At the recent Davos meeting, Mark Carney told his audience that the “rules-based international order” is a “pleasant fiction.” He called the present “a rupture, not a transition,” and listed how power now operates: economic integration used as a weapon, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure deployed as coercion, supply chains treated as vulnerabilities to be exploited. Stripped of the language of “strategic competition,” this names how the West, under United States imperial power, has organised trade, money and resources for decades.

The West in this account is not a moral community or a settled group of core states. Critical scholars Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson describe it instead as a shifting formation built through institutions, security arrangements, payment circuits and resource infrastructures that decide who can turn land, labour and raw materials into realisable value and who instead lives in instability as everyday life. In Carney’s remarks, the change is that a G7 state is now spoken to in terms long used to discipline the global South.

US imperialism has never rested only on bases or overt interventions. It has relied on enforcing a particular kind of “development” that reorganised decolonising societies around financial discipline and participation........

© The Friday Times