Consortium News: 10-02-2026,
Europe likes to believe it has turned the page. But it keeps rereading the same chapter – only with better lighting, writes Raïs Neza Boneza.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, on Jan. 20. (World Economic Forum /Ciaran McCrickard/CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
By Raïs Neza Boneza
Peoples Dispatch
There are moments in global politics when the mask slips – not because power suddenly discovers morality, but because maintaining the performance becomes too expensive.
Recently in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney did something unusual. He admitted (almost casually) that the so-called rules-based international order has never quite been what it claimed to be.
That the rules were unevenly applied. That the strongest routinely exempted themselves. That integration, once sold as mutual benefit, has increasingly become a tool of coercion.
For a brief second, one could almost feel relief. Not because the truth was new – but because it was finally spoken aloud. We have lived under this system for generations. Born into it. Disciplined by it. Told it was neutral, benevolent, inevitable.
We were instructed to respect “rules” written elsewhere, interpreted elsewhere, enforced elsewhere – usually against us. The outcome was never order, but obedience; never justice, but management.
And yet, the system endured – not because it was true, but because everyone agreed to behave as if it were.