“Canada’s Moral Optimism and the Limits of Humane Global Leadership: Reflections on Mark Carney”

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s unapologetic speech at Davos in Norway revealed a leader fluent in transnational and global discourse, attentive to the anxieties and asymmetries shaping life in both the Global South and the Global North. He rightly diagnosed the global order as fractured, most notably the U.S.-led model, which he portrayed as not merely strained but structurally broken and perhaps beyond meaningful repair.

Yet Carney’s optimism rests on a familiar paradox. While he called for a more humane and empathetic global order and underscored Canada’s moral responsibility to help craft it alongside the League of Nations, his framework ultimately reinscribes Western authority as the primary steward of global governance. His rhetoric gestures toward anti-imperial critique, but only in its softer form—one that critiques excesses while leaving intact the West’s presumed right to rule.

The speech thus reflects the enduring tension within liberal internationalism: a desire to reform global power without fundamentally redistributing it. Canadians may take pride in Carney’s eloquence and ethical posture, but they should also interrogate the limits of a vision that seeks to humanize empire rather than move beyond it.

If I were Canadian, I would share in that pride, particularly because of Carney’s emphasis on moral leadership, ethical diplomacy, and constructive foreign policies aimed at advancing the common good and human flourishing across the world. Yet I remain deeply grateful to my Haitian ancestors, who recognized far earlier the dangers of imperialism and Western global hegemony in the nineteenth century. Their insight remains instructive today. The Haitian Revolution and the enduring meaning of 1804 still offers lessons the world has yet to fully learn.

In continuity with W. E. B. Du Bois’s seminal claim at the turn of the twentieth century that race would constitute the central problem of modernity, the most consequential impediment to global human flourishing in the present moment is the rearticulation of imperial power. This contemporary imperial formation operates through an intensified nationalism and is institutionalized by the strategic surveillance, regulation, and disciplining of nations in the Global South. Any vision of humane global leadership and moral progress that fails to reckon with the significance and global meaning of the Haitian Revolution remains, at best, incomplete.

It takes hopelessness to exist, but optimism to live.