Renata ZILLI

Researcher at the European Centre for International Political Economy

At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, two visions of the global order collided. US President Donald Trump declared the world stronger; the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned it was more fragile. Their clash reveals how trade, once governed by shared rules, is increasingly shaped by contradiction – and why an egalitarian liberalism must be reclaimed as a politics of agency.

It has become a cliché, almost a reflex, to begin an analysis of global disorder with Dickens’ opening line of his novel A Tale of Two Cities, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. The quotation flatters the writer and, with minimal effort, signals that a contradiction is about to be explored. Almost a decade ago, in 2017, the line also crowned Xi Jinping’s well-received Davos address, in which he celebrated the global economic order while acknowledging its incongruities. This year at Davos, I was struck by the fact that the contradiction was embodied by two individuals. Two opposing ways of understanding the current state of the global order: Donald Trump and Mark Carney.

Yet Carney’s worldview is nothing new. For decades, both the left and the right have been calling out the flaws in the system. From the left, the critique was sustained primarily by the fact that globalisation created enormous wealth, but it was captured by only a few at the expense of the many, the environment, and, in the eyes of some, national identities. While these were genuine concerns, some versions of the liberal left abandoned their egalitarian focus, instead directing their criticism and rebellion towards grievances based on biological and individual traits, such as gender, race, or both. The result provoked a major shift in world politics: the subject of history was no longer the hero but the victim, as the philosopher Susan Neiman argued in her book Left Is Not Woke.

From the right, the critique of globalisation followed a different path. Its concerns were less focused on redistribution and more on a sense of loss of control over their sovereignty and borders, and on displacement from their traditions and communities. Borrowed from the illiberal left, the right repackaged victimhood as a political mechanism of defence against the broken promises of prosperity that liberal globalisation was meant to deliver. The right’s ambition consequently shifted from a purely conservative stance to becoming reformists of the social order, aiming to replace it with what the political theorist Patrick Deneen has described as a post-liberal ‘common-good conservatism’. As a result, the traditional distinctions between left and right began to blur, as each became illiberal in its own form. 

What separates Carney from Trump’s view of the world is not a geographical but an axiomatic border. That is, in the principles they uphold – particularly those on which institutions are grounded. In Trump’s world, institutions matter instrumentally, only to the degree they serve the powerful. In his telling, repeated ad nauseam, the international trade system is not under structural strain but merely distorted by bad deals and weak leadership – a condition he alone claims to have corrected in less than a year. 

Another 20th-century British writer, George Orwell, coined the term ‘doublespeak’ to describe a political language in which words are used not to reveal reality but to obscure it. In Trump’s narrative, fragmentation is portrayed as a strength, coercion as leadership, and trade protectionism as a source of rising living standards. Yet today, far from being stronger, the international institutions are more fragile and vulnerable. Without clear rules, the global economy is becoming more unstable, and the costs are borne by those least able to absorb them. Mark Carney’s remarks were met with an ovation, not because they were novel, but because he named the fiction. 

In the realm of international trade, the multilateral trade system that emerged in the post-war period developed its own tradespeak. Free trade often concealed protection for powerful sectors; fair trade evaded the question of who actually benefited; and openness became a moral claim, even as its costs were unevenly distributed. Over time, these incongruities were cemented in policies that consistently underdelivered. International trade is not solely to blame; rather, the focus was lost: the objective became expanding trade volumes year after year, rather than ensuring that its gains were broadly shared across society. 

There’s a strain of the left that has always been shying away from calling itself liberal, particularly in contexts where liberalism is associated with the right. Yet one indisputable feature of a liberal project – across the ideological spectrum – is that individuals, like nations, are not destined to subordination. They retain the agency and capacity to shape their economic and political futures. A system that replaces equal treatment with permanent exceptions may appear pragmatic, but it does not reform; it regresses. Carney is right that we should not mourn the world order that is gone. The task, instead, is to uphold these principles as the bedrock of a more ambitious and equitable global order.

Photo credits: 2026 World Economic Forum / Ciaran McCrickard
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