Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

If you are like me, the contrasts between the speeches Mark Carney and Donald Trump gave this week in Davos were remarkable. And you also noticed the reactions of European leaders and the Canadian media and public gave. Carney’s speech, in particular, framed a social imaginary that he invited others to imagine and participate in. Given the particular stakes of upcoming negotiations about North American free trade, one can very well understand the courage and risk Carney took. He was able to name what is, to say the emperor had no clothes, and to lift the concept of sovereignty out of our collective unconsciousness.

Sovereignty is the political framework for individual agency, communal action, group advocacy, and the feeling of meaningful choice over one’s life.  

Personally, locally and professionally, I have seen much life as being exercised within this tension. For example, I teach newcomers to Canada, and their overwhelming battle is simultaneously gaining the language and cultural skills to step into their own authentic lives here. Personally, I have raised two young adults whose modus operendi is a struggle for their own agency and authenticity: they are each, in their own ways, working out what it means to become agents of their lives. Locally, I live within a province that is about to consider some form of local independence and attempts to renegotiate its relationships with indigenous populations and the Canadian federation itself.

But Carney named it. Sovereignty matters, and the contested understanding of what sovereignty means is a tension we can no longer avoid. And while his assertion of a “Principled and Pragmatic” program lingers in the background, requiring a working out as we go and is thus subject to much critique, we all owe him a round of applause for helping us think about what sovereignty means.    

Part I

Why the Language of Sovereignty Resonates in a World of Rupture

Sovereignty has re-emerged in contemporary political discourse not merely as a legal or strategic term, but as a moral and existential ideal. Its renewed appeal cannot be explained solely by shifts in global power or the breakdown of international institutions. Rather, sovereignty has become inspirational because it mirrors a deeper concern of our age: the struggle for authenticity, i.e. the desire to act from within one’s own values rather than as an instrument of external systems. In an age marked by fragmentation, instrumental rationality, and the erosion of shared meaning, sovereignty functions as the political analogue of this ethical striving.

Charles Taylor’s diagnosis of modernity remains instructive. Taylor, whom Carney quoted in a speech to his caucus, argues that modern individuals are animated by a powerful ideal of authenticity. Authenticity is conscious striving to be faithful to one’s sense of self. Taylor asserts that authenticity only becomes intelligible within what he calls horizons of significance. Authenticity is not radical self-creation, nor is it mere preference satisfaction. It is an ethical orientation toward goods that transcend the individual while still giving shape to one’s own identity. When these horizons collapse, agency flattens, choice becomes arbitrary, meaning thins out, and the self oscillates between narcissism and submission to impersonal systems.

Sovereignty, properly understood, names an analogous structure at the collective level. It is not reducible to ownership, control, or domination. As I argued last week in “Sovereignty: The Power Beyond Ownership”, sovereignty refers to ultimate authority and responsibility. It is the capacity of a political community to legitimately order its common life and bear the consequences of its decisions. Ownership operates within rules; sovereignty establishes and justifies them. It is relational rather than extractive, moral rather than merely instrumental, and enduring rather than transactional.

This distinction clarifies why sovereignty resonates so powerfully in moments of rupture. Just as authenticity resists the reduction of the self to a function of markets, algorithms, or bureaucratic rationality, sovereignty resists the reduction of nations to passive nodes within global mechanisms they neither govern nor meaningfully consent to. In both cases, the core question is the same: is agency real, or merely derivative?

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent emphasis on sovereignty should be read through this ethical lens. In his remarks at the World Economic Forum, analyzed in “Carney at the World Economic Forum: Commentary and References”, Carney situates sovereignty within a “world of rupture.” The postwar rules-based order is fraying; economic interdependence has been weaponized; global institutions increasingly lack the authority they once possessed. Under such conditions, integration no longer guarantees mutual benefit. It can become a mechanism of coercion.

For Carney, sovereignty is not a retreat from cooperation but its moral precondition. Nations that lack sovereign capacity cannot participate in global systems as equals; they can only comply. Sovereignty therefore becomes the collective capacity to act from conviction rather than compulsion. This framing closely parallels Taylor’s account of authenticity: meaningful personal or political action, requires orientation toward shared goods, not merely strategic adaptation to prevailing forces. While I haven’t yet been able to articulate my “cautionary hunches” within this framework, Carney’s speech articulates what is so inspiring about political agency.

Carney’s rhetoric resonates because it restores dignity to political agency. It invites citizens to understand their nation not as a passive beneficiary of a declining order, but as a moral actor capable of shaping its future in accordance with its values. Sovereignty, in this sense, is not nostalgia for absolute control, but fidelity to responsibility. It is the refusal to live within imposed narratives simply because they are expedient or powerful.

By contrast, Donald Trump’s apparent unconcern with sovereignty reflects a fundamentally different anthropology. His language consistently collapses sovereignty into ownership: territory as property, power as acquisition, politics as transaction. Within this framework, authority is measured in leverage rather than legitimacy, and relationships are evaluated as deals rather than commitments. The moral dimension of sovereignty—its grounding in responsibility, continuity, and shared meaning—largely disappears.

The contrast is revealing. Ownership seeks control within an existing system; sovereignty bears responsibility for the system itself. Trump’s transactional worldview has little use for sovereignty understood as moral authority, because such authority cannot be bought, sold, or seized without remainder. This reduction of power to possession mirrors what Taylor identifies as a degraded form of authenticity: self-assertion without horizons of significance, choice detached from obligation, agency emptied of meaning. Taylor has variously called this type of person “unencumbered” and “atomized”.

Part II

How a Renewed Social Imaginary Emerges from the Modern Struggle for Agency

The connection between authenticity and sovereignty does more than explain a political mood; it helps articulate a social imaginary that many have sensed but not yet named. As explored in “Social Imaginaries”, a social imaginary refers to the background set of images, stories, assumptions, and moral intuitions through which people understand their collective life. It is not a formal ideology, but a lived sense of what is normal, legitimate, and possible.

Late modernity’s dominant social imaginary has been shaped by abstraction and scale. Individuals experience themselves as embedded within vast economic, technological, and administrative systems that operate far beyond their comprehension or influence. While these systems promise efficiency and prosperity, they often erode the sense that collective life is meaningfully authored by human agents. Political participation becomes procedural; moral responsibility diffuses; agency feels outsourced.

Late modernity’s dominant social imaginary has been shaped not only by abstraction and scale, but by this rise of technocratic rationality. Technocratic reasoning treats social and political life primarily as problems of technical management. As I have already described elsewhere, technocratic rationality extends instrumental calculation into domains where moral judgment, shared meaning, and public deliberation ought to prevail, refiguring human beings as inputs to be optimized rather than agents capable of shaping a common world. Under this logic, governance becomes a matter of expertise and efficiency, while questions of purpose, responsibility, and legitimacy are deferred or dissolved into metrics, procedures, and system performance.

Hannah Arendt warned that when administrative and technical imperatives colonize the public realm, politics itself is hollowed out: judgment gives way to procedure, action to management, and citizens to functionaries. Walter Benjamin’s critique runs parallel, diagnosing how modern rationality transforms political life into spectacle or administration, severing action from meaning and reducing participation to passive consumption rather than collective authorship. Together, these critiques illuminate why technocratic rationality erodes the sense that collective life is meaningfully authored by human agents. Political participation becomes procedural, moral responsibility diffuses across impersonal systems, and agency feels increasingly outsourced—precisely the condition that gives rise to a renewed longing for sovereignty as a reclaimed horizon of responsibility and action.

The appeal of sovereignty emerges precisely at this point of tension. People may struggle to articulate what feels wrong, but they intuit that something essential has been lost: the sense that decisions affecting their lives are made within a moral horizon they recognize as legitimate. Sovereignty, when framed as authority grounded in responsibility rather than ownership, gives conceptual shape to this intuition. It supplies an image of collective agency that aligns with the ethical demand for authenticity at the personal level.

Carney’s language succeeds because it renders this latent social imaginary intelligible. By linking sovereignty to values, relationships, responsibility, and resilience rather than domination or isolation, he offers a picture of political life that people can inhabit. Nations are not merely market participants or security assets; they are situated moral communities capable of acting in history. This restores coherence between identity and action, between who we understand ourselves to be and how we participate in the world. Trump’s rhetoric fails to engage this emerging social imaginary because it remains trapped within an older, thinner one where power is possession, politics is deal-making, and legitimacy is irrelevant so long as leverage is secured. This imaginary offers immediacy but not meaning, force but not orientation. It cannot sustain the ethical weight that sovereignty, properly understood, now carries.

Seen this way, sovereignty is not a reactionary impulse but a constructive one. It is an attempt to recover a shared image of collective life in which responsibility, legitimacy, and moral orientation matter again. It allows individuals to imagine themselves not as spectators of global systems, but as participants in shaping a common world.

The Takeaways

Sovereignty is inspirational because it is the political expression of authenticity. It signals a refusal to live within imposed narratives and an insistence on meaningful agency rooted in shared values. What gives this language its power today is not nostalgia for control, but a widespread intuition that collective life has drifted too far from moral intelligibility.

By linking sovereignty to authenticity, we gain more than a political argument. We gain a clearer articulation of a social imaginary that had previously remained implicit. It names a shared desire for agency that is neither isolated nor coercive, neither purely individual nor merely systemic. It affirms that both persons and nations require horizons of significance in order to act meaningfully.

Carney’s invocation of sovereignty resonates precisely because it mirrors the modern self’s struggle for identity within relational and moral frameworks. Trump’s transactional approach, by contrast, reflects a reduction of agency to possession and leverage, evacuating sovereignty of our deepest strivings. In an era of rupture, sovereignty offers the nations, and the individuals within them, a way to live truthfully rather than instrumentally, restoring dignity where abstraction has thinned meaning and responsibility.