The recent address by the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum reopened a question many governments have quietly been avoiding: has the international system crossed a threshold where power, rather than principle, once again determines what is legitimate in global affairs?
For much of the post–Second World War period, the international order rested on a tacit bargain. The most powerful states led by the United States and supported by its allies provided security guarantees, relatively open markets, and leadership of global institutions. In return, other states accepted a rules-based system grounded in multilateralism, predictability, and restraint. The arrangement was never neutral, never evenly applied, and often hypocritical. Yet it produced enough stability to sustain globalization, moderate great-power competition, and offer smaller states some protection against raw coercion.
That bargain is now visibly fraying.
Carney’s intervention is significant not because it catalogues violations of international norms those are well documented but because it challenges the deeper assumption that rules meaningfully constrain power. Economic interdependence, once seen as a stabilizing force, has become a tool of leverage. Trade access, financial flows, technology platforms, sanctions regimes, development finance, and even climate cooperation are increasingly weaponized. In this environment, compliance with global norms no longer guarantees protection. Instead, vulnerability becomes the penalty paid by weaker or more exposed states.
This reality raises an uncomfortable question: is “might” now functionally “right”?
The honest answer is partially yes. Not because norms have disappeared, but because they are applied selectively, subordinated to national interest, or overridden by strategic necessity. Outcomes increasingly trump legitimacy. Power(military, economic, technological, or financial) has become a substitute for consent.
Yet this is not simply a return to nineteenth century geopolitics. What is collapsing is not the idea of order itself, but the illusion that a single hegemon can underwrite it indefinitely, or that institutions can operate independently of shifting power realities. The old model hegemonic leadership dressed as universalism is no longer credible in a world of diffuse power, rising contestation, and eroding trust.
Carney’s argument resists fatalism. He does not declare the end of global order; rather, he suggests that its previous architecture no longer holds. The proposed alternative is neither nostalgia nor isolationism, but recalibration. In place of hegemonic guardianship, he points to coalitions of “middle powers”, states with sufficient economic and political weight to shape outcomes collectively, but without ambitions of domination.
In this vision, order is sustained not by a single guarantor, but by overlapping coalitions that align interest with principle, realism with restraint. Rules do not survive on moral authority alone; they endure only if actively defended, strategically reinforced, and embedded in contemporary forms of cooperation.
This diagnosis has profound implications—not least for Africa.
For African states, the weakening of the rules-based order is not an abstract concern. Historically, multilateral norms and institutions, however flawed, functioned as partial equalizers. They offered smaller and weaker economies some insulation against coercion, some recourse against unilateralism, and some voice in shaping global agendas. As enforcement becomes selective and power more openly determines outcomes, African states face heightened exposure to geopolitical instrumentalization.
Trade preferences become conditional. Development finance becomes politicized. Security partnerships become transactional. Technology access becomes stratified. Climate commitments become negotiable. In short, Africa bears the costs of a system where rules weaken faster than power diffuses.
This context also renders traditional non-alignment increasingly untenable. The classic posture maintaining broad relationships while avoiding explicit alignment emerged in a bipolar or hegemonic system where space existed between blocs. In a fragmented order marked by economic coercion and strategic competition, that space is narrowing. Access to markets, finance, digital infrastructure, and even humanitarian support is increasingly shaped by geopolitical positioning.
What emerges is not the end of non-alignment, but the need to transform it. African diplomacy must evolve from passive non-alignment to strategic non-alignment: a posture that is deliberate, interest-driven, coordinated, and backed by collective leverage. This requires clearer prioritization of national and regional interests, sharper negotiation capacity, and greater willingness to walk away from asymmetric arrangements.
Crucially, Africa’s leverage cannot be built at the level of individual states alone. No single African country qualifies as a middle power in global terms. But African institutions, acting collectively, can approximate one. The African Union, regional economic communities, and coordinated African caucuses in global forums become not symbolic platforms, but instruments of power aggregation.
In a world where coalitions matter more than universal consensus, African unity becomes a strategic asset rather than a rhetorical aspiration. Fragmentation, by contrast, invites external actors to divide, extract, and instrumentalize.
Carney’s emphasis on middle-power coalitions therefore presents a narrow but real opening for Africa, if it is seized collectively. African states can shape outcomes on debt restructuring, development finance reform, climate adaptation funding, digital governance, and global public goods but only by acting as agenda-setters rather than petitioners.
This marks a necessary shift in diplomatic posture. Appeals to fairness, equity, and historical responsibility remain morally valid, but they are no longer sufficient. In a system where rules survive only if defended, African diplomacy must invest in rule-shaping as much as rule-invoking. That means developing common positions early, negotiating across blocs, and aligning with partners not on ideology, but on concrete institutional outcomes.
At the same time, the normalization of coercion underscores the urgency of economic diversification. Diplomatic autonomy increasingly depends on reducing single-partner dependencies across energy, food systems, technology platforms, and finance. This is not a call for autarky, but for resilience. Without diversified partnerships and domestic productive capacity, diplomatic choice becomes illusory.
The evolving global order also places a premium on institutional competence. States that can deliver policy coherence, manage data, regulate digital infrastructure, and deploy finance effectively gain credibility and bargaining power. Those that cannot become objects of intervention rather than participants in governance. Capacity, not rhetoric, increasingly determines standing.
So, is might now, right?
In practice, increasingly so. Power is asserting itself more openly, norms are thinner, and coercion is normalized. But this does not mean order has disappeared. It means that order is no longer guaranteed by hierarchy alone.
Does the global order still hold?
Only conditionally. Only if it evolves from a hegemonic promise into a shared, enforced responsibility; one sustained by coalitions, defended by capable states, and adapted to contemporary realities.
For Africa, the choice is stark. The continent can remain a reactive arena where external powers compete, extract, and project influence. Or it can act as a coordinated political and economic actor, shaping the contours of a reimagined order.
The choice confronting the international community is not between order and chaos. It is between an order shaped collectively or a world where power alone decides what is right. For Africa, neutrality without strategy is no longer protection. In an age where might increasingly defines right, agency must be built, not assumed.
Writer Chukwuma Aniekwe