At Davos, Canada’s prime minister argued that the ‘rules-based order’ was always a useful fiction, but now the sign has to come down. Borrowing Václav Havel’s greengrocer parable, he warned that ‘go along to get along’ won’t buy safety in an age where tariffs, supply chains and finance are weapons. His pitch: middle powers aren’t helpless, but they need honesty, ‘value-based realism’, more strength at home and flexible coalitions abroad, because if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.
This is his speech. Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints. On the other hand, I would like to tell you that the other countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless.
They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the various states. It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must. And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.
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And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety. In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? 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. 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.
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