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View all search resultsThe end of a lie: Collapse of the rules-based myth
The hegemonic pretensions of powerful states, the weaponization of interdependence, and the erosion of shared norms all confirm that old certainties have dissolved.
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The opening ceremony of the 57th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council on Sept. 9, 2024, in Geneva, Switzerland. (AFP/Fabrice Coffrini)
W
hen the late playwright Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll first opened 20 years ago, it was deeply personal for me as a student at Cambridge studying film in Prague. A meditation on the clash between communism and capitalism in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), it dwelt on the confrontation between high theory and lived reality in a way that moved me profoundly. Two decades later, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent speech in Davos felt like the sequel.
Stating in no uncertain terms that “the rules-based order is fading,” and that we are undergoing a “rupture, not a transition,” Carney offered a master class in what he calls “naming reality.” For nearly four decades (since the fall of the Berlin Wall), Western policymakers have assumed that the prevailing international order would progressively expand its circle of beneficiaries, constraining power with institutions, markets and normative frameworks. But Carney, a leading exponent of that order, has discarded this script.
The “great powers,” he noted, are abandoning even “the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests.” The multilateral institutions that have defined the postwar age are “under threat,” with the UN secretary-general recently acknowledging that his organization is at risk of “imminent financial collapse.” Thucydides’ famous aphorism, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”, is once again becoming the currency of geopolitics.
The intervention of a former central banker (Carney previously led both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England) serves as a bookend to the brief period of unquestioned Western dominance that is most famously associated with Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. Invoking the Czech writer-turned-president Václav Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless, Carney revived a striking insight from the Cold War’s battle of ideas.
For decades, he told the Davos audience, we have been “living within a lie” (quoting Havel) under a system whose “power comes not from its truth but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true.” Systems endure not simply through force, but through the ritual compliance of ordinary participants, like the greengrocer who, “to avoid trouble,” displays a sign reading, “Workers of the world, unite!” Suspending his disbelief, he opts for safety, toeing the party line rather than confronting power.
Carney’s reference to Havel was not some quaint historical aside. He was urging us to open our eyes and recognize that we replaced one lie with another after the Cold War. The world’s middle powers have been especially complicit in the “fiction” of a benign global order. For decades, countries like Canada, Japan and Western Europe’s advanced economies have chosen to “go along to get along”, accepting asymmetric enforcement of trade rules and tolerating legal exceptions for powerful states, because compliance bought stability.
“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false,” Carney said, “that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient […] and we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” In calling out the double standards, he articulated a truth that the Global South has always known.
