Ciaran McCrickard / World Economic Forum
In speech that appeared to attack the policies of US President Donald Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney grabbed the international headlines at the Davos summit.
Faced with Trump’s imposition of tariffs on those that have criticised his grab for Greenland, Carney launched into a confrontation with Trump saying,
‘Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs is leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.’
His late arrival at the conclusion that many of neo-liberal capitalism’s critics have long been making was met with unstinting praise from the mainstream media. But Carney is no critic of the system that he is now saying has failed so badly.
Carney is the ultimate insider. Before becoming Prime Minister of Canada, he was responsible for austerity in the UK when he was governor of the Bank of England between 2013 and 2020, and before that, Governor of the Bank of Canada.
His speech also contained an unqualified restatement of what has long been the European leaders’ response to Trump: to mimic Trumps rearmament policy in order to fill the void created by his unwillingness to play by the old Atlanticist rules. Thus, Carney stressed, ‘we’re working with our NATO allies, including the Nordic Baltic Eight, to further secure the Alliance’s northern and western flanks, including through Canada’s unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in aircraft and boots on the ground…boots on the ice. Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland, and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic’.
In fact, the Belgian prime minister, Bart De Wever, spelt it all out much more brutally than Carney when he said: ‘Europe is at a crossroads where it has to decide. Until now, we tried to appease the new president in the White House…We were lenient, hoping to get his support for the Ukraine war. We are in a very bad position at the moment…But now so many red lines are being crossed that you have the choice between your self-respect – being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else.’
Such was his despair that he went on the quote Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci’s saying that ‘if the old is dying and the new is not yet born, you live in the time of monsters’, and he concluded that it was up to Trump ‘to decide if he is a monster, yes or no’.
But, at Davos the European leaders had only one answer to Trump’s inconsistent hostility to Europe: to mimic his rearmament programme. They plan autarkic militarisation to replace US engagement with Europe. On the Ukraine war they are, of course, more hawkish than Trump. On Greenland, they want to arrive at the militarisation of the island and the suppression of its sovereignty by agreement within NATO, rather than by unilateral action by Trump. And they plan to use this show of ‘independence’ to threaten and cajole Trump back into treating them in such a way that they can remain ‘happy vassals’.
In the end, Trump will go on threatening and compromising because he’s getting the increased military spending he wants from Europe. The European leaders will go on rearming, complaining, and then appeasing again because they have their own imperial project underway.
For ordinary people in Europe, it is a waking nightmare of increased arms spending leading to cuts, conscription, poverty and a drive to war.
All of this makes the European Peace conference more important than ever. Make sure you are part of it on 20 June, Central Hall Westminster.