No one saw the Carney go

On the gothic absurdity of the geopolitical circus and the sovereignty salsa

Far be it from me, who at primary school was forever "Tim Hollow Head", to make jokes about people's names...

But Nick Cave is touring, and this blogletter is named for a Cure song.

And "my head is burning" from the parade of pathological politics through the summer break.

And Mark Carney(!?) being the one to tell the world the post-war consensus is dead has sent me away, away, we're sad to say... away to one of the Prince of Darkness's weirdest songs:

I'm writing about Mark Carney as my first post of 2026? What's the world coming to?

Well, that's kind of the point.

I still haven't finished the piece on Zohran and Zack. I considered writing something about Venezuela and the collapse of the "rules based order", but the bush and beach were calling. I started to write something about the latest Iranian revolution and the need to embrace complexity and multiplicity of causes while supporting people's rights to self-determination, but got immersed in Naomi Klein's brilliant Doppelganger. Dear friends were evacuated from both fire and flood and I couldn't bear to think enough about it to write anything. I was going to write something about the hate speech legislation, but a friend started drafting a submission to the inquiry which I helped with instead, and which David Pocock kindly read some of into Hansard, and at some point I will come back to the point I wanted to make about normative vs criminal constraints on speech and the dangers of backfire, but... it's still January, for goodness sake!

And now this.

The Carny left behind a horse so skin and bone that he'd named Sorrow

The central-banker-turned-Canadian-PM Mark Carney, the Moses of the moment, descends unto Davos with a declaration that we are in the abyss between the no longer and the not yet! How could I not write something?

It's important to start by saying that someone of Carney's stature telling the World Economic Forum that the "rules based order" was never what it claimed to be but is now over is BIG. It's a geopolitical earthquake as much as the events it is referencing are.

Because he's right. It's true, and a lot of us have been saying it, and now it's been said there, by him, in that way, and it cannot be unsaid.

And because he's right that the saying of it matters. He's right that the whole aedifice is and has always been something of a confidence game. It's all based on consent. And withdrawing consent, as I wrote in Living Democracy, is not only powerful but in some ways the pivotal aspect of changing the system. Yes, the system is also underpinned by violent coercion, but as Hannah Arendt wrote, violence destroys power, and it fails when consent is withdrawn, when the story shifts, when people don't believe you anymore.

The Arendtian aspects of Carney's declaration are, of course, why I need to write about it. This whole blogletter, and my PhD research, is riffing on her concept that we are in the abyss between the no longer and the not yet, a space where it is incumbent on us to face the world as it actually is, not as we would wish it to be, and where, should we choose to do so, we become free to find our path to something new.

Focussed as I am on this set of ideas, it was extraordinary to me to hear Carney say that "this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is", that "The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, and more just."

But...

You knew there was a but coming...

While boss Bellini, waved his smoking pistol around
Saying "The nag was dead meat
We can't afford to carry dead weight"

There's a dark, gothic absurdity lurking in Mr Carney's speech, like in Mr Cave's lurching, apocalyptic waltz. An absurdity that left me with a feeling of whiplash.

The Carney / Carny canard also owes something to my having just finally read Doppelganger, with Klein's brilliant insights about the seriously ridiculous and ridiculously serious nature of contemporary political discourse still echoing around my head. She writes about the circus funhouse mirror reflections of reality that her doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, engages in - wrapping a small kernel of truth in a big lie. She takes a real issue - concerns with Big Pharma, or Big Tech, profiteering from the pandemic and encroaching on our data privacy - and diverts attention away from the real underlying causes (capitalism), and towards bizarre conspiracies.

And, as Klein explains, it's not just the Wolfs and Bannons and Trumps who do this, though they are the undisputed experts. See my posts on the banality of ecocide and net zero reality, for local examples - tell the obvious truth that our environment laws are broken, and effectively blame the Greenies and weaken them further. It's an embedded practice in our politics at large: coopting concepts, stealing frames, stripping language and ideas of their very meaning, such that discourse is "meme-ified" grey goo.

Am I being unfair to Mark Carney?

Well, hey, he can deal with it, if I am. He's the Prime Minister of Canada. But I also don't intend to blame him - it's systemic, not personal. And I also still think he's performed an important service.

But, he declared the old world to be over, and then presented a vision of ... the old world. In a recursive vision that is disorienting in its circularity, his solutions - multilateral trade between capitalist nation states, with a taste of protectionism thrown in; massively increased military spending, with a side order of new technology; continued resource extraction, with a rhetoric of "clean" critical minerals; some lovely words about pluralism and freedom and sustainability - sound kind of like late capitalist modernity without Trump. Which, of course, leads straight back to the next Trump.

And they were silent for a spell
Wishing they'd done a better job of burying Sorrow

This is a speech which, by naming an important reality, opens up extraordinary possibilities ... only to close them off immediately.

As others have noted, the choice of the Václav Havel story is telling. Havel was a great leader, and the story of the shopkeeper's choice to put the sign in the window or not makes an important point about the power of consent. But the story also carries other implications - that the "workers of the world" do not and must not unite.

In Carney's speech, only nation states have agency. They can be great powers or middle powers, fortresses or partners. They can fight or trade or cooperate. People exist literally only as "talent", as "an educated population", or as the vast population of a trading bloc.

This, I want to emphasise, is not in the least bit Arendtian. Hannah was all about the people, in their wonderful, messy complexity. And she didn't have a lot of time for nation states.

And here's the final, crucial point.

Carney's proposed world is all about sovereignty. The word appears eight times in a relatively short, 2000 word speech. His vision is of a world where enlightened sovereign states cooperate towards prosperity and universalism.

Hannah Arendt argued powerfully 75 years ago that sovereignty and universal rights are entwined in a complex contradiction. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she set out how rights are a creation of the state, but state sovereignty makes them unenforceable, both internally and externally. Indeed, the very form of the state - a body which includes and excludes by design - makes universal rights anathema.

Arendt's analysis, as I've recently explored elsewhere in the blogletter, was primarily concerned with stateless people (which was her personal and very recent experience), for whom "their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them" (Origins, Penguin Classics 2017 edition, p387). But this analysis now extends into a broad application of her concept of "rightslessness", where most citizens of most nations are excluded from the capacity to influence decisions that determine our literal capacity to survive. Arendt scholar and Emeritus Professor of Political Theory and International Relations at the University of St Andrews, Patrick Hayden, has written a brilliant and devastating analysis of how, since “the power to exclude [has become] the essence of statist politics”, now “rightslessness is deeply embedded within the logic of the inter-state system".

A world where sovereignty is paramount is a world where states matter but people do not, regardless of the pretty words of their more enlightened leaders. And it's a world that leads inexorably towards one form of fascism or another, along the road to ecocide and extinction.

I don't believe for a second that that is what Mark Carney wants. It's not what he's proposing. But it is the outcome of his proposal.

If he actually read Arendt, and the specific passages parts of his speech are so reminiscent of, he would find her wonderful suggestion that, to truly understand the world, to comprehend, means facing up to and resisting of reality - whatever it may be, or might have been.

That resisting (my emphasis) is key.

Simply acknowledging that the old world is "no longer" is insufficient, if we let it drag us back. If we fail to resist, if we fail to think hard, act courageously, and forge a new path together, we'll end up back where we started.

Happy new year?

And a murder of crows did circle 'round
First one, then the others flapping blackly down

And the Carny's van still sat upon the edge
Tilting slowly as the firm ground turned to sludge

And the rain it hammered down
And the rain it hammered down
And the rain it hammered down
And the rain it hammered down

And no one saw the Carny go
No one saw the Carny go
No one saw the Carny go
I say, it's funny how things go...