Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada
Jan 20, 2026
来源链接：
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/
Thank you very much, Larry. I'm going to start in French, and then I'll switch back to English.
[The following is translated from French]
Thank you, Larry. It is both a pleasure, and a duty, to be with you tonight in this pivotal moment that Canada and the world going through.
Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints.
On the other hand, I would like to tell you that the other countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the various states.
The power of the less power starts with honesty.
[Carney returns to speaking in English]
It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.
And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.
And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.
Well, it won't.
So, what are our options?
In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?
And his answer began with a greengrocer.
Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn't believe it, no-one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persist – 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. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.
For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
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. 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.
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 as 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.
The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied – the WTO, the UN, the COP – the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat. And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains.
And this impulse is understandable. A country that can't feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, has few options. 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. And there is another truth. 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.
Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.
Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.
They'll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty – sovereignty that was once grounded in rules, but will increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.
This room knows this is classic risk management. Risk management comes at a price, 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. Complementarities are positive sum. And the 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.
Now Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture.
Canadians know that our old comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security – that assumption is no longer valid. And our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, has termed “value-based realism”.
Or, to put another way, we aim to be both principled and pragmatic – principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights, and pragmatic and recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.
So, we're engaging broadly, strategically with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.
We are calibrating our relationships, so their depth reflects our values, and we're prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given and given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks that this poses and the stakes for what comes next.
And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength.
We are building that strength at home.
Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, on capital gains and business investment. We have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade. We are fast tracking a trillion dollars of investments in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond. We're doubling our defence spending by the end of this decade, and we're doing so in ways that build our domestic industries.
And we are rapidly diversifying abroad. We have agreed a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the European defence procurement arrangements. We have signed 12 other trade and security deals on four continents in six months. The past few days, we've concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We're negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.
We're doing something else. To help solve global problems, we're pursuing variable geometry, in other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests. So, on Ukraine, we're a core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per capita contributors to its defence and security.
On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark, and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland's future.
Our commitment to NATO's Article 5 is unwavering, so we're working with our NATO allies, including the Nordic Baltic Gate, 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.
On plurilateral trade, we're championing efforts to build a bridge between the Trans Pacific Partnership and the European Union, which would create a new trading bloc of 1.5 billion people. On critical minerals, we're forming buyers’ clubs anchored in the G7 so the world can diversify away from concentrated supply. And on AI, we're cooperating with like-minded democracies to ensure that we won't ultimately be forced to choose between hegemons and hyper-scalers.
This is not naive multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It's building coalitions that work – issues by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together.
In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations.
What it's doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture, on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.
Argue, the middle powers must act together, because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu.
But I'd also say that great powers, great powers can afford for now to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not.
But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what's offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.
This is not sovereignty. It's the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination. In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice – compete with each other for favour, or to combine to create a third path with impact.
We shouldn't allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong, if we choose to wield them together – which brings me back to Havel.
What does it mean for middle powers to live the truth?
First, it means naming reality. Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is – a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.
It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals. When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction, but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.
It means building what we claim to believe in, rather than waiting for the old order to be restored. It means creating institutions and agreements that function as described. And it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion – that's building a strong domestic economy. It should be every government's immediate priority.
And diversification internationally is not just economic prudence, it's a material foundation for honest foreign policy, because countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.
So Canada. Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world's largest and most sophisticated investors. In other words, we have capital, talent… we also have a government with immense fiscal capacity to act decisively. And we have the values to which many others aspire.
Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but.. A partner that builds and values relationships for the long term.
And we have something else. We have a recognition of what's happening and a determination to act accordingly. We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is.
We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the 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.
That is Canada's path. We choose it openly and confidently, and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us. Thank you very much.
主要观点提炼
马克·卡尼的演讲是一次对后“基于规则的国际秩序”时代的宣言，核心是号召中等强国联合自强。其主要观点可以提炼如下：
核心诊断：旧秩序已死，世界进入断裂时代
演讲开宗明义，指出“基于规则的国际秩序”这一“美好的虚构”已经终结，世界正进入一个“大国地缘政治不受约束”的严酷现实阶段。世界面临的是“断裂”而非“过渡”。
核心比喻：生活在谎言之中与取下“标语”
借用哈维尔“无权者的权力”理论，卡尼将各国过去对不完美的旧秩序的顺从比作“生活在谎言之中”，把象征性的支持比作橱窗里的“标语”。他呼吁各国“取下标语”，停止假装旧秩序仍然有效，诚实面对新现实。
核心困境与出路：中等强国的“菜单论”
提出了核心警句：“如果我们（中等强国）不在餐桌上，我们就会出现在菜单上。” 这意味着在无序的大国竞争中，不掌握主动的中等国家将成为被牺牲的对象。唯一的出路是放弃对霸主的单向依赖与迎合，通过联合行动创造影响力。
加拿大新战略：“基于价值观的现实主义”
宣布加拿大外交政策转向 “基于价值观的现实主义” ，即坚持原则（主权、人权等）的同时极度务实（承认利益分歧、渐进主义）。其核心是从“依赖价值观的力量”转向“依赖自身力量的价值”，通过增强国内经济和军事实力（如国防翻倍、万亿投资）来支撑外交。
具体行动路线：国内强基，国外多元，议题结盟
国内：大规模投资经济、能源、科技和国防，打造“战略自主”的物质基础。
国外：迅速实现贸易和伙伴关系“多元化”，与欧盟、亚洲、南美等多方签署协议，减少对任何单一力量的依赖。
全球：采用 “可变几何” 策略，即不依赖瘫痪的旧多边机构，而是针对不同议题（如乌克兰、北极、关键矿产、AI），与价值观和利益交集最多的伙伴组建灵活有效的专项联盟。
最终愿景：中等强国共同开辟“第三条道路”
卡尼认为，在大国夹缝中，中等国家不应相互竞争讨好霸主，而应联合起来，利用它们所代表的合法性、诚信和规则力量，共同建立一个比旧秩序“更大、更好、更强、更公正”的新架构。这是一条向所有志同道合国家开放的、介于孤立堡垒与霸权附庸之间的“第三条道路”。
核心高频词详解与例句
Deepseek从演讲原文提炼整理
1. 政治与国际关系
sovereignty /ˈsɒv.rən.ti/ (n.) 主权
Context: ... respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity...
拓展例句: Economic globalization sometimes challenges the traditional concept of national sovereignty. (经济全球化有时会挑战国家主权的传统观念。)
hegemony /hɪˈdʒem.ə.ni/ (n.) 霸权，支配地位
Context: This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods...
拓展例句: The study examines the cultural hegemony of one nation over others throughout history. (这项研究审视了历史上一个国家对他国的文化霸权。)
2. 经济与贸易
leverage /ˈliː.vər.ɪdʒ/ (n./v.) 杠杆作用；影响力；利用
Context: ... great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion...
拓展例句: A high level of education can be leveraged to secure better job opportunities. (高水平的教育可以被用来获取更好的工作机会。)
diversify /daɪˈvɜː.sɪ.faɪ/ (v.) 使多样化，多元化
Context: And we are rapidly diversifying abroad.
拓展例句: To reduce risk, investors are advised to diversify their portfolios across different asset classes. (为降低风险，建议投资者将投资组合分散到不同的资产类别。)
3. 社会与抽象概念
resilience /rɪˈzɪl.i.əns/ (n.) 复原力，适应力
Context: Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses.
拓展例句: Building psychological resilience is crucial for coping with stress and adversity in modern life. (建立心理韧性对于应对现代生活的压力和逆境至关重要。)
autonomy /ɔːˈtɒn.ə.mi/ (n.) 自治，自主权
Context: ... they must develop greater strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals...
拓展例句: University students should be given enough autonomy to manage their own time and studies. (应该给予大学生足够的自主权来管理自己的时间和学习。)
4. 行为与变化
invoke /ɪnˈvəʊk/ (v.) 援引，提及（法律、原则等）
Context: Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised.
拓展例句: The defendant invoked his right to remain silent during the police interrogation. (被告在警方审讯时行使了保持沉默的权利。)
hedge /hedʒ/ (v.) 对冲，防范风险
Context: Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.
拓展例句: Some people invest in gold as a way to hedge against inflation and currency fluctuations. (有些人投资黄金以对冲通胀和货币波动的风险。)
10个月宝宝每天需要喝多少奶粉？
