The Dignity of Nations
Canadian PM Mark Carney's speech at the World Economic Forum sought to find some dignity in the exhaustion of the modern world.
As an undergraduate at La Trobe University in Melbourne I took class with now-Emeritus Professor of Politics, Robert Manne. The class was an overview of the 20th Century through its great essays and books (non-fiction and fiction). It was the best class I’ve ever taken, and has provided me with an enormous direction with my subsequent work.
One of the essays studied in the class was Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless – written by the Czech playwright and dissident in 1978 while under secret police surveillance and harassment. The essay has come back into prominence after being used by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney to frame his address to the World Economic Forum in late-January.
As Carney illustrated, the central character of the essay was the greengrocer who places the sign “Workers of the World United” in his shop window. The greengrocer may very well have wanted the workers of the world to unite, but this was not his intent. Instead the sign was placed in the window because he knew not doing so would invite suspicion and a knock on his door. The sign served as a demonstration that the greengrocer was doing what was expected of him and therefore earned the right to be left alone by the authorities.
Havel extrapolated that this was part of the “living inside a lie” that governed communist Czechoslovakia, and other similar totalitarian societies. Living this way involved repeating slogans, performing rituals and obeying expectations to avoid punishment or exclusion. By doing so, individuals help sustain the system’s power, sacrificing truth and dignity in exchange for a fragile sense of safety and normality.
Carney’s argument was that the global community was similarly engaged in the ritual of performance. Mouthing platitudes about the “rules based order” that were designed to placate us as we avoid recognising the world is undergoing a dramatic shift in values. Or a “rupture” as Carney described it. Gone was the architecture of technocratic cooperation – or the attempt to create it – and in its place lay the blunt realities of raw power and rapacious will.
The resonance the speech had was not so much its diagnosis of the global environment, but the satisfaction of acknowledging this reality. The speech was a relief value. It provided the permission to speak more honestly. With the added respect that Canada, a country which is shackled both geographically and economically to what is now a revisionist superpower, would so conspicuously take their sign down.1
More broadly, the sentiment of Carney’s speech highlighted the exhaustion of our current age. Modern political movements have appetites that are rarely satisfied. They are demanding and conflictual. These movements practice “total politics” – seeing public space as political fields to continuously claim through slogans and symbols. Offering no neutral space for civil society to inhibit and cooperate, and no respite for anyone who might want such a space.
Havel’s essay had already found a present-day resonance prior to Carney’s speech as a critique of modern progressive shibboleths. Land acknowledgements and bio pronouns can be seen as being akin to the greengrocer putting his sign in the shop window. Signals that people are doing what is expected of them, of holding the correct opinions, and therefore have earned the right to be left alone. Whatever sentiment these ideas had originally sought to convey now take a backseat to their social pressures.
These pressures, regardless of their social, political, or international manifestations eat away at our dignity. Dignity begins as a quiet insistence within the individual: the need to live in alignment with what one knows to be true. When that alignment is broken — when we speak words we do not believe or perform rituals emptied of meaning — we feel a subtle, yet profound diminishment. These little cuts compound into a sense that one isn’t able to live in a genuine and honest manner.
As these small acts of self-betrayal accumulate, they harden into social reality. A society organised around pretence teaches its members that truth is dangerous and costly. The façade becomes ambient — no longer imposed solely from above, but maintained by mutual silence and shared cowardice. Havel’s greengrocer reveals how oppression persists without constant violence: people internalise the public game of slogans and reproduce them themselves. In such a world, dignity is not crushed dramatically but slowly drained, replaced by resignation and cynicism.
What happens to individuals under a regime of façade also happens to nations in the international system. States, like people, hunger for dignity — to be recognised as legitimate, coherent, and self-respecting actors — and when they structure their external posture around fictions, that dignity erodes. Havel’s insistence was that dignity is not granted by strength, but by refusing to live within a lie. A nation may continue to function without dignity, but it no longer stands upright in the world.
The “rules based order” was meant to provide dignity to nations. For each country, no matter how small and lacking in power, to be respected within the international system. This was never going to be perfect, powerful countries would always throw their weight around. But the architecture of the system at least allowed smaller countries to turn up at international forums and feel like they had some form of respect.
Carney acknowledging that this attempt at universal respect was now gone may have exposed Canada to having mouthed the slogan, but it also exposed the countries who have been undermining the system – United States, Russia, China. As Havel wrote, were the greengrocer to place a sign in his window that said “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient” it would be an embarrassment to the greengrocer. However, it would also be an embarrassment to the regime, as it would reveal the truth about their power. One that had nothing to do with the workers of world uniting.
This is why Donald Trump was so quick to dismiss Carney’s speech. His fondness for humiliation was exposed. And exposed by the country that arguably has the most to lose. Far from being embarrassed, Carney – and Canada – had displayed courage. Something that also embarrasses Trump.
Of course, the greater permission to speak freely that Carney has sought to establish doesn’t make this new reality any easier. Carney’s prescriptions are hard work and sober endurance. It won’t be fun. But acknowledging a problem moves us from a state of denial towards acceptance and action. It now gives us a sense of responsibility, which elicits far less anxiety – and far more dignity – than maintaining a façade.
Australia is yet to do so. We are far too timid.