Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech at this year's World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, offered an honest portrayal of the anxiety now gripping advanced economies amid a historical transition that can no longer be managed through slogans. Heard from the perspective of the Global South, it is useful not because it "discovers" anything new, but because it exposes, with the involuntary frankness typical of liminal moments, what has become the true conflict of our time: not a dispute over rules, but over who has the right to name reality.

One should begin with the obvious. Canada may have a vocation for nuance, but it has no vocation for geopolitical divorce. Borders, trade flows, production chains and the inescapable gravitational pull of Washington function as a civilizational fact. What is "interesting" about Canadian autonomy is precisely its condition as a rhetorical exception: it may exist, provided it does not alter the underlying structure. Reality, as always, enters through the kitchen door. This is why the Global South listens to Davos with respect, but without enchantment: it has seen this film before — and has paid far too high a price for the ticket.

The decisive point, however, does not lie in Carney himself. It lies in the reaction to what he symbolizes. The transition of the international order has become, in Western vocabulary, a kind of "administrative apocalypse". Everything is framed as "rupture", "collapse", and "disorder". Curiously, while the West was steering the process, the same phenomenon was called "transition", "adjustment" and "modernization". When the hand that holds the helm changes, language changes with it. What was "evolution" yesterday has become "threat" today; what was "reform" has become "risk"; what was "leadership" has become "decline". It is not the world that has panicked: it is the narrative monopoly that has been broken.

There is in this a component of strategic psychology — and of historical irony. The post-1945 order did, indeed, fulfil important functions: it rebuilt economies, institutionalized mechanisms and organized much of global trade. But it also served, with remarkable efficiency, to universalize language while particularizing practice; to proclaim rules and administer them selectively; to speak of law while operating through exception; to invoke values while practising coercion. The Global South knows this mechanism not through theory, but through history: sanctions, conditionalities, tutelage, interventions, and the perpetual invitation to "integrate", provided it never becomes a protagonist.

What the West has often called "order" was, in practice, uniformity under coercion. Multipolarity, by contrast, may represent a historical opportunity for institutional harmony: multiple voices, real rules, less arbitrary application, and a system in which "universal" is no longer synonymous with "Western".

For this reason, alarmism is, to a large extent, a reflection of a sense of lost control. When the center sets the rhythm, change looks civilized; when the center loses centrality, change is described as barbarism. It is an aesthetic of decline: the same water that yesterday was the "current of progress" is today labeled "turbulence". The problem is not the water; it is who has lost the vessel.

That said, the Global South cannot fall into the easy comfort of criticism. Transition is not a moral prize; it is a test of capacity. And capacity requires a project. A Global South that merely celebrates Western weakening without constructing alternatives reproduces old forms of dependency by other means. The task, therefore, is a deliberate shift from rule-taker to rule-maker — an exercise in political engineering.

This project must begin by overcoming fragmentation, the most sophisticated form of domestication. As long as Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia negotiate separately, they will be treated as markets rather than as poles of power. Coordination among regional mechanisms, common positions on structural issues, and sustained bloc diplomacy are the minimum conditions for genuine influence. It further demands the conquest of technological sovereignty, for the 21st century has transformed data into territory. Control over infrastructure, cloud systems, and algorithms now enables power to be exercised without a single shot being fired. Digital dependence is the new frontier of colonization — invisible extraction, externally captured value, and externally defined rules. The Global South must build its own infrastructure, regulatory capacity, and the capability to engage tech giants without kneeling.

Concurrently, financial emancipation is non-negotiable. The prolonged centrality of the dollar and of the Bretton Woods institutions has turned the monetary system into an instrument of coercion and exported instability.

Diversifying currencies, strengthening regional banks and expanding local-currency settlement mechanisms are not ideological gestures against the West, but foundational acts of sovereign prudence. So too must transnational justice be redefined: climate, public health and food security cannot remain objects of charity. They must be translated into operational obligations, with predictable financing, so that solidarity becomes structural rather than poetic. Finally, institutional and symbolic reform is essential. Legitimacy has its own geography. Institutions that claim universality while remaining anchored in the hierarchies of 1945 carry that hierarchy in their DNA. Reforming representativeness and decision-making mechanisms — and openly debating the very geography of power — is therefore part of the necessary reconstruction.

The central point is this: there is no reason for despair. History is not an eternal building; it is a cycle of architecture. International orders have beginnings, middles, and ends — and maturity lies in accepting this temporality without hysteria. What must end is not cooperation, but the pretence that it exists only under the command of a center.

The message from Carney in Davos has been heard. The Global South, however, listens with one fundamental difference: it does not seek to replace one command with another. It seeks to transform command into governance. And herein lies the inevitable irony: what most unsettles is not the changing world, but the prospect of one that becomes genuinely plural — without asking permission.

The author is a visiting professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, and senior fellow at the Policy Center for the New South.

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