Nostalgia is not a strategy

Taking the sign out of the window.

In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel (later president) wrote The Power of the Powerless and asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?

His answer began with a greengrocer.

Every morning, a shopkeeper puts up a sign: “Workers of the world, unite.” He doesn’t believe it. No one does. But he displays it anyway: to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because everyone repeats the ritual, the system persists — not through violence alone, but through ordinary people participating in ceremonies they privately know to be false.

Havel called this “living within a lie.”

Davos is starting to look more and more like a farce. But there was at least one courageous, inspiring moment: the Canadian Prime Minister’s speech.

With Havel’s metaphor, he brought back a simple mechanism: a system holds less by its truth than by our participation in rituals we know are false. As long as everyone keeps displaying a slogan they no longer believe in, the system holds — until the day someone stops “playing along.”

The Prime Minister’s invitation was clear: break the ritual. Stop “playing the game” when the game becomes a lie.

His diagnosis in Davos was blunt, and brave: we are not living through a transition, but a fracture in the world order — and when you face a fracture, you don’t just “adjust.” You change posture, with lucidity and courage.

What is he talking about? The end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a hard reality — a world where geopolitics, where the dominant great power, is constrained by no real limits, no real accountability.

In very polite diplomatic language, it was a no more bullsh*t moment: the end of the comfortable fiction, the end of recited slogans, the end of invoking a “rules-based order” as though it still works as advertised. He said it explicitly: “

"We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.” “This bargain no longer works.” And therefore: “Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is…”

In other words: take the sign out of the window.

And he draws a consequence that matters: the power of the less powerful begins with honesty.

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I love that invitation to face reality as it is — and the fact that he does not stop there. He also opens a path toward radically different possible futures: the possibility for middle powers to build a new order that integrates our values.

But to create that future, we need the capacity to challenge our beliefs — and to reinvent our lives without waiting for the old order to come back.

And this is exactly what Shapership - the Art of Shaping the Future(s) is:

A method for crossing reality by shifting perspective, without deodorized discourse, by putting courage at the center — and by making circumstances a place of inner transformation (not moral recitation).

Here is how his intervention illustrates the three Shapership perspectives:

1. ‍The Big NO — NO LIES
   Refuse the collective performance: that tendency of countries to “accommodate,” to “comply,” to avoid trouble — hoping obedience will buy security.
   “Well, it won’t.”
   The Big NO is taking the sign out of the window, and stopping the performance of a sovereignty that masks real subordination.
   He shows that a system’s power comes from our willingness to act “as if” — and that its fragility comes from the same place.

Shapership’s Big NO, here, means:
• refusing to live within a lie,
• refusing performed sovereignty that masks real dependence,
• refusing the illusion of mutual benefit when integration becomes dependency.

2. The Big YES — LIVE IN TRUTH
   After refusal, he proposes a discipline: live in truth.

Concretely, that means:
• first, naming reality as it is,
• acting coherently,
• applying the same standards to allies and rivals,
• and building what we claim to defend — rather than waiting for the return of “the old order.”

It is a demanding YES: not a slogan, but an operational ethic.
And he warns: when we stay silent in one direction and speak in the other, we are keeping the sign in the window: “…we are keeping the sign in the window.”

3. Anticipative Experimentation  — build a “third way”
   The most strategic passage is his proposal for a “third way with impact”: neither multilateral naïveté nor retreat behind higher walls.

He proposes a reinvention strategy: not a fortress world of everyone for themselves, but coalitions that work, issue by issue: “It’s building coalitions that work – issues by issue…”
• variable-geometry coalitions depending on the issue,
• alliances grounded in enough shared values and interests to act,
• and a refusal of isolated bilateral negotiations with a hegemon — which force countries to compete to be “the most accommodating.”

For Europe, this speech opens a clear direction: hold together the value of our principles and the value of our strength — and move beyond postures, by building, file by file, effective coalitions that restore room for manoeuvre, coherence, and credibility.

In summary — in Shapership language:
• Big NO: take the sign out of the window. No lies.
• Big YES: live in truth.
• Reinvention: experiment a third way — pragmatic, dignified, and effective.

I quote the canadian prime Minister ones more,

Nostalgia is not a strategy.

We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation.
The powerful have their power.
But we have something too – the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.

The final question (for institutions as much as for each of us) becomes simple:
What “sign” are you still keeping in your window, even though you no longer believe in it — and what would happen if you took it down, now?

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See Prime Minister Mark Carney full speech at World Economic Forum in Davos – January 20, 2026

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