Vaclav Havel’s seminal 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless is rarely encountered today outside university syllabi or the shelves of political theorists. That absence is telling. In an era defined by strategic ambiguity, selective morality and the quiet retreat of liberal ideals, Havel’s insistence on truth as a political force feels uncomfortably demanding. Yet it may be precisely the text Europe — and much of the world — now needs to rediscover.
Havel wrote under the suffocating conformity of communist Czechoslovakia, but his insights transcend their historical setting. At the heart of his argument lies a deceptively simple parable: a greengrocer places a sign in his shop window reading “Workers of the world, unite!” He does not believe in the slogan. He displays it not out of conviction but out of habit, fear and a desire for a quiet life. The lie is banal, but its effects are profound. By participating in a collective fiction, the greengrocer helps sustain the very system that constrains him.
Havel’s claim was radical for its time: power does not only flow downward from institutions and rulers; it is reproduced daily by ordinary people who choose to live within a lie rather than confront the discomfort of truth. When that pretence collapses, even seemingly impregnable systems can suddenly appear naked.
That parable resurfaced recently in an unlikely setting. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney invoked Havel’s greengrocer to make a broader argument about the state of the global order. He urged countries and corporations alike to “take their signs down” — to stop pretending that existing arrangements still reflect shared values and mutual trust when, increasingly, they do not.
The speech struck a chord. In a world of fractured alliances, transactional diplomacy and eroding norms, Carney’s appeal to intellectual honesty resonated as a rare moment of moral clarity. Yet as applause echoed through Davos’s conference halls, a deeper and more troubling question lingered: what does “living in truth” actually require in today’s international system — and who decides?
For wealthy liberal democracies, particularly in Europe and parts of the Anglosphere, the answer is increasingly clear, if politically uncomfortable. It means acknowledging that the United States, long the anchor of the post-war liberal order, no longer reliably occupies that role. Washington’s oscillation between selective engagement and outright disdain for multilateralism has forced its partners to confront an unspoken reality: the transatlantic relationship no longer guarantees the defence of liberal democratic values abroad or even their consistent protection at home.
Admitting this truth entails difficult choices. It means investing in autonomous capabilities, accepting strategic risk and, above all, abandoning the comforting illusion that the old order can simply be preserved through rhetoric. For Europe, it implies learning to act geopolitically, not merely regulate geopolitics.
For much of the so-called global south, however, the meaning of “taking the sign down” is far more ambiguous — and potentially destabilising.
Many emerging and middle powers have long viewed the “rules-based international order” with scepticism. In their experience, the rules have often been applied unevenly, enforced selectively and interpreted flexibly to suit the interests of the powerful. From the early scramble by wealthy nations to secure COVID-19 vaccines, leaving poorer countries to wait, to the inconsistent invocation of international law in conflicts across the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe, the charge of hypocrisy has not been hard to sustain.
From this vantage point, abandoning the pretence of shared values may feel liberating. If the rules were never truly impartial, why continue to uphold them? Why restrain national ambition in deference to norms that appear to protect some states while constraining others?
In this interpretation, living “in truth” does not mean recommitting to liberal principles, but discarding them altogether. It means embracing an unapologetically transactional world, where national interest reigns supreme and moral language is stripped from diplomacy. For some governments, this shift offers immediate advantages: greater freedom of manoeuvre, fewer lectures from the West and the ability to play rival powers against one another.
The temptation is understandable. But it is also dangerous.
A world in which pretence disappears without being replaced by genuinely shared norms does not become more honest — it becomes more brutal. In the absence of a hegemon capable of coordinating or enforcing rules, power itself becomes the sole currency. Smaller and mid-sized states may find that their newfound “freedom” is illusory once stronger actors decide to shape their choices through economic coercion, military pressure or political interference.
History offers little comfort here. Periods marked by the erosion of shared rules have rarely produced stable pluralism. More often, they have resulted in spheres of influence, proxy conflicts and the quiet subjugation of those unable to defend their autonomy. Without even the veneer of law to appeal to, all that remains is raw leverage.
Canada’s own recent diplomacy illustrates these tensions in miniature. Carney’s Havelian appeal in Davos came just days after Ottawa signed a new partnership agreement with China. The decision is not without rationale: China remains a central actor in global trade, climate policy and technological supply chains. Engagement is unavoidable.
Yet in the context of Beijing’s strategic alignment with Russia amid the war in Ukraine, the agreement sits uneasily with Carney’s claim that Canada is “calibrating our relationships so their depths reflect our values”. The episode underscores a broader dilemma facing many middle powers: how to reconcile principled rhetoric with pragmatic engagement in a world where economic interdependence increasingly cuts across political lines.
This tension raises a sobering possibility. The global system may not be moving toward a spontaneous, pluralistic order of middle powers cooperating through flexible coalitions. Disorder or renewed superpower dominance appear far more likely outcomes.
The idea that overlapping interests alone can sustain stability underestimates the centrifugal pull of sovereignty and short-term advantage — particularly in a climate where major powers actively encourage fragmentation. The Trump administration’s open hostility toward multilateral institutions, combined with its enthusiastic promotion of zero-sum sovereignty, has already accelerated this trend. The flames it lit continue to burn, even beyond its tenure.
For an alternative to emerge — one that avoids both anarchy and hegemonic domination — coalitions of states must be anchored in more than convenience. They require institutional depth, predictability and, crucially, a shared understanding of values that makes long-term cooperation visibly worthwhile.
Only one actor currently has the scale, economic weight and normative vocabulary to offer such an alternative: the European Union.
The EU is not a superpower in the traditional sense, but it remains a unique political experiment. Its member states have pooled sovereignty not as a concession to weakness, but as a source of collective strength. In doing so, they have demonstrated — however imperfectly — that rules can constrain power without extinguishing it.
Moreover, the EU continues to speak the language of liberalism, human rights and multilateralism with a credibility that, for all its flaws, exceeds that of any other major bloc. For countries searching for an alternative to stark alignment with Washington or Beijing, Europe could, in theory, serve as a pole of attraction.
In practice, however, the EU has yet to fully embrace this responsibility.
Rather than deepening integration with like-minded partners beyond its borders, Brussels often appears inward-looking, risk-averse and divided. Recent developments are telling. The European Parliament’s move to trigger a judicial review that could delay a long-negotiated trade agreement with South American countries signals a retreat from strategic engagement at precisely the moment it is most needed. Meanwhile, suggestions from the European Commission that it may abandon the most-favoured-nation principle — a cornerstone of the global trading system — hint at a willingness to weaken the very rules Europe claims to defend.
Such steps may be politically expedient, but they undermine the EU’s claim to be a custodian of a rules-based order. Taking the sign down without taking responsibility for what replaces it risks reinforcing cynicism rather than restoring trust.
Havel understood this danger well. For him, dissent was not an end in itself. Exposing the lie was only the beginning. Truth had to be followed by reconstruction — by the patient, often unglamorous work of building institutions worthy of belief.
When Havel later became president of post-communist Czechoslovakia, he confronted the difficulty of translating moral clarity into effective governance. The lesson was not that ideals are naïve, but that they demand effort, compromise and endurance.
Today’s global crisis of legitimacy calls for a similar seriousness. The point of telling the truth is not to discard values along with hypocrisy, but to recommit to those values in ways that make them real. A liberal, rules-based order that functions equitably remains an aspiration worth pursuing — not because it is perfect, but because the alternatives are demonstrably worse.
Whether Europe is willing to shoulder that burden remains uncertain. What is clear is that pretending the old order still works, while quietly benefiting from its decay, is no longer an option. As Havel warned decades ago, living within a lie may offer temporary tranquillity. But eventually, the lie collapses — and the cost of truth deferred is far higher than the cost of truth embraced.
