Mark Carney’s recent Davos address can be read as a moment when geopolitical realism converges with the moral logic long articulated in Catholic social teaching.

His claim that the post–Cold War international order is fracturing is not merely a strategic observation; it exposes a deeper crisis concerning the structures that sustain the common good among nations.

Catholic doctrine has consistently argued that political and economic systems are judged by their capacity to protect human dignity and enable authentic participation in shared goods.

Fracturing the global order

Carney’s warning that middle powers risk becoming objects rather than agents within a coercive global environment identifies precisely such a failure of participation.

Catholic social teaching defines the common good as the ensemble of social conditions allowing persons and communities to reach fulfilment (Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes §26).

When Carney insists that nostalgia for a prior order is not a viable strategy, he is effectively arguing that inherited frameworks no longer guarantee those conditions.

Reconstructing the common good

An order that permits domination by concentrated power undermines the dignity of political communities and, by extension, the persons they serve.

His appeal for middle powers to organise new patterns of cooperation becomes an effort to reconstruct institutional conditions capable of supporting the common good under altered historical circumstances.

The speech’s emphasis on coalition-building resonates strongly with the Catholic principle of solidarity, a structural commitment to mutual responsibility across borders.

Solidarity through intentional cooperation

Carney’s vision of flexible networks organised around shared interests reflects an understanding that interdependence must be governed intentionally if it is not to devolve into coercion.

Catholic teaching holds that global interdependence, left morally unstructured, intensifies injustice; cooperation among middle powers appears as a pragmatic analogue to institutional justice.

His argument also implicitly invokes subsidiarity, affirming that responsibility should be exercised at the level competent to act rather than deferring to great-power dominance.

Limits of strategic realism

A world in which only a few actors determine outcomes contradicts the Catholic conviction that participation is itself a dimension of human dignity.

However, Catholic social teaching would insist that any reconstruction of the international order be evaluated by its effects on the most vulnerable and by its preferential concern for the poor.

Stability without justice remains morally incomplete, as political architecture cannot endure unless it rests on moral commitments strong enough to sustain trust among nations.

• Dr Joe Grayland is an assistant lecturer in the Department of Liturgy at the University of Wuerzburg (Germany). He is a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Palmerston North, New Zealand.