Édouard Manet, Masked Ball at the Opera (1873). The uniformity of the dress—then top hats, now business suits—betrays the uniformity of the worldview.. I initially wanted to refrain from commenting on WEF 2026 in Davos. Part of the reluctance came from method:
when we look at the behavior and rhetoric of Western ruling elites in a
place like Davos, there is always a limit to what we can know about
specific allegiances, internal conflicts, and degrees of honesty or
outright lying.
The
really granular analysis, who is double‑gaming whom, which factions are
ascendant, would require several types of research, including a
biographical mapping of transatlantic elite networks, a very close
reading and anaylis of speeches, interviews, and think‑tank papers over
time, as well as first‑hand observations of how these people behave and
talk off‑stage. This is a type of data we do not have. What we do have,
however, is a birds‑eye view, and from that vantage point, Davos 2026
looks like a narrative alignment ritual for Western power elites.
If we take seriously the idea of the Bunker State (as laid out in my introduction essay “The Bunker and the Void”), a transatlantic securitocracy
and other transatlantic elite factions manage its populations and
territories as resources in an attempt to halt the erosion of Western
hegemony, then Davos 2026 becomes very legible. It was the moment where
this Bunker logic was openly voiced, morally justified, and synchronized
across the Atlantic system.
Several things crystallized this for me such as Mark Carney’s speech on “the end of the rules‑based order”,
but also the remarks of Stubb or Macron, or Merz or Von der Leyen
(etc.), a first-hand account from Davos by Yana Afanasieva, the timeline
of policy decisions that preceded Davos 2026, pointing to a dynamic of
convergence that seems to be a bit more than that.
Let’s
start with what is, in effect, a confession (wihtout taking into
account its function and motivation). Mark Carney, now Canada’s prime
minister, told the Davos audience:
"We
knew that the story about the rules-based order was partially false...
We knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on
the identity of the accused and the victim. This fiction was useful
[because of the goods provided by American hegemony]... So we placed the
sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely
avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain
no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not
a transition...”.”
To explain this, he invoked Václav Havel’s famous essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel described a greengrocer who hangs a “Workers of the world, unite!”
sign in his shop window to avoid trouble. The system persists because
everyone performs obedience to a lie. Carney applies this straight to
the liberal order. For decades, he says, countries like Canada’s ruling
elites professed a belief in a rules‑based order while knowing that it
was selectively applied and often false, but went along because the
fiction was useful.
This is in other words the end of the liberal emancipatory promise.
The rules‑based order or more precisely, the liberal order always
functioned as a mask over US American hegemony and a hierarchy of power
in which law and coercion were applied asymmetrically. Thus, what is new
is not the reality of it being a mask, but what is new is that one of
the actors now says it, on stage, in Davos. Carney’s proposed honesty is
neither about appealing to a deeper moral truth, not is it about
building something genuinely just and new. Instead, he reframes this new
honesty like this:
“Stop
invoking the rules-based international order as though it still
functions as advertised. Call it what it is – a system of intensifying
great power rivalry…”
In
other words: truth is acceptance of power politics as the permanent
horizon. The mask is off; the architecture remains. This is what I would
call a Havel Inversion: the language of dissident resistance is used
not to undermine an existing system, but to upgrade its ideology for the
Bunker era.
Interestingly,
in that same speech Carney reveals that he did not invent this
language. He explicitly credits Finnish President Alexander Stubb with
the term “value-based realism”, and at Davos 2026, multiple Western leaders deployed nearly identical speeches in content.
Stubb at Davos:
“Can Europe defend itself without the US? Unequivocally, yes.”
Carney:
“We
are calibrating our relationships, so their depth reflects our values,
and we’re prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given
and given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks that this
poses and the stakes for what comes next. And we are no longer just
relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our
strength. We are building that strength at home.”
European Council President António Costa:
“The EU will defend
its interests... against any form of coercion... we will engage
constructively with the US on areas of shared interests, but will stand
up for itself if necessary.”
Carnegie Endowment (analyzing Davos):
“Europe’s vulnerability lies in its dependence on the United States... Europe must pair greater unity about its red lines with sustained efforts to reduce vulnerabilities... restraint must be a choice rather than a necessity.”
First of all, we can notice a pairing of sovereingty
talk (we need to be less dependend on the US) with talk about defense.
And herein, we can also ask ourselves: What does “value-based realism”
actually mean in practice? The values are actually NATO membership,
sovereignty rhetoric, like-minded democracies. The realism? It is about
accepting US demands (Greenland framework, defense spending hikes to
5%+, integrated procurement, tariff negotiations, payment infrastructure
alignment). Therefore, soverignty is performed in speeches while in
reality subordination is implemented through “booths on the ice”, integrated command structures and resource allocation to US power elite prioritites.
This
is the shift from “liberal internationalism” (universal rules, human
rights, multilateral institutions) to “value-based realism” (bloc
cohesion, strategic resilience, hard power) is thus nothing more than a
taking the mask off moment as well as a justification for the coming harshness, the amoralness. Still, it preserves the moral vocabulary while abandoning the emancipatory content.
The core line of Carney’s speech, for my purposes, is this:
“Sovereignty
that was once grounded in rules, but will increasingly be anchored in
the ability to withstand pressure. This room knows this is classic risk
management. Risk management comes at a price, but that cost of strategic
autonomy, of sovereignty can also be shared.”
This
is essentially a way of using the word “sovereignty” but to cover up a
logic of anti‑entropic management. In the unipolar moment, “rules” and
more specifically, laws, were the shield of a US‑led framework. A
framework that enabled European social states and Canadian welfare
capitalism to exist at all. In the new moment, Carney says, that shield
is gone. Now sovereignty will be the capacity to absorb shocks in a
system which is perceived to be hostile, not using any rules at all but
using coercion instead. What’s more, sovereignty is shared.
A shared sovereignty is not soverignty unless the citizens of that
soverign state decided collectively that this is what they want. Did
they?
Everything that follows and that we can see being at Davos 2026 is a program for whole‑of‑society mobilization
toward that end: Strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals,
finance, supply chains, collective investments in “resilience”,
fast‑tracking “a trillion dollars” into energy, AI, critical minerals,
new trade corridors, doubling defense spending, explicitly in ways that
build domestic (dual use) industries. The social‑democratic content of
the state drains away as the state becomes an infrastructure and
security platform, a node in a grid. Healthcare, education, and public
goods become contingent on their contribution to resilience for what is
perceived as great‑power rivalry, and not just the development of a multipolar order.
Sociologists have long documented that elite gatherings
like WEF (but also many others like the Munich Security Conference or
Bilderberg Meetings) serve specific coordination functions distinct from conferences in other social fields. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social capital (1986) shows how these events create “institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” that produce differential access to power. C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite (1956) demonstrated how corporate, political, and military elites coordinate through informal networks and exclusive gatherings, bypassing democratic processes. More recent scholarship on the transnational capitalist class (Sklair 2001; Robinson 2004) identifies forums like Bilderberg and WEF as key sites where transatlantic power elites align policy frameworks before implementing them through national governments.
Now, WEF in particular is such an elite gathering and it performs several functions. The attendance at Davos itself leads to an institutionalized recognition that one is member of a global elite. Further, the networks formed at such a meeting can be converted into economic benefit (through deals and contracts) but also political influence
(e.g. policy coordination). Thus, whether decisions were made here, I
don’t know, but the informal gatherings that such venues as Davos
provide do offer the possibility for such actions. The messages that
were released by Trump that Macron had sent him exactly reveal these
types of dynamics. It is also where elites hear the same story from
different elite stakeholders, thereby aligning their cognitive maps and talking points for the year. It’s about reducing entropy within the ruling stratum. It’s also a space to forge a working consensus on permissible policies and
realistic horizons. Disagreements are managed within the boundaries of
shared class and systemic interests (e.g., how to secure critical
minerals, not whether to prioritize securitization over the welfare
state). Lastly, the event generates a media cascade that
signals to investors, bureaucrats, and the professional-managerial
class what the “serious people” are now thinking. The carefully curated
release of reports and speeches provides a legitimizing
intellectual gloss for policies that will later be implemented. It’s
the first green light for more austerity, mobilization, and the
normalization of amoral realism.
Therefore,
Davos 2026 was not where these larger political frameworks of
pragmatism, technocracy, and the “mask off” moment were decided or
debated, but it was rather where decisions were publicly synchronized
across the transatlantic system. It is a dynamic of structural coordination through shared class position and all of which this implies.
Let’s go through several points that could reflect such a structural coordination of narrative (and policy):
The
rhetoric toward mobilization which includes the use of hard power, the
whole-of-society approach through the word resilience, and the
importance of material or resource corridors and strategic geographical
location, was explicit and quite similar in content across speakers:
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (at Davos):
“So, President Trump and other leaders are right. We have to do more there. We have to protect the Arctic against Russian and Chinese influence….Yes,
we (Europe) can defend ourselves today, but we have to deliver on The
Hague commitments. Not because of Donald Trump — yes, it equalizes with
the US that keeps them in — but particularly because we have to defend
ourselves.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (at Davos):
“Second, we want to make Europe a key player again in global politics—economically, and particularly in defense.
We need to be able to defend ourselves, and we need to do so fast.
These goals are complementary. Economic competitiveness and the ability to shape global politics are two sides of the same coin.”
Notice how Merz conjoins the topic of defense with the ability to shape global politics?
Behind
this rhetoric, the material decisions behind these statements were
already made. For example through €800 billion ReArm Europe plan
in April 2025, or when the European Parliament adopted its 2026 budged
with defence and security among its priorities in November 2025, or in
December 2025, when the Parliament approved a “mini-omnibus”
reallocating Digital Europe, Horizon Europe, European Defense Fund
toward defense and dual-use projects. These announcements were all ready
to go before Trump’s Greenland threats, before his tariff ultimatums.
Davos was the narrative rollout.
Even
though sovereignty is a prominent topic at this year’s WEF, it still
seems as if some NATO member, and in particular those that would be part
of the Arctic sphere, are playing their assigned functional role for
their particular territorial containter (country) within the integrated
NATO architecture.
Carney (Canada):
“On
Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark... Our
commitment to NATO’s Article 5 is unwavering... we’re working with our
NATO allies, including the Nordic Baltic Gate, to further secure the
alliance’s northern and western flanks, including through Canada’s
unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in
aircraft and boots on the ground, boots on the ice.”
Rutte (NATO):
“NATO
is constructed like this: that the US, Canada and the European NATO
Allies work completely integrated... For the United States to stay safe,
you need a safe Arctic, a safe Atlantic, and a safe Europe.”
The Atlantic Council (interpreting the Trump-Rutte “framework”):
“The
‘hard work’ ahead for negotiators will be hammering out an agreement
that addresses Trump’s legitimate security concerns while also
respecting the sovereignty of NATO allies... Creative solutions include:
UK’s ‘sovereign base area’ in Cyprus, shared sovereignty over Andorra,
US perpetual lease in Guantanamo Bay.”
Ultimately, each NATO member is being assigned a territorial and functional role.
And this year’s WEF focused mostly on those near or close to the
arctic. Which means Canada is part of the Arctic flank. As we know,
Germany is the logistics corridor and possibly an industrial base for EU
rearmament. Poland and the Baltics are part of the Eastern flank with
forward ground forces. The other Nordics are part of the Arctic and
Baltic monitoring. Greenland (implicitly) is part of the US “sovereign
base areas” for critical minerals, radar installations and its
geographical location close to Russia.
Ultimately,
all talks about soverignty or even an apparent verbal altercation
between US and allied policy elites, mask an even deeper integration
while explaining that this integration is accompanied by ruthlessness
and force. The example of Greenland proves instructuive. While every leader (except for Trump) publicly says “we stand with Denmark’s soverignty”,
in reality, Trump and NATO’s Rutte anounce a framwork for a future deal
while the Atlantic Council (as one of the transatlantic networking
entities) discusses creative solutions. The very same goes for teh EU
itself and the narrative around “we can defend ourselves.” NATO integration becomes deeper. And I could show how, but this will be the topic of another essay.
This is what I call a kind of simulated sovereignty
where leaders perform resistance for domestic audiences through
speeches and temporary parliamentary freezes of trade deals while
accepting the material fact of subordination (integrated NATO command,
US-controlled critical infrastructure, dollar/Euro financial
architecture). Even the reference to “middle powers acting together” is
simply acting within that same architecture of G7, NATO, the dollar and
the Euro.
Indeed,
the NATO paragraph in Carney’s speech is especially revealing and the
hipocrisy of it is incredible if predictable. On the one hand:
“Our
commitment to NATO’s Article 5 is unwavering… we’re working… to secure
the alliance’s northern and western flanks… boots on the ground, boots
on the ice.”
And on Greenland:
“We
stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark, and fully support their unique
right to determine Greenland’s future… Canada strongly opposes tariffs
over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared
objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic.”
What
does these two paragraphs mean? Read through the Greenland crisis that
unfolded around Davos, this is precisely the pattern I have described
elsewhere: Carney never questions the premise that Greenland’s future is
an alliance matter, defined through “shared objectives” of Arctic security, and, hence, not through Danish/Greenlandic self‑determination. “Stand with Greenland and Denmark” is absolutely cost‑free rhetoric. The operative clause is: “focused talks to achieve our shared objectives in the Arctic.”
Those “shared objectives” have already been written in Washington, NATO
HQ, and the Pentagon: secure critical minerals, sea lanes, and basing
under US command.
This
is simulated sovereignty in its purest form if we ever needed an
example of it. While publicly allegiance to territoria integrity,
international law and the right of small nations to choose their future
is performed, on the practical, the material level, the parameters of
the future are set by alliance planners and above all, US-led strategic
requirements.
Carney even names the pathology outright:
“This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”
And then, he immediately performs sovereignty while accepting subordination.
That
is a most formidable example of elite capture: they are capable of
describing the illness in abstract terms, but structurally unable to act
outside of it as they are deeply integrated in to the transatlantic
structures on the social networking, on the material-professional, but
also on the material-military level of the core US/NATO architecture.
From
the outside, all this could be dismissed as overinterpretation of
speeches and an overinterpretation of gatherings such as the WEF. This
is where Yana Afanasieva’s very interesting first‑hand account from Davos becomes invaluable.
She notes a hierarchy of moods between gleeful Americans and fatalistic Europeans. Americans from media and business arrive “in a very gleeful mood,” openly relishing European humiliation and celebrating their might. While Europeans are “apprehensive and in denial”: fatalistic about whatever will happen to Greenland, but emotionally fixated on Ukraine.
This
shows, essentially, that, of course such ruling strata are not a
monolithic bloc acting in complete harmony. An internal hierarchy of the
Bunker does exist. The US, as command center,
feels empowered by its ability to coerce allies (tariff threats,
Greenland gambit, and so much more) and to dictate alliance priorities.
Europe, as logistics and industrial base,
senses its subordination but clings to the Ukraine narrative because it
allows Europeans to still see themselves as the “garden” fighting the
“jungle”, and not as a subordinate resource pool to their own ally.
Greenland forces them to confront their vassalage. Ukraine allows them
to maintain the civilizational fantasy. They choose fantasy.
The
account also notes that Europeans still view the world through
Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, seeing those outside Europe as “half‑devil and half‑child.” This is the dichotomous, sacralizing logic,
and it is the action‑guiding orientation framework that makes Bunker
policies thinkable. If the non‑West is coded as wild and irrational,
then multipolarity appears as “lawlessness” rather
than a legitimate redistribution of power and resources. Any move by
Russia, China, or the Global South is experienced as ontological threat.
Therefore, “more governance” at home and “hard power” abroad become existential imperatives. As Carnegie, Rutte, and Carney all frame it at Davos 2026: this is great power rivalry.
Multipolarity is simply not understood and framed as an opportunity for
cooperation, but the oppposite. In other words, the colonial gaze is
still present and maybe even more so now.
The next point on AI and more governance,
I would argue, present a technocratic acceleration. AI functions as an
ideological and financial bridge over stagnation. It promises growth and
control without addressing the underlying material erosion
(deindustrialization, energy costs, rare earth dependency). While “more
governance” means more technocratic emergency powers through central
banks, regulators, NATO planners, security agencies. The logic is that
if the world outside is “chaotic” and “lawless,” then the only
alternative is to freeze the internal order through administrative
control, surveillance, and automation. Politics is too slow; code and
expertise must take over.
Source: Wolin, S. S. (2008). Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton University Press.
We
need to understand gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Davos
through the social function they perform on different layers: from the
micro layer of the indivisual politician and elite stakeholder, to the
meso layer of the transantlantic social networks, to the meta layer of
the NATO and US-led strategic frameworks in the face of what they
perceive to be a crumbling world order if they cannot reign supreme. It
is, thus, on such a world stage that leaders signlan compliance to each
other and to Washington while preparing their publics for permanent
mobilization. They do so by also updating in a way their operating
ideology, to one of “value-based realism” but I would rather call an
amoral technocratism. Further, it is here, where territorial roles are
legitimized, too, maybe refined.
These
transatantic elites are not panicking because they believe they can
manage the transition from pleasant fiction to hard fortress. Whether
they can is another question. What is clear is that they have chosen the
Bunker over the Common, and Davos 2026 was the moment they said so out
loud, to each other, in the mountains.
I
am not arguing that a secret cabal controls events or that elites act
in perfect lockstep. Far from it. Instead, I am documenting structural
coordination through shared class interests, institutional embeddedness, and network communication,
the same processes sociologists have long studied in business cartels,
professional associations, and ruling class formation. (Please look up
power elite research and C. Wright Mills for this.) Whether we can learn
to perceive it as such or not, but the ruling strata are a social
group, just like we are, whether we define ourselves as middle-class,
working class, bourgeoisie, or what have you.
Such functional elites coordinate openly through
NATO summits, G7 meetings, WEF forums, think tank networks, and defense
planning processes. This coordination is imperfect (there are factions,
mistakes, contradictions) but real (it produces observable patterns in
policy and rhetoric). Furthermore, of course, there are different
functions, roles, patterns in biographies, national and regional
flavors, slightly different scopes of action,…etc., but again, they do
act in this manner because of class interests, and also because they see
themselves apart from the world that is Non-Western and Non-elite. On
the topic of factions, there might, for example, be a faction of
European national politicians and another one of EU technocrats, and,
therefore, tensions between soverignty rhetoric and integration
imperatives. Yes. These contradictions are real, and they produce messy
outcomes. But they occur within the Bunker framework, not as challenges
to it.
In the end, all factions accept
that Multipolarity is a threat, that NATO is indispensable, that
mobilization is necessary, that technocratic governance is legitimate.
So, we need to understand that coordination in some areas is real (we
can empirically document it), but it is not conspirational because it is
structural, network-based and imperfect. Further, elites have agency,
they can choose what they say and do. But they do so under the
constraints of the structures they live in (material conditions,
institutional embeddedness, network dependencies, etc.). Essentially,
just like we all do, we act within the constraints of structures bigger
than ourselves.
During the Cold War,
NATO coordinated defense policy, ideological messaging (Congress for
Cultural Freedom), and economic integration (Marshall Plan) across the
West. Nobody calls this a conspiracy. We know it is documented history.
This what I call the Bunker State operates similarly through
coordination through institutional mechanisms (NATO Planning),
ideological production (think tanks), and material incentives (defense
contracts, EU funds).
Right
now, we are embedded within similar processes, trapped in them. We
cannot step outside the geographical space that is the world while
travelling into the future to look back at a historical time. But we can
still do our best to gather and observe. The difference between then
and now, is that we’re observing it in real time, before it’s safely in
history books.
These are the Notes that partly touch upon the topics discussed here:
Amoralness as Ideological Superstructure
The 2030 Countdown: Alliance & Sovereignty
If
Davos 2026 marks the moment the West officially transitioned from the
“pleasant fiction” of the liberal order to the architecture of the
Bunker, then our task of observation becomes critical. Now we must
synchronize our understanding of what this “Value-Based Realism” looks
like in practice.
Do
you see this shift from “rules” to “resilience” manifesting in your own
national context? Is the “Havel Inversion”, using the language of truth
to justify amoral power, visible in your local political discourse?
This project relies on connecting the birds-eye view of structural
coordination with granular reality. Your counterpoints, observations,
and local signals are necessary to test the strength of the Bunker
thesis. Leave a comment below.
Leave a comment
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