Lessons for Sri Lanka from Mark Carney's Davos intervention

CANADIAN Prime Minister Mark Carney’s celebrated speech at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos was widely interpreted as a candid admission that the so-called “rules-based international order” has fractured.

- By Charith Gunawardena and Professor Kanishka Goonewardena

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney

He stated “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”.By urging middle powers to abandon comforting illusions and confront the reality of economic coercion, Carney appeared to challenge longstanding platitudes of globalisation and liberal internationalism. Yet for countries such as Sri Lanka, the speech offers less a roadmap for reform than a cautionary tale. It merely illustrates how critiques emerging from within the global economic establishment remain selective, self-serving, and insufficiently attentive to the structural injustices faced by poorer nations. In such circumstances, Sri Lanka has no choice but to engage the global economic order strategically and tactically-but only by asserting its sovereignty in order to ensure the well-being of its citizens.

For much of the Global South, the “rules-based order” never functioned as advertised. Trade liberalisation, capital mobility, and investor protections were presented as neutral mechanisms for shared prosperity, yet in practice they entrenched inequalities between capital-exporting and capital-importing countries. International trade and investment agreements limited policy autonomy in developing economies while preserving advantages for multinational corporations and advanced industrial states. Carney’s acknowledgment that economic integration has been weaponised is therefore not a revelation from a Southern perspective, but a belated recognition from within the very system that normalised these dynamics.

A system reformat for self-benefit