After the Rules-Based Order: Power, History, and the Limits of Technocratic Repair

The recent speech by Mark Carney, titled “Principled and pragmatic: Canada’s path,” is best read not as an idiosyncratic policy statement but as a representative document of an intellectual tradition that has reached its limits.

The speech articulates, with clarity and restraint, the worldview of late neoliberal technocracy: economically literate, institutionally cautious, normatively earnest—yet historically thin and politically incomplete. In that sense, it deserves to be taken seriously. It also deserves to be challenged precisely where it is weakest: in its understanding of history, power, and the structural conditions under which international economic orders emerge and collapse.

A Political Order Disguised as a Neutral Framework

The rules-based order was never merely a set of abstract norms. It was a political construction anchored in the post–Second World War distribution of power and stabilized through institutions that reflected that balance. Its coherence rested on three pillars: concentrated geopolitical authority, credible enforcement capacity, and an economic architecture capable of aligning growth with political consent.

From the early 1980s onward, this settlement was extended and deepened under markedly different conditions. Economic coordination increasingly substituted for political agreement. Market integration was elevated from an instrument of stability to a normative end in itself. Institutional legitimacy was assumed to follow automatically from efficiency and openness.

What is now described as the erosion of rules is, in fact, the unravelling of a political compromise that had already been stretched far beyond its original historical context.

Integration as a Recurrent, Not Progressive, Phenomenon

The experience of the last four decades was never exceptional in historical terms. Periods of intensified trade and integration have repeatedly emerged under specific political and military conditions, only to unravel once those conditions changed. Roman Mediterranean integration, early modern mercantile networks, nineteenth-century free trade, and the post–Cold War expansion of market integration all followed this pattern.

The failure of integration is not an accident. It is the rule.

What distinguished the late twentieth century was not the novelty of openness, but the belief—particularly strong among economists—that economic interdependence could override political conflict and neutralize power asymmetries. That belief now stands exposed.

Political–economic orders are not modular systems that can be upgraded once key components fail. They are embedded in historical trajectories shaped by security arrangements, social contracts, development paths, and unresolved conflicts. When those trajectories diverge, institutional coherence cannot be restored by technical adjustment alone.

Once the material and political foundations of the postwar order shifted—through slower growth, widening inequality, demographic change, and renewed strategic rivalry—its internal contradictions were no longer containable. Its breakdown was not a surprise. It was a delayed outcome.

The Neglect of Historical Path Dependency

The speech rightly observes that today’s international environment is shaped less by predictable rules and more by bargaining, coercion, and unilateral action. Yet this transformation is presented as a deviation from the norm.

Historically, it is the opposite.

While acknowledging that the rules-based order was always imperfect, the speech treats that imperfection primarily as an implementation problem rather than a structural one. What remains largely absent is an appreciation of historical path dependency.

States do not respond to openness abstractly. They respond through institutions shaped by past wars, colonial experiences, revolutions, demographic pressures, and security dilemmas. These trajectories determine whether openness is perceived as opportunity, vulnerability, or threat.

Diversification strategies, resilience frameworks, and supply-chain reconfiguration cannot erase these inherited constraints. They may mitigate exposure at the margin, but they do not alter the underlying political logic that drives states to reassert control when systemic uncertainty rises.

In this respect, the speech reflects an economistic tendency to treat history as background rather than structure. Yet history lies at the heart of the present moment.

Power Politics Reduced to Risk Management

The intellectual formation of the speaker matters. Trained as an economist and seasoned as a central banker, Carney approaches global disorder through the lens of risk, volatility, and systemic fragility. This yields a lucid diagnosis of instability but a constrained interpretation of its causes.

Geopolitics is not a risk external to the system. It is the system.

Strategic rivalry, coercion, and conflict are not market failures to be diversified away. They are expressions of power that operate independently of efficiency considerations. The assumption that states will adjust behavior in response to altered economic incentives underestimates the extent to which political objectives override economic costs.

History offers no support for the idea that interdependence disciplines great powers once core strategic interests are perceived to be at stake.

The Ambiguity of “Principled Pragmatism”

The conceptual centerpiece of the speech—the balance between principle and pragmatism—appears sensible but remains analytically underdeveloped. In practice, such formulations often obscure rather than resolve political trade-offs.

Principles become meaningful only when violating them would be easier, more profitable, or more expedient. That is the moment when a principle ceases to be a declaration and becomes a constraint. Pragmatism, in turn, matters only when it confronts limits.

This is a familiar pattern in late neoliberal governance, where normative claims are retained rhetorically even as their binding force weakens materially.

Middle Powers and Structural Asymmetry

The speech places considerable emphasis on coordination among middle powers as a stabilizing force. While appealing, this argument underestimates the structural asymmetry of the international system.

Coalition-building can amplify voice, but it does not substitute for power. Military capability, technological control, financial dominance, and agenda-setting capacity remain concentrated. Middle powers operate within constraints they do not define. Economic cooperation among such states can enhance resilience, but it cannot fundamentally reshape the strategic environment unless anchored in enforceable security and institutional commitments. History again offers sobering lessons on the limits of dispersed agency.

Neoliberalism’s Blind Spot

At a deeper level, the speech illustrates a persistent blind spot of neoliberal thought: the treatment of integration as a technical arrangement rather than a political settlement.

Markets do not float above power. They are embedded within it.

The neoliberal order assumed that expanding markets would generate their own legitimacy and stability. When distributional conflict intensified, political backlash emerged, and rival powers refused to internalize the same constraints, the architecture began to fracture. That fracture was not sudden. It was delayed.

From this perspective, the current moment is not a crisis of integration but its historical denouement.

Beyond Technocratic Closure

The value of Carney’s speech lies in its diagnostic clarity within its own intellectual frame. Its limitation lies in that frame itself.

A world shaped by strategic rivalry, historical memory, and power politics cannot be governed by economic rationality alone. Nor can integration be restored by better management, broader diversification, or more inclusive rhetoric.

Integration was always contingent. Its failure was always foreseeable.

What is now required is not a recalibration of the old order, but a political economy that takes history seriously, names power explicitly, and abandons the illusion that integration is an end state rather than a phase.