canada? Renewal should not come through further concentration of federal and prime-ministerial power. It means finally moving forward on electoral reform toward proportional representation. It means sharing power more widely by strengthening local governments and communities. If this sounds complicated in an increasingly complex world, it is. Difficulty is not an argument against doing it.
Last Updated on January 23, 2026 | Published: January 23, 2026