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Twenty years ago, Stathis Tsagkarousianos chose this title for a book containing his conversations with people who seemed like remnants of a world that no longer existed.
The title fits perfectly the speech the Canadian Prime Minister delivered in Davos last week. “We know,” he said plainly, “the old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger and more just.”
Mark Carney’s speech rightly became global news and is now being called historic. In a world this turbulent, here was someone—a politician, not an intellectual—who managed to describe it with absolute clarity of thought, realistically, without sentimentality, without peddling false hope, and crucially, without preaching the end of the world. Instead, he proposed.
He proposed that we see reality as it’s taking shape, admit where we stand, and respond through cooperation.
“This is the task of the middle powers—countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation. 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,” he stressed, calling on middle-power countries like Canada to form a common front.
Mark Carney, an economist from the banking sector, opened his speech with a particularly vivid reference to the way Václav Havel described, in his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” how the communist regime managed to survive for so long.
Havel, the last president of Czechoslovakia before its dissolution, wrote about a greengrocer who every morning hung a sign in his shop window reading: “Workers of the world, unite!”
He didn’t believe it, but he did it to satisfy the regime and avoid trouble. Everyone did the same. “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.”
What we’ve been living was an illusion too—though a formula had been found, an international order that, by and large, worked. “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.”
But today we need to take the sign down, because you can’t “live within the lie” of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination, as the Canadian Prime Minister pointed out.
The world, then, finds itself at a crossroads again. And instead of clapping along with the powerful to keep on their good side, we need to push back and try to build a new world better than the one before.
Is there hope?
This article was first published on 01.02.2026
Source: GOODBYE OLD WORLD
