“Rupture, Not Transition”: Canada’s PM, Gramcsi, and World Order

“The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls or whether we can do something more ambitious.”

The most important political speech about international relations in 50 years just came from Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney.

Carney is a liberal, but that didn’t stop him (or his speechwriter) from voicing something close to a Gramscian conjunctural analysis—realism in the most literal (and critical) sense. Here’s a key portion from that speech:

American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security...this bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition...recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as a weapon. Tariffs as leverage...

We knew that the story about the rules-based order was partially false...We knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused and the victim. This fiction was useful…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...You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination…

Antonio Gramsci was perhaps the first to advocate for political strategy on the basis of what we would later call conjunctural analysis. Per Stuart Hall:

A conjuncture is a period during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape.

Mapping the terrain of our reality by thinking this way—ie, seeing our moment as the amalgamation of different forces converging in ways that generate contradictions—has long been a strategic way of thinking for leftists of various stripes, from labor unions to urban guerrillas to climate activists. The reason, per Rob Carley, is simple: The contradictions in any given conjuncture “provide opportunities for groups to raise consciousness, organize, mobilize, and combine…”

You have the best chance of manipulating the forces that drive our conjuncture if you start from identifying and trying to address living lies: Remedy the contradictions that benefit some at the expense of others. To put it bluntly, shit is fucked up; demand to change it. Because conjunctural analysis uniquely suits those who demand change, it has always been a unique resource for leftist/“anti-systemic” movements.

I don’t want to lavish praise upon—or co-sign—everything Carney says in this speech. Carney is wise to identify and even lament the hypocrisies of the unipolar moment; the liberal-hegemonic mask that veiled American primacy. But the old way of thinking that Carney speaks of—the “rules-based order” and such—crumbled because of its hypocrisy. Carney justifies having lived with the contradictions of the liberal myth for as long as possible, but that’s short-sighted. As James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time:

time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.

An international order predicated on a false foundation was always going to rupture. What would’ve made the project of liberal ordering sustainable was to close the gap between its ideals and its practice; that gap only grew wider with time.

But possibly the most impressive thing about Carney’s recasting of international relations itself is in answering what is to be done. Carney’s call to action is a version of what I said in my last post, echoed by notables as diverse as Joseph Stiglitz and Frank Fukuyama: Confront America, collectively. Here’s Carney’s answer:

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…if 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. Hegeimons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. They’ll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty. 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 fragmentations. Complimentarities are positive. Some 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.

Carney is resisting responding to great-power imperialism with chauvinism and Hobbesian militarism, which would only redound to the benefit of the imperialists. This is not a hair-of-the-dog situation: If militarized geopolitics is a problem, its solution will not be reducible to still more militarized geopolitics. Carney seems to get that.

What we need now is for American politics to produce centers of power and agents of the state who can meet people like Carney halfway. Together, a global concert of the willing can forge a stable, peaceful international order that strives toward justice for all. That’s an ideal my generation grew up on and we’re not surrendering it under any circumstances. Shit is fucked up. And we’ll die trying to change it.

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