A pivotal Davos speech: Why Mark Carney reached back to Vàclav Havel

Photo of an anamorphic portrait of Václav Havel, the former Czech president, created by sculptor Patrik Proško in 2023 at Vàclav Havel airport, Prague. (Taken by me summer 2025).

I don’t think I’ve written about a political speech since 2020. That’s about 5 years, according to my calendar. But today I feel compelled to, after listening to a powerful speech delivered by Mark Carney at Davos last Monday.

The feelings it stirred weren’t ones of motivation or empowerment. If anything, the current geopolitical context brings turbulence rather than comfort. What the speech delivered instead was sobriety and situational clarity. An admission, from a global leader, that the old rules-based system has not only changed, it no longer exists. That is hardly comforting or agreeable. Yet there is a strange sense of weight being lifted when voices from the former rules-based community begin to drop their usual stances and speak more plainly about reality.

What struck me about Carney’s speech, although austere and sobering, was its clarity. And its simplicity.

After a brief opening, he offers a sober assessment of the current state of affairs, then cites Thucydides: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” From there, the speech moves into a powerful human image that allows listeners to recognise a present-day pattern.

He draws on an example from Václav Havel’s essay, written while Havel was still a dissident, ‘The Power of the Powerless’. It illustrates a deeply human problem. Havel describes a local shopkeeper who places a sign in his window each morning reading “Workers of the world, unite,” despite not believing it. The act is repeated to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to stay out of danger. And yet, through this simple ritual, a system is maintained. Not by violence alone, but by everyday actions people privately know to be false. This is the complicity of the fearful.

What Carney does by invoking this image is provoke the listener to name the lie we have been living with. It acts as a cognitive shortcut to frame the present. Not in an accusatory way. Not in an inflammatory one. But in a way that allows people to think for themselves. By using this example, he surfaces an age-old psychological dilemma that remains profoundly human: systems persist not because they are true, but because stepping out of them requires courage. And courage has a price.

Once this dilemma is clearly framed, he introduces the idea of the “middle powers” in contrast to the great powers. Countries that can cooperate around shared values and a shared vision. Cooperation rather than fortress thinking. Shared values as stabilising forces, not moral slogans.

A good leadership speech, in my view, invites clarity. It does not inflame. It provokes pause rather than exhaustion. In this case, it felt like a glass of cold water thrown in the face of nostalgia. As Carney himself puts it, nostalgia is not a strategy.

I’ll be honest. I don’t enjoy talking about politics much these days. It’s polarising. I have friends and family with varying political views, but we get along. I’ve learned that trying to do other people’s thinking for them is a fool’s errand. More often than not, it simply locks people into petty conflicts. What I do know is that we share common needs: security, prosperity, justice and stability.

And that, in the end, is the simple point Carney’s speech was making. It served as a form of collective orientation. Everything has a price. And sometimes, you have to pay it.

That is clarity.

That is cutting through the noise.