In the rarefied atmosphere of Davos on 20 January 2026, Canadian PM, Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England, UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, and one of the most articulate defenders of the post-1945 Western consensus, delivered a speech that will be remembered as much for its candour as for its underlying anxiety.
Entitled “The Rupture: Middle Powers in a World of Great Power Coercion”, the address was framed as a call to action for “middle powers” to reclaim agency amid great-power bullying. Yet beneath the measured tone lay an unmistakable lament: the old order, long presented as a universal good, had been exposed as fragile and uneven. Many observers heard in Carney’s words a quiet plea, “Mr. Trump, can we have our ball back?” as the former central banker grappled with a world in which the polite fictions that sustained western dominance were being torn away.
Telling it as it is
Carney did not shy away from uncomfortable truths. He described the so-called rules-based international order as a “pleasant fiction”, one that everyone had agreed to sustain “as if it were true”. Trade rules, he admitted, had been enforced asymmetrically; international law applied with “varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim”. Western nations – Canada foremost among them – had prospered under this arrangement, benefiting from predictability, open markets, and the security umbrella of American hegemony, while much of the global south faced subordination through debt, unequal trade terms, and resource extraction disguised as development.
Even as he critiqued great powers for weaponising tariffs, financial infrastructure, and supply chains, Carney floated ideas like G7 ‘buyers’ clubs’ for critical minerals –suggesting a coordinated western effort to diversify away from concentrated (often Chinese or Russian) sources without fundamentally challenging the extractive logic that has long characterized relations with the developing world.
His speech gave no recognition of the need to build relationships of mutuality with peoples of the global south. Indeed, he specifically referenced Canada’s pension funds as “amongst the world’s largest and most sophisticated investors”. Those pension funds are key actors in global rentier capitalism. They extract wealth from around the world – including Scotland where, for example, they own Aberdeen and Glasgow airports and Forth Ports as well as much of the UK’s railway rolling stock (Angel Trains).
Living in another world
Carney’s speech implicitly concedes that the rupture is not merely Trump’s doing; it is the exposure of what the system always was: a power-based arrangement dressed in the language of universal values.
This brings us to the deeper fictions that have underpinned the global order. Money itself is the most pervasive: a social construct whose value rests on collective belief, state monopoly, and institutional trust. Yet the same architects who proclaim money’s neutrality have used it to enforce hierarchies. The IMF and World Bank, ostensibly neutral lenders of last resort, have repeatedly imposed austerity on debtor nations in the global south.
‘Original sin’ in international finance – borrowing in foreign currencies – has locked much of the global south into cycles of dependency.
Carney’s wish list
What, then, do the elites – exemplified by Carney and those applauding him in the Davos consensus – hope to salvage from the current chaos? Their instinct is preservation through adaptation. Carney urges middle powers to forge coalitions based on “shared values” and build “strategic autonomy” in energy, food, and minerals – language that signals a desire to recreate western-centric networks capable of withstanding unilateralism from Washington or Beijing.
G7 coordination on supply chains would secure access to resources without relinquishing influence over pricing or extraction. Calls for ‘honesty about the world as it is’ are paired with appeals to preserve the core architecture: weighted voting in the IMF, consensus mechanisms that empower veto-wielders, and investor-state dispute settlement clauses that shield capital from democratic regulation.
If there is to be any genuine ‘rupture’ we need to see the likes of Canada’s huge pension funds, and the rest of the G7, making a contribution to economic development in the global south on the basis of mutuality, not one-way wealth extraction.
Changing the rules
A far more radical and promising path lies in the opposite direction: embracing the rupture as an opportunity to build open-sourced global equality grounded in rediscovered national sovereignty. With the fiction of the rules-based order removed, sovereign currency-issuing governments can finally exercise the full potential illuminated by chartalism and many heterodox economists. Fiscal space is limited not by imaginary budgets but by real resources – available labour, materials, and productive capacity.
Nations can mobilise idle domestic resources to raise living standards without begging for foreign approval or piling up unpayable foreign-currency debt.
The global south, in particular, stands to gain most from this rediscovery. Foreign debt can be addressed through adoption of their own domestic currency to build resilience of domestic supply, particularly for food and energy as vital foundations. The former French colonies in West Africa must be freed from France’s domination of their economies through the operations of the CFA Franc and be supported to introduce their own independent national currencies.
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Redefining of global institutions
Global institutions must be fundamentally transformed: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and even NATO restructured with equal voting rights for every nation, no veto powers. The outright cancellation of corporate-rights clauses that allow foreign firms to sue governments over public-interest policies could be considered. Trade agreements would shift from protecting investor profits to enabling genuine equity of opportunity. Every country would be free to pursue full employment, universal education, and sustainable infrastructure.
Central to this vision is a clearer understanding of currency as a public utility rather than a scarce commodity to be hoarded for fictional profit and future security. When money is recognised as a social ledger, societies can redirect it toward collective goals: job guarantees, green transition, health and education systems that lift entire populations.
Shared knowledge is people-power
The crowning element is mandatory open-sourcing of all global research, development, discoveries, inventions, and insights. A true ‘commons’ of global knowledge would allow every nation to contribute according to its current capacity while drawing freely from humanity’s shared pool of understanding. Climate models, medical breakthroughs, renewable-energy designs would no longer be locked behind patents for private gain. They would be available for adaptation and improvement by anyone, anywhere.
Over time, this democratisation of knowledge would raise education levels and living standards in the global south to the point where all nations participate as equals in solving humanity’s greatest challenges. The process would be iterative and collaborative, not zero-sum.
More than idealism
This is not mere idealism; it is the natural world order, deeply aligned with human evolutionary history. Our species did not dominate the planet through solitary brilliance but through networked ingenuity. Dexterity for tool use and advanced cognition evolved in tandem with hyper-sociality. The social brain hypothesis reminds us that large neocortices developed to navigate complex alliances and share information.
Every major leap in human capability has coincided with breakthroughs in communication – spoken language enabled collective memory, writing preserved knowledge across generations. The printing press democratised ideas, and digital networks connected billions instantaneously.
The power of open sourcing
Open sourcing is the latest, most powerful extension of this trajectory. It maximises our biological predisposition to cooperate, iterate, and build cumulatively – precisely the strategy that turned a vulnerable primate into the apex species. Proprietary silos create artificial scarcity and slow adaptation. In contrast, open collaboration propagates improvements rapidly and resiliently, mirroring how early human bands shared innovations to survive environmental shocks.
The game has changed
Trump’s disruptions, for all their recklessness, have shattered the old illusions and cleared space for evolution to resume. The elites may scramble to salvage fragments of their former privilege, but the deeper invitation is to something greater: sovereign nations, freed from hypocritical constraints, uniting in open pursuit of shared human potential. The game has changed.
It is time to stop playing for fictional profits and start advancing together – exactly as evolution has prepared us to do.
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