“Today, I’ll talk about the rupture in the world order, the end of a nice story and the beginning of a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints.

But I also submit to you that other countries, particularly middle powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that embodies our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of states.

The power of the less powerful begins with honesty.

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.

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 to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety.

It won’t.

So, what are our options?

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, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world, unite!” He doesn’t believe 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 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.

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim,

This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works.

Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.

But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

You cannot “live within the lie” of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

The multilateral institutions on which middle powers have relied — the WTO, the UN, the COP — the very architecture of collective problem solving, are under threat.

And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions — that they must develop greater strategic autonomy: in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains.

And this impulse is understandable. A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.

But let’s be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable.

And there’s another truth: if great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from “transactionalism” will become harder to replicate. Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.

Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. They’ll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty — sovereignty that was once grounded in rules, but will be increasingly anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.

This room knows, this is classic risk management — risk management comes at a price. But that cost of strategic autonomy — of sovereignty — can also be shared. Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentation. Complementarities are positive sum.

And the question for middle powers, like Canada, is not whether to adapt to the new reality — we must. The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls or whether we can do something more ambitious.

Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture.

Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumptions — that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security — that assumption is no longer valid.

And our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb has termed “values-based realism” — or, to put another way, we aim to be principled and pragmatic.

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.

And pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share our values. So we’re engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.

We are calibrating our relationships so their depth reflects our values. And we’re prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given the fluidity of the world order, the risks that this poses, and the stakes for what comes next.

And we are no longer relying on just the strength of our values, but also on the value of our strength.

We are building that strength at home.

Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, on capital gains and business investment. We have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade. We are fast-tracking a trillion dollars of investment in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond.

We are doubling our defence spending by the end of this decade and we’re doing so in ways that build our domestic industries.

And we are rapidly diversifying abroad. We’ve agreed a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the European defence procurement arrangements.

We have signed 12 other trade and security deals on four continents in six months.

In the past few days, we have concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar.

We’re negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.

We’re doing something else. To help solve global problems, we are pursuing variable geometry — in other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests.

So on Ukraine, we’re a core member of the coalition of the willing and one of the largest per-capita contributors to its defence and security.

On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland’s future.

Our commitment to Article 5 is unwavering.

So we’re working with our NATO allies — including the Nordic-Baltic Eight — to further secure the alliance’s northern and western flanks, including through Canada’s unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in aircraft and boots on the ground.

Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic.

On plurilateral trade, we’re championing efforts to build a bridge between the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the European Union, which would create a new trading block of 1.5 billion people.

On critical minerals we’re forming buyer’s clubs anchored in the G7 so the world can diversify away from concentrated supply.

And on AI we’re co-operating with like-minded democracies to ensure we won’t ultimately be forced to choose between hegemons and hyperscalers.

This is not naive multilateralism. Nor is it relying on their institutions. It’s building coalitions that work, issue by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations.

What it’s doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.

Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.

But I’d also say that great powers can afford, for now, to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.

This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.

In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: compete with each other for favour or to combine to create a third path with impact.

We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong — if we choose to wield them together.

Which brings me back to Havel.

What would it mean for middle powers to “live the truth“?

First it means naming reality. Stop invoking “rules-based international order” as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion.

It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals.

When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.

It means building what we claim to believe in. Rather than waiting for the old order to be restored, it means creating institutions and agreements that function as described.

And it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion. Building a strong domestic economy should always be every government’s immediate priority.

And diversification internationally is not just economic prudence — it is the material foundation for honest foreign policy. Because countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.

So Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world’s largest and most sophisticated investors. In other words, we have capital, talent, we also have a government with the immense fiscal capacity to act decisively.

And we have the values to which many others aspire.
Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability.

We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but. A partner that builds and values relationships for the long term.

And we have something else. We have a recognition of what’s happening and a determination to act accordingly.

We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is.

We are taking the sign out of the window.

We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.

But we believe that from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, more just.

This is the task of the middle powers. The countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine co-operation.

The powerful have their power. But we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.

That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently.

And it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.

aus: Mark Carney: Middle powers navigating a rapidly changing world, Davos, 20.1.26, im Internet.

Abb.: David Pope, Australien, 23.1.26, im Internet.
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01/26

“… Theorism is not about thinking about reality.

oh  no, but about destroying it: producing what is perceived to be real.

oh no, but about destroying it: producing what is real.

Theorism is not about thinking about reality but about destroying it.

When the angel is added to theory, he short-circuits practice.

Theorism is radical poverty. …”

aus: Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa: Concert for a raised fist, 2007, hier Brüssel: Bozar 2025

11/25

1. Schöne Metaphern

2. Unübersetzbar unmißbar

“The president’s approach: tackle problems that don’t exist via policies that won’t work. …

The effects of his uncertainty and instability have delivered a body blow to both supply and demand, shattered consumer confidence, upset the bond market, undermined the dollar, forced other nations to reorganize global trade and empowered China above all.

It’s all too late. Trump has destroyed Trumpism. ‘I alone can fix it.* Trump’s fix is in.

… He required the complicity of the Republicans in the Congress. They are more than his handmaidens; they could have restrained him at any moment. They chose to abdicate their power to enable him.”

aus: Sidney Blumenthal: After 100 days, Trump has destroyed Trumpism, Guiardian online, 30.4.25, im Internet.

Abb.: Asier Sanz, via Facebook.

02/25

“… Years of research and clinical observation have yielded catalogues of presumed mental dysfunction, culminating in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. First produced by the American Psychiatric Association seven decades ago, and currently in its fifth edition, the DSM organizes conditions into families … More than any other document, the DSM guides how Americans, and, to a lesser extent, people worldwide, understand and deal with mental illness. …

The DSM as we know it appeared in 1980, with the publication of the DSM-III. Whereas the first two editions featured broad classifications and a psychoanalytic perspective, the DSM-III favored more precise diagnostic criteria and a more scientific approach. Proponents hoped that research in genetics and neuroscience would corroborate the DSM’s groupings. Almost half a century later, however, the emerging picture is of overlapping conditions, of categories that blur rather than stand apart. No disorder has been tied to a specific gene or set of genes. Nearly all genetic vulnerabilities implicated in mental illness have been associated with many conditions. A review of more than five hundred fMRI studies of people engaged in specific tasks found that, although brain imaging can detect indicators of mental illness, it fails to distinguish between schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, and other conditions. The DSM’s approach to categorization increasingly looks arbitrary and anachronistic. …

But there’s a larger difficulty: revamping the DSM requires destroying kinds of people. As the philosopher Ian Hacking observed, labelling people is very different from labelling quarks or microbes. Quarks and microbes are indifferent to their labels; by contrast, human classifications change how ‘individuals experience themselves—and may even lead people to evolve their feelings and behavior in part because they are so classified.’ …

By promising to tell people who they really are, diagnosis produces personal stakes in the diagnostic system, fortifying it against upheaval. …

To be named is to be acknowledged, to be situated in a natural order. …

Online communities such as the subreddit r/BPD crystallize psychiatric tags into identities to be socially accommodated and invite people to diagnose themselves. Such communities, Kriss fears, can ‘pervert’ B.P.D. [borderline personality disorder] into a self-serving justification for misconduct. …

Yet there’s a broader issue here. People’s symptoms frequently evolve according to the labels they’ve been given. …

Any new psychiatric taxonomy develops in the shadow of the old. It must contend with the echoes of the previous scheme, with people whose selves have been cast in the shape of their former classification. By failing to take these into account, models such as hitop risk re-creating the categories of their predecessors. Psychiatric diagnosis, wrapped in scientific authority and tinged with essentialist undertones, offers a potent script. As Layle wondered after she was told about her autism, ‘How did I know what was truly me, and what I had convinced myself I was?’

Manvir Singh: Why We’re Turning Psychiatric Labels Into Identities, The New Yorker online, 06.05.2024, im Internet.

01/25

“… the Oxford English Dictionary has just announced “brain rot” as its word of year. As an abstract concept, brain rot is something we’re all vaguely aware of. The dictionary defines it as ‘the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging’. But few people are aware of how literally technology is rotting our brains, and how decisively compulsive internet use is destroying our grey matter.

Brain rot was portended almost 20 years ago when scientists studied the effects of a new invention called ’email’, specifically the impact a relentless barrage of information would have on participants’ brains. The results? Constant cognitive overload had a more negative effect than taking cannabis, with IQs of participants dropping an average of 10 points.

And this was prior to smartphones bringing the internet to our fingertips, which has resulted in the average UK adult now spending at least four hours a day online (with gen Z men spending five and a half hours a day online, and gen Z women six and a half).

In recent years, an abundance of academic research … found evidence that the internet is shrinking our grey matter, shortening attention spans, weakening memory and distorting our cognitive processes. The areas of the brain found to be affected included ‘attentional capacities, as the constantly evolving stream of online information encourages our divided attention across multiple media sources’, ‘memory processes’ and ‘social cognition’.

Paper after paper spells out how vulnerable we are to internet-induced brain rot. ‘High levels of internet usage and heavy media multitasking are associated with decreased grey matter in prefrontal regions,’ finds one. People with internet addiction exhibit ‘structural brain changes’ and ‘reduced gray [sic] matter’. Too much technology during brain developmental years has even been referred to by some academics as risking ‘digital dementia’. …

Dr Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California and author of Attention Span, has found evidence of how drastically our ability to focus is waning. In 2004, her team of researchers found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes. In 2012, it was 75 seconds. Six years ago, it was down to 47 seconds. …

The term brain rot was popularised online by young people who are most at risk of its effects. The fact that those who are most at risk have the most self-awareness of the problem is heartening news. The first step towards any change is understanding the problem. And there is cause to be hopeful. In recent years, anti-technology movements have gained traction, from teenagers turning to dumbphones to campaigns for a smartphone-free childhood; green shoots for a future in which we are able to reclaim our minds. …”

aus: Siân Boyle: Is doom scrolling really rotting our brains? The evidence is getting harder to ignore, The Guardian online, 9.12.24, im Internet.

Abb.: Sarcasm, Facebook.

12/24

“The Arab world is increasingly divided between those who are losing everything, and those who have everything.

For the past few months, there has been a grim new ritual whenever I meet people from some Arab countries. It’s a sort of mutual commiseration and checking in. How are things with you? Where is your family? I hope you are safe, I hope they are safe. I hope you are OK. We are with you.

There is a comfort to it, and also an awkwardness. Comfort because the words are earnest, the solidarity almost unbearably meaningful. Awkward because the scale of what many are enduring is too large to be captured in those words. Everything feels shot through with survivor’s guilt, but also with a little bit of resolve in the knowledge that the calamities tearing apart our nations have closed the distances between us.

At the heart of it all is Palestine – an open trauma that haunts interactions. A muteness has set in, where before there was anger and shock. Added to this is Lebanon. … At the same time, Sudan is a year and a half into a bewilderingly savage war. …

Zoom out further and the scene across the Arab world looks historically bleak. Fires big and small are burning everywhere. Many countries – Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Syria – are either divided by low-grade rumbling conflicts (Syria is once again escalating), or struggling through humanitarian crises.

The tolls of the past few years are staggering. Not just in terms of death, but displacement, too. … Almost every Sudanese person I know, within and outside Sudan, is huddled with other family members in temporary circumstances, living out of a suitcase, waiting for the next time they have to move again. …

Another toll, less urgent when one is speaking of life and death, looms in the background. Large historical cities are being ravaged and a process of civilisational erasure is under way. All of Syria’s Unesco world heritage sites have either been damaged or destroyed. Gaza’s Great Omari mosque, whose origins date back to the fifth century and which has been described as ‘Gaza’s historic heart’, was laid to ruin by the IDF. The old city of Sana’a in Yemen, inhabited for more than 2,500 years, has been classified as ‘in danger’ since 2015. This year, in Sudan, tens of thousands of artefacts, some of them dating back to the pharaonic era, have been looted. Cities can be rebuilt, but heritage is irreplaceable.

Even stable countries such as Egypt have not escaped this cultural sabotage. Heritage sites are being razed to make way for urban development by a government that is racing to rebuild Egypt to conform with its monoculture of military rule. In this, there is a metaphor that applies across the region. For the sake of entrenching power, the political establishment is happy to vandalise identity.

Even in my own mind, I can feel cultural contours blurring as physical architecture disappears. And with it, so many other things are being erased – a sense of rootedness, of continuity, of a future. I look at my children and am chilled by the realisation that the very topography of Sudan, and the Arab world as I experienced it through literature, art and travel, is something they will never know. …

I sound like an old nostalgic woman now, I know. Singing the blues of exile, idealising a past that was always far from ideal, ready to annoy a new generation and tell them that it wasn’t always like this. Because I was once that new generation, listening to elders smoking Marlboro Reds and drinking tea and telling me it’s a shame you never experienced the heyday, when we used to study medicine in Baghdad for free, go to the theatre in Damascus, host Malcolm X in Omdurman. When we had behemoth publishing houses and a pan-Arab solidarity. I used to think, well, isn’t that failure yours as well? Because your class didn’t manage to translate that into a political project that wasn’t constantly hijacked by military men and dictators.

As the centre of political and economic power in the region shifts to the oil-rich Gulf states, which are becoming concentrated expressions of hyperconsumerism and modernity, … high-octane sports events and extravaganzas of glamour, as orgies of violence unfold elsewhere. …

An Iraqi friend recently offered me some solace on Sudan. Baghdad was starting to feel normal, she told me, for the first time in 20 years. Things were far from ideal, but there was a possibility that in a few decades, there would be a chance for a new start. And maybe the best you can hope for is a new start, and not a rehabilitation of the past. In the meantime, all that can be said to friends and strangers, all now countrymen, is I hope you are safe. I hope you are OK. We are with you.”

aus: Nesrine Malik: From Beirut to Khartoum, the Arab world is changing beyond our recognition, The Guardian online, 2.12.24, im Internet.

Abb.: Smurf our blue planet, Europakruispunt, Brussel, April 2024, auch im Internet.

12/24

“But apparently, we humans also share 60% of our DNA with a banana. How arbitrary is that? Half of our genes have counterparts in bananas! We are just a bunch of very complicated and violent bananas.”

aus: Xiaolu Guo: A Chinese-born writer’s quest to understand the Vikings, Normans and life on the English coast, Guardian online, 15.8.24, im Internet.

Abb.: Thomas Baumgärtel: Banane am Kreuz, 1983, im Internet.

08/24

“Guilt … is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since then it is no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication, it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness. …

I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices.”

aus: Aude Lorde, zitiert durch: Emma Dabiri: What white people can do next, o.O.: Penguin Random House UK 2021, S.92.

Abb.: Poster Rex (gegründet durch Markus Lange und Lars Harmsen), 2014-

08/24

“Unfortunately, much of the present ‘anti-racist’ conversation is ahistorical and lacking in this analysis. It is also generally devoid of analysis of class or capitalism, which it seems to have largely replaced with interpretation of interpersonal ‘privilege’. …

It is far more persuasive to be presented with a clear vision of the type of society we want to create because we all stand to benefit from it, rather than being chastised to transfer your ‘privilege’ to a ‘black‘ person, especially when the steps about how to actually do that are the best vague and nebulous. …

[For example, Holiday Philips writes,] ‘An ally is someone from a non-marginalized group who uses their privilege to advocate for a marginalized group … They transfer the benefits of their privilege to those who lack it.’

First of all, this is wildly generic. Who is the ‘non-marginalized group’ and who is the ‘marginalized’? … Many white people are not in possession of enough privilege to transfer its benefits to anyone. … Moreover, how would they transfer it?

Are the benefits of the ‘privilege’ we are demanding they transfer merely material benefits extracted through the exploitation of the poor? Of migrants? Of sweatshop labourers? Of the environment? Because the mainstream anti-racist conversation is conveniently devoid of any analysis of class or capitalism, this crucial question is left unanswered, and the ”transfer of privilege’ to ‘marginalized groups’, irrespective of individual circumstances (these transfers always seem to be framed in terms of individuals rather than systems), starts to look like the transfers of resources to people in the global north – who, although members of ‘marginalized groups’, still often have structural privilege over other people with whom they might share racial, but not class, identities. …”

aus: Emma Dabiri: What white people can do next, o.O.: Penguin Random House UK 2021, S.5, 16, 22, 23.

Abb.: Jaelin-doodles: End your privilege, im Internet.

08/24