Who’s eating at Carney’s table?

A guest post from New Internationalist

Hello everyone,

This week, I’m really pleased to bring you a guest post from New Internationalist, a magazine that has been around for more than 50 years and, in its own words, is “a totally independent co-operative and proud to be co-owned by our staff team and over 4,600 reader-owners.”

I discovered the magazine in my teens growing up in Dublin and it was one of the outlets that opened my eyes to the wider world and international politics.

It’s more important than ever to support independent media and a wave of new organizations is now filling a void that many feel has been left by a failure of mainstream media to respond to the current moment.

New Internationalist was a trailblazer in that space.

You can subscribe to its newsletter here, its digital content and magazine here, or have a dig around its site here.

For Proximities, the co-editors of NI have written a compelling column on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s much-lauded speech at Davos last week, which appeared to shock many in the international community for its unusually forthright tone.

The piece will be republished in the March/April issue of New Internationalist, “AI: The people behind the machine.”

Proximities readers can pre-order the issue for 20% off using the code PROXIMITIES when checking out at subscribe.newint.org.

Until next Saturday,

Barry.

---

Who’s eating at Carney’s table?

The world’s superpowers have been making a meal of the Global South for some time. But the idea that “if you’re not at the table then you’re on the menu” – a widely quoted line from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos last week – was not an invitation for the world’s majority to take a seat at his dinner table.

In his address, Carney declared a “rupture” in the post-war world order, and rallied what he called “middle powers” such as Canada, its European allies and Britain to “act together.” The Liberal Party leader has since enjoyed a surge in popularity for what has been dubbed a radical “anti-Trump” speech, applauded as rare criticism of U.S. hegemony from a Western leader.

The speech was a significant departure from the delusional rhetoric of “partnership” that has characterized the West’s subservience to the U.S. since World War Two. But Carney’s words were a belated echo of what many Global South leaders and civil society groups have been saying for years: that accountability in the international system has never been equally applied.

For these “middle powers” to heed Carney’s calls for multilateralism without questioning its limitations risks entrenching the very system that led to this moment.

When the League of Nations was founded in 1920, veto power was reserved for the victors of World War One. The U.N., which succeeded it in 1945, simply replicated that hierarchy at the Security Council.

Its promise of multilateralism remains unfulfilled, with poorer nations locked at the bottom of a global order where “justice” is shaped by power.

Nations in the Global South, many of which were still European colonies when the U.N. was created, have long called out this hypocrisy.

In a 1999 edition of New Internationalist, former Tanzanian socialist president Julius Nyerere wrote: “Independence of the former colonies has suited the interests of the industrial world for bigger profits at less cost. Independence made it cheaper for them to exploit us.”

A FALLEN VEIL

The crises of the past decade have made this abundantly clear. The Global South has borne the brunt of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost of living crisis, soaring inequality and climate breakdown.

This was not by accident. It came about as a result of a neoliberal model that subordinates food and energy to volatile global markets, entrenches debt dependency, and treats our planet as a commodity.

So when Carney calls for nations to “develop greater strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains,” he is not setting the tables in capitals such as Accra, Bogotá or Dhaka, but rather in Tokyo, Brussels and Ottawa.

Though far from unscathed by today’s crises, these so-called middle powers have largely been able to shield themselves from their worst effects thanks to their perceived protections in the free market.

No more. The veil has fallen, exposing vulnerabilities once thought impossible for countries such as Canada and the nations of Europe. But for the Global Majority, this sudden burst of geopolitical realism is merely a late-stage reckoning with the status quo they’ve been living through for decades.

The hard power Carney now condemns has long been wielded against the South. Outrage in the Global North comes only from the fact that the chickens are finally coming home to roost.

Trump, then, is not the architect of this rupture. He is merely a grotesque symptom of a neoliberal system that has long been pulling our societies apart, repackaging greed as good and poverty as failure.

A MIGHTY TASK

This moment demands not just an end to a U.S.-led world order, but its replacement with something genuinely just.

Many nations have already taken on this mighty task.

In the 1990s, the Jubilee 2000 campaign saw people in 40 countries push for debt cancellation for the world’s poorest nations by the turn of the millennium. Today, momentum is gathering for the Hague Group, a coalition of non-Western countries campaigning for the enforcement of international law and court adjudications against Israel over its genocide in Gaza.

So too is support for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, an initiative that aims to build an international agreement to halt new fossil fuel developments, and commit to a fair and just phase-out.

We also know that there are possibilities for replacing the current system of development aid through a global wealth redistribution framework such as the one proposed by the Expert Working Group on Global Public Investment.

The response to U.S. hegemony cannot be the creation of a tighter, more exclusive club of middle elites that feed on the Global South for cheap labor and resources while doubling down on failed neoliberal logic at home.

Instead, it must be one in which grassroots popular movements take political power, and make equitable international cooperation possible.

The task now is not to secure a seat at Carney’s table, but to dismantle the dining hall altogether.