In the Midst of a Rupture

"The modern ancien regime is rather merely the clown of a world order whose real heroes are dead." -- Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law

"This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition." -- Mark Carney

In his speech to the Davos World Economic Forum yesterday (January 20), Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney drew an analogy between the so-called "rules-based economic order" and the "post-totalitarian" Communist government of Czechoslovakia described by Václav Havel. Carney began with Havel's parable of the greengrocer who every day places a sign in the shop window:

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, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe in it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. 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.

Carney made a slight misstatement of the topic of Havel's essay, however. Havel didn't ask how the communist system sustained itself. He was addressing how the post-totalitarian system did so. In fact, "post-totalitarian system" appears 71 times, compared to 0 for "communist system." A few hints from Havel suggest that the post-totalitarian system he analyzed had some notable similarities with the capitalist West:

In highly simplified terms, it could be said that the post-totalitarian system has been built on foundations laid by the historical encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society. Is it not true that the far-reaching adaptability to living a lie and the effortless spread of social auto-totality have some connection with the general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity? With their willingness to surrender higher values when faced with the trivializing temptations of modern civilization? With their vulnerability to the attractions of mass indifference? And in the end, is not the grayness and the emptiness of life in the post-totalitarian system only an inflated caricature of modern life in general? And do we not in fact stand (although in the external measures of civilization, we are far behind) as a kind of warning to the West, revealing to its own latent tendencies?

It is possible to take Havel's analysis a step further and ask whether there is not a semblance of post-totalitarianism also to the ideology of the so-called free world. That step is warranted by no less an authority than the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt. In "The Ex-Communists," Arendt distinguished between former communists and ex-communists. Former communists simply went on with the rest of their lives while ex-communists morphed into communists-in-reverse and became informers against their old comrades. ‪Commonweal, which had published Arendt's article in 1953, published a retrospective in 2024, "Hannah Arendt on the New Right: Thinking like a communist." The article stresses the relevance of Arendt's essay today, over 70 years after it was published:

Today, amid the rise of what has been termed right-wing populism, Arendt’s work on National Socialism and ex-Communism remains as relevant as ever. The legacy of the ex-Communist mentality is a potent force in American politics. It is used by those who support Trump’s anti-establishment politics to erode democratic norms such as free speech by, for example, banning books that are deemed incompatible with a certain vision of American culture. Written over seventy years ago, Arendt’s Commonweal essay illuminates affinities between the tyranny of this ex-Communist mentality and the “New Right” today, which echoes the worst of the McCarthy era.

In her 1953 essay and in an earlier typescript from around 1950 dealing with the same issue, "The Eggs Speak Up," Arendt argued that the ex-communists brought their Stalinist habits with them into their anti-communist agitation, thus creating a totalitarian threat from the right.‬‬‪"[T]hey are introducing police methods into normal social life..." she wrote, "Because, without exception, they name names, they make police agents of themselves after the fact, as it were. In this way, the informant system is being  integrated into the society."‬‬ To borrow a term from the Soviet lexicon, the ex-Communist cadre performed as the vanguard of McCarthyism.

This is not to argue for an identity between the restriction of political activity under Communist Party rule in Eastern Europe and the marginalization of the broad left in the U.S. and its allies. There are differences of both degree and kind. But there was also convergence as post-totalitarianism began to crumble in the East while in the West, neo-liberal austerity, privitization, and deregulation became the norm  to which there is no alternative, according to "Iron Lady" Maggie Thatcher. It is not just the rules-based international order that resembles Havel's post-totalitarianism.

But returning to that supposedly rules-based order (RBO), Carney painted a rosy, albeit nebulous, picture of its public goods: 

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 varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

John Dugard, former member of International Law Commission, Judge ad hoc International Court of Justice, and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, gives a considerably less sanguine picture of those "partially false" protections in an editorial, "The choice before us: International law or a ‘rules-based international order’?" in which he asked:

What is this creature, the ‘rules-based international order’, that American political leaders have increasingly invoked since the end of the Cold War instead of international law? Is it a harmless synonym for international law, as suggested by European leaders? Or is it something else, a system meant to replace international law which has governed the behaviour of states for over 500 years?

Dugard's answer outlines several reasons why the U.S. prefers the RBO to international law:

• First, the United States is not a party to a number of important multilateral treaties that constitute an essential feature of international law.
• Second, the United States has placed interpretations on international law justifying the use of force and the violation of international humanitarian law that are controversial and contested.
• Third, the United States is unwilling to hold some states, such as Israel, accountable for violations of international law. They are treated as sui generis cases in which the national interest precludes accountability.

Dugard concludes that the West's adherence to the RBO undermines efforts to establish a universal system of laws based on the same presumed rules and values of the RBO, which, however. do not have a known content beyond the assertion of general principles like "respect for human rights, self-determination, territorial integrity, freedom of navigation, democratic governance, free movement of goods, economic openness etc." The starkest example of the deviation of the RBO from international law Dugard notes can be seen in the "unbreakable bond" between the U.S. and Israel:

This exceptionalism in respect of Israel was spelled out by the United States in its joint declaration with Israel on the occasion of President Biden’s visit to Israel in July 2022, which reaffirms ‘the unbreakable bonds between our two countries and the enduring commitment of the United States to Israel’s security’ and the determination of the two states ‘to combat all efforts to boycott or de-legitimize Israel, to deny its right to self defence, or to single it out in any forum, including at the United Nations or the International Criminal Court’. This commitment explains the consistent refusal of the United States to hold Israel accountable for its repeated violations of humanitarian law, support the prosecution of perpetrators of international crimes before the International Criminal Court, condemn its assaults on Gaza (best portrayed as excessive enforcement of the occupation of Gaza and not self-defence as the United States argues), insist that Israel prosecute killers of a US national (Shireen Abu Akleh), criticize its violation of human rights as established by both the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly, accept that Israel applies a policy of apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and oppose its annexation of East Jerusalem. And, of course, there is the refusal of the United States to acknowledge the existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal or allow any discussion of it in the context of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Such measures on the part of Israel are possibly seen as consistent with the ‘rules-based international order’ even if they violate basic rules of international law.

As Carney said in his speech, "we knew that international law applied with varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim." But he didn't name the accused or the victims. Don't hold your breath for a clarification on who they are. Nevertheless, this was a bold speech that invites the kind of critical expansion that I have tried to do here. Regardless of whether Carney was aware of all the implications, he definitely provided a lot of substance to chew on.