At Davos, during the ongoing elite annual gala known as the World Economic Forum (WEF), Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a speech, receiving much fanfare. His “bravery” and “honesty” in calling out the reality of the post WW2 global order—the so-called “international rules based order”—has led to enthusiastic approval from establishment liberals.
Carney admitted that this order was always a fiction, that the rules were always applied selectively and that the West participated in it because it benefited from this particular arrangement.
It speaks to the dearth of morality within the Western political establishment, that this admission of hypocrisy without repentance is receiving adulation. The acceptance that the “rules-based order” was always just a cover to justify atrocities around the world, doesn’t make one’s complicity in it any less.
For example, from Haiti, to Somalia, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and of course to the genocide in Palestine, the larger Western world has always been present besides the US in its campaigns of extermination and extraction.
But what has changed now? Why the “honesty”?
As the US is adapting to its declining global influence, particularly in Asia and Africa vis-a-vis China, it is recentering the zone of its exploitation on the Western Hemisphere, which includes Denmark (via Greenland) and Canada. While countries of the Global North previously pillaged the territories of Indigenous peoples together, now Europe and Canada find themselves becoming a potential target of the US adjustment.
And this in a nutshell is what Carney is calling a “rupture”. The loss of honour among thieves.
White supremacy
One of the foundational but masked pillars of the US-centered rules-based order is White supremacy. The unwritten agreement that the settler colonial states will remain junior partners to the US and benefit from its hegemonic status in return for having a subservient foreign policy against the rest of the world.
That is precisely why we have seen near-complete alignment and assistance to the US during the invasions and genocides of Brown and Black people in places like Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia to name a few. That’s why we don’t hear a peep when Venezuela or Iran are threatened but we get high-browed indignation when it comes to Denmark and Canada.
The Danish Ambassador to the US shed light on it unwittingly when he tweeted:
“Yes, history does matter: The Kingdom of Denmark has always stood shoulder-to-shoulder w. . After 9/11, answered the US’ call. We lost more soldiers in Afghanistan per capita than any other NATO ally.”
The West and fascism
It is hard not to see the parallels with Europe in the 1930s and the rise of fascism. As Aimé Césaire put it in Discourse on Colonialism about European elites: “…before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples”.
Césaire goes on to write about the European elite and Hitler: “what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”
The old order can’t “forgive” US president Trump for turning the colonial gaze towards Denmark and Canada. That’s the reason for the rally behind Carney.
Towards a new order
In Carney’s speech, after a clear admission of guilt, there is no shame for the moral decrepitude of benefiting from an unjust system or at least an apology to those who are owed much more. There is no mention of reparations, or regaining of the trust of the majority world, or a call for solidarity with the global South. There is no acknowledgement of the unjust nature of the global economy and no grand aim to dismantle its exploitative structure.
Rather, there is a proposal to tweak around the edges by building militarized, transactional alliances of “middle powers” which can safely ensconce the old elite in their positions of power. As his domestic policies show, he is cut from the cloth of neoliberal austerity and serves elite interests: delivering tax cuts and deregulation for the rich while the masses get poorer.
His actions are a far cry from his rhetoric of building “something bigger, better, stronger, more just”. He’s only interested in salvaging what he can of the old order, not a real transformation. It is a display of craven self-preservation, not honesty.
If a new order is to be better and more just, it has to start with a complete reconfiguration. It must be an order, where the interests of the powerful minority do not continue to rule over the people and planet; where direct, forceful action is taken against a live-streamed genocide; where the labor of the global South is not systematically appropriated; and where capitulation is no longer a response to threats and bullying.
The rules-based order has indeed expired, but the majority world always knew it was a noose around its neck. And that’s why it does not need unapologetic beneficiaries of that system at Davos telling us what should come next.
Author
Did you like this article? Help us produce more like it by donating $1, $2, or $5. Donate