Full Transcript of Carney's Speech to World Economic Forum

Summary

Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a forceful speech Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on the “new world order” and how middle powers like Canada can benefit by working together. The speech was delivered against a backdrop of rising geopolitical tensions between great powers like Russia, China and the United States, and as U.S. President Donald Trump threatens allies with tariffs and pushes to acquire Greenland from Denmark, a member of the NATO military alliance.Below is the full transcript of the English parts of Carney’s remarks.Thank you very much, Larry. I’m going to start in French, and then I’ll switch back to English.(IN FRENCH)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. Story continues below advertisement And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along, get along to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.Well, it won’t. So what are our options? More on Canada More videos 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? And his answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe in it. No one does. But he places the 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.Havel called this living within a lie. The system’s power comes not from its truth,...