This post is part of a symposium on international law under the second Trump administration. Read the rest of the posts here.
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The Canadian Prime Minister arrives at Davos. Not quite Nietzsche’s lantern-bearing madman running to the marketplace to announce the death of God, he nonetheless comes to shatter an illusion. He will announce that the “international rules-based order,” once a “useful fiction,” is no more. “[G]reat powers,” he will warn, have used “extreme global integration” as “a weapon”: “Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” “Nostalgia is not a strategy,” he will declare. He will say that we cannot continue to “‘live within the lie’ of mutual benefit through integration, when integration is the source of [our] subordination.” Drawing on Václav Havel’s example of the shopkeeper, whose display of a sign (“Workers of the World Unite!”) operates not to affirm its content but to signal obedience to an exhausted ideology, he will remind his audience that a failed “system’s power comes not from its truth but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true.” It is time, he will say, for “companies and countries” to “take their signs down” and for us all to “live the truth.”
Mark Carney’s speech has been lauded, and is notable, for clearly stating that countries should not seek to manage the great powers’ (read: United States’) misuse of tariffs, financial infrastructure, and supply chain integration by seeking exceptional treatment on an individual basis and otherwise pretending things are normal. In circumstances where the default position of many states is to do just that — even in the face of humiliation — that is something. As is his call for middle powers to take responsibility for “building what we claim to believe in” and acting accordingly with both allies and adversaries.
Yet it became quickly apparent that what Carney believes in is the continuation of neoliberal capitalism. Setting aside that Carney mentions companies before countries, consider his account of how his government is responding to this “new reality”: Canadians have “cut taxes on incomes, on capital gains and business investment” and removed “all federal barriers to interprovincial trade”; they are “fast-tracking a trillion dollars of investment in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond,” while “doubling defence spending” over a decade; they are signing free trade pacts with various nations and forming a “buyer’s club,” anchored in the G7, for its critical minerals, and relying on their key advantages in extraction and finance. The question, then, for Carney, is how to maintain neoliberal capitalism without acting as if the United States could be relied on to anchor an international rules-based order.
Carney’s turn to the G7 is instructive. The G7 formed a key part of Thatcher and Reagan’s successful effort to rebuff the attempt by newly independent states to use their numerical advantage in the UN General Assembly to establish a new set of trading and financial rules. Like Carney’s, Thatcher and Reagan’s project was forged in crisis and without any nostalgia towards existing institutional arrangements. What mattered to them was the ability to conceive of new institutions and arrangements (and new uses for old ones) which could shore up power and privilege by concentrating decision-making authority in the hands of a few key states.
What made Thatcher and Reagan’s institution-building effective was that it combined policy and institutional design with a sustained, long-term hegemonic ideological project in both the UK and US that shifted public perception of “common sense” towards an authoritarian, right-wing agenda. The reactionary dimensions of this agenda have metastasized most recently not as a result of neoliberalism’s successes, but precisely because of its failings. This speaks to the effectiveness and endurance of a project that depended on people willing to act as if its premises were true—including the premise, as Thatcher famously argued, that there was no alternative.
One person willing to keep acting as if there is no alternative is Carney himself. Indeed, Carney treats the policy tenets of neoliberalism as a truth that we can simply live. Apart from abandoning the “as if” of the United States’ role as a reliable guarantor of the system, Carney fails to grapple with the various “as ifs” on which neoliberalism has long depended. At the international level, these include the idea that we should act “as if” a division between formal sovereign equality and vast disparities in economic power could cohere into long-term stability in the global economy through the gradual (if ever-deferred) process of “development” in poorer states. And that, as part of this division, we should act “as if” coercive interventions by powerful states and international institutions in poorer states to achieve that development would be in the interests of (and somehow desired by) their populations.
The thinness of both Carney’s account of neoliberalism’s premises and his commitment to moving beyond them was exposed shortly after his speech, as the United States and Israel attacked Iran. Carney now faced a test of his determination to move beyond a faith in American hegemony and remain “principled in our commitment to fundamental values: sovereignty and territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights.” The strategic incompetence, manifest illegality, humanitarian and environmental impacts, and predictable global economic consequences of the United States’ actions provided perhaps the perfect example of a moment to “take [Canada’s] sign down.” Instead, Carney supported the US action, even if he did so with regret.
Carney’s central claim—that a “system’s power comes not from its truth but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true”—offers an important insight, but not for the reasons he suggests. He would have done well to pause and ask himself the question posed by philosopher Jacques Derrida, “What, then, are we doing when we say ‘as if’?” As Derrida, by reference to Immanuel Kant, explains, “the ‘as if’ plays a decisive role in the coherent organization of our experience.” To act, like the shopkeeper, “as if” a social commitment were true is not to act falsely or blindly. Indeed, what mattered to Havel was not that the sign was a lie, but that the Soviet dictatorship “had long since alienated itself completely from the social movements that gave birth to it.”
What Carney seems to have missed is that it is not just failed or exhausted systems that rely on collective acceptance of their premises, but all institutional arrangements in complex social systems. Indeed, for Kant, the grounding of state sovereignty (a “fundamental value” and self-evident concept for Carney) is itself dependent on such “as if” reasoning. Since “the act by which a people forms itself into a state”—the “original contract”—is, Kant argues, “[p]roperly speaking only the idea of this act,” “subtle reasonings” about the origins of legal authority within a state “are altogether pointless and, moreover, threaten a state with danger.” Instead, as a principle of practical reason, the “presently existing legislative authority ought to be obeyed, whatever its origin,” and its authority must be “thought as if it must have arisen not from human beings but from some highest, flawless lawgiver,” namely God. If there is a truth here that we could live through our institutional arrangements, it is not accessible to humans, even those at Davos.
The as if, of course, is not a prescription for subservience to fictions. At the same time that we must accept that any institutional arrangement in a complex social system depends on participants collectively acting as if certain foundational premises are functionally true, we do so without any guarantees. This applies even where the challenges which we might establish our laws and institutions to meet are genuine and are, or ought to be, widely accepted as such. This is because it is impossible for the laws and institutions we create to be a pure and perfect response to those challenges. Awareness of this impossibility is how we retain power over our fictions. When our systems and institutions do fail us, we must take on the responsibility to imagine and institute different forms and arrangements – which in turn will depend for their success not on truth but on collective acceptance, for the time being, of their foundational premises.
Ultimately, of course, what matters is not whether the premises of our laws and institutions are in fact true. What matters is whether they are the proper subject of, and remain faithful to, a collective commitment – and, of course, what that commitment comprises.
Instead of seeking to re-establish an institutional framework to maintain the “reality” of there being no alternative to neoliberalism, we could take Carney’s identification of the present moment as a fundamental “rupture” and think more broadly about our responsibilities to imagine new possibilities. What would it mean, we could ask, to aim to create laws, institutions, alliances, and projects as if they were based on climate change posing an existential threat to the lives of millions? Or as if they existed to address economic inequality within and between states on the basis that this inequality is not only unjust, but also socially, politically, and environmentally unsustainable? Or as if a child born in Gaza is equal to all others in worth and dignity?
