The USA is the economic engine on the planet. And when America booms, the entire world booms. … You all follow us down and you follow us up. ~ President Donald Trump, at Davos 2026.
The Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, which commenced on 19 January 2026, unfolded not merely as a gathering of political leaders, corporate executives, and institutional custodians, but as a collective juridical diagnosis of the international system itself. Framed under the overarching theme “A Spirit of Dialogue”, Davos 2026 occurred at a moment when dialogue, as traditionally understood in international relations and law, has become increasingly conditional, transactional, and fragile. What emerged was not reassurance but recognition: that the post‑1945 multilateral legal order is no longer merely under strain, but is experiencing a structural rupture.
The five thematic pillars articulated at Davos—cooperation in a contested world; responsible deployment of innovation; unlocking new sources of growth; investing in people in the age of artificial intelligence; and the restoration of dialogue—were less policy roadmaps than normative aspirations struggling against geopolitical realities. Collectively, they revealed a widening gap between the ideals embedded in international treaties and the conduct of States in an era of renewed power politics.
Discussions: Challenges Faced and Expressed
- France
President Emmanuel Macron’s warning that the world is drifting toward “a world without rules, where international law is trampled underfoot and where the only law that seems to matter is that of the strongest” echoed concerns long articulated by international lawyers regarding the weakening of pacta sunt servanda, the cornerstone principle codified in Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The selective invocation of international law—whether under the United Nations Charter, the World Trade Organization Agreements, or multilateral environmental treaties—has increasingly undermined confidence in the universality and neutrality of legal norms.
Macron’s appeal for respect over brutality and law over bullying implicitly reaffirmed the foundational principles of the UN Charter, particularly the sovereign equality of States under Article 2(1), the prohibition of the use of force under Article 2(4), and the obligation to settle disputes by peaceful means under Article 2(3). Yet Davos 2026 made clear that these principles are no longer self‑executing. They depend on political will that is unevenly distributed and increasingly subordinated to national interest calculations.
- Canada
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s assertion that the world is experiencing a rupture rather than a transition carries profound implications for international law. A transition presupposes continuity of legal frameworks; a rupture calls into question their effectiveness. The assumption that international economic integration, reinforced by WTO disciplines on non‑discrimination and market access, would inevitably produce stability has been decisively challenged by the weaponization of trade, finance, and supply chains.
Carney’s critique resonates with the reality that the dispute settlement mechanism of the WTO, once regarded as the crown jewel of rules‑based trade, has been functionally paralyzed. In parallel, unilateral tariffs, justified on national security grounds under domestic law, increasingly circumvent the spirit—if not always the letter—of multilateral trade obligations. The result is a system where legality survives formally, but legitimacy erodes substantively.
His invocation of Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless offers a compelling metaphor for contemporary international law. States continue to perform adherence to rules whose protective capacity they privately doubt. This performative compliance sustains the appearance of order, but its fragility becomes evident whenever power asymmetries are exposed.
One of the most consequential intellectual currents at Davos 2026 was the reemergence of middle powers as proactive architects of cooperation. Carney’s observation that States not seated at the table risk being “on the menu” encapsulates the vulnerability of countries that lack hegemonic leverage but depend on legal predictability for security and prosperity.
The strategy articulated—described as variable geometry—marks a departure from universalist multilateralism toward issue‑specific coalitions. This approach does not reject international law; rather, it re‑imagines its operationalization. Plurilateral agreements, regional compacts, and sector‑specific coalitions increasingly supplement universal treaties whose consensus thresholds have become prohibitively high.
One example that can be cited in this context is aviation governance, where this trend is already visible. While the Chicago Convention of 1944 remains the constitutional instrument of international civil aviation, States increasingly pursue supplementary arrangements on climate measures, unmanned aircraft systems, and cybersecurity through regional and plurilateral frameworks, often within or alongside the International Civil Aviation Organization. I have addressed this trend in some depth in my latest book Is Air Law International ? (Ethics Press: 2025) The same logic applies to climate governance under the Paris Agreement, where nationally determined contributions coexist with climate clubs and sectoral initiatives.
- The United States and Europe
The forthright defense of tariffs as geopolitical instruments by the United States Trade Representative at Davos underscored a decisive shift in the philosophy of international economic law. Trade is no longer treated primarily as a vehicle for mutual gain, but as an extension of national security policy. This reconceptualization challenges the foundational premise of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which sought to depoliticize commerce through predictability and reciprocity.
European leaders’ warnings that trade escalation risks weakening Western cohesion implicitly invoked the broader objectives of economic cooperation embedded in the UN Charter and the Bretton Woods framework. Yet Davos 2026 revealed the limits of legal constraint in the absence of shared strategic narratives. When market access becomes conditional and retaliation is framed as imprudent, trade law risks devolving into a vocabulary of convenience rather than obligation.
d)NATO
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s reminder that the war in Ukraine remains the central security challenge highlighted the dangers of strategic distraction. Collective security, whether under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty or Chapter VII of the UN Charter, depends not only on legal commitments but on sustained political focus. The proliferation of geopolitical disputes risks diluting attention and undermining deterrence.
From a legal perspective, selective urgency weakens the credibility of collective defense arrangements. The legitimacy of security alliances rests on consistency, both in rhetoric and response.
e) AI
The discussions on artificial intelligence at Davos 2026 revealed a growing normative lag between technological capability and legal governance. Warnings that AI may replicate the distributive failures of globalization resonate with broader concerns about regulatory asymmetry. While international aviation law has long grappled with balancing innovation and safety through instruments such as the Chicago Convention and its Annexes, AI governance remains fragmented and largely domestic.
The risk identified—that benefits accrue disproportionately to data and infrastructure owners—raises questions about equity, labour rights, and social cohesion. International labour standards, articulated through the International Labour Organization, have yet to be meaningfully integrated into AI governance frameworks. Without deliberate legal intervention, technological efficiency may erode social legitimacy.
My Take
The enduring contribution of Davos 2026 lies not in its theme but in its honesty. By acknowledging rupture and rejecting nostalgia, it reaffirmed a foundational truth of international law: that its vitality depends not on ritual invocation, but on the courage of States to live within the truth and to build, incrementally and collectively, a legal order fit for a contested world.
At this juncture, it is useful—indeed necessary—to step back from the immediacy of policy responses and institutional recalibration and examine a deeper, often unspoken foundation of the rules‑based international order: its dependence on collective belief. The contemporary crisis confronting international law is not merely one of enforcement or compliance; it is epistemic. It concerns the erosion of the shared fictions upon which order itself is constructed.
As Yuval Noah Harari persuasively argues in Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the Twenty‑First Century, the human world is not sustained primarily by objective realities, but by intersubjective ones—fictions that exist because we collectively believe in them. Nations, corporations, currencies, borders, sovereignty, and even law itself are not tangible phenomena in the way mountains or oceans are; they are products of the human imagination, institutionalized through repetition, ritual, and consent. The international legal order is, in this sense, one of humanity’s most ambitious fictional enterprises.
This observation should not be misunderstood as a dismissal of law’s seriousness. On the contrary, it is precisely because law is fictional that it is powerful. From the Stone Age onward, self‑reinforcing myths have enabled large groups of humans—strangers to one another—to cooperate at scale. Homo sapiens did not dominate the planet because of superior physical strength, but because of a unique cognitive capacity: the ability to create shared stories, disseminate them, and persuade millions of others to act as if they were true. Treaties, constitutions, and international organizations are merely refined descendants of these early myths.
The rules‑based international order, now under visible strain, is one such shared story. It rests on the collective belief that States are sovereign equals; that treaties bind even the powerful; that disputes will be resolved peacefully; and that law, not force, provides legitimacy. These propositions are not empirically self‑evident. They function only so long as a sufficient number of actors behave as if they were true.
Stephen Pinker complements this insight through his analysis of conventions and common knowledge. In When Everybody Knows That Everybody Knows, Pinker explains that social order depends on conventions that are self‑reinforcing precisely because they are mutually recognized. Traffic rules, monetary systems, and legal norms work not because they are natural laws, but because everyone knows that everyone else knows—and expects compliance. International law operates in much the same way. Its authority derives less from coercion than from expectation.
This is why selective compliance is so corrosive. When powerful States exempt themselves from rules while insisting on their application to others, they do more than violate individual obligations; they weaken the underlying convention itself. Once enough actors conclude that belief is no longer reciprocated, the fiction collapses. What follows is not an orderly transition to a new system, but fragmentation.
Davos 2026 captured this moment of disillusionment. The repeated acknowledgment that the old order is not returning reflects a dawning awareness that the shared story is no longer universally believed. Economic integration, once narrated as mutually beneficial, is increasingly experienced as asymmetric vulnerability. Multilateral institutions, once seen as neutral arbiters, are perceived as arenas of power projection or paralysis. The ritual incantation of “rules‑based order” begins to resemble what Václav Havel described as “living within a lie.”
Yet the danger does not lie in abandoning comforting illusions; it lies in abandoning shared conventions altogether. Here, Thomas Friedman’s stark warning becomes relevant: the opposite of autocracy is not democracy, but chaos. Autocracy and democracy are both systems—stories with internal coherence, rules, and expectations. Chaos is the absence of a shared narrative. It is the condition in which no rule is presumed, no commitment trusted, and no restraint expected.
From the perspective of international law, chaos is far more dangerous than hierarchy. A world of competing autocracies may still operate within recognizable patterns of power and deterrence. A world in which no one believes in any rule—where treaties are optional, borders provisional, and commitments transactional—renders law functionally meaningless. In such a world, even the powerful lose predictability, and the weak lose all protection.
The present moment, therefore, is not a binary choice between naïve multilateralism and raw power politics. It is a choice between renewing shared conventions or drifting toward normative entropy. The challenge for middle powers, and for institutions like those represented at Davos, is to decide which fictions are worth preserving and which rituals must be abandoned.
The fiction that deserves preservation is not the myth of perfect compliance or universal goodwill. It is the more modest, but indispensable belief that law matters—that obligations constrain behavior, that legitimacy has value, and that cooperation is preferable to coercion. These beliefs do not require unanimity; they require a critical mass.
This is why coalition‑based cooperation, variable geometry, and principled realism are not retreats from international law, but strategies for its survival. By acting consistently, applying standards evenly, and reducing vulnerabilities to coercion, States reinforce the credibility of the conventions they claim to uphold. They demonstrate belief not through rhetoric, but through practice.
Ultimately, the rules‑based order will not be saved by declarations or nostalgia. It will survive only if enough actors continue to believe in it—and, more importantly, behave as if they do. Law, like all enduring human institutions, is a story we tell together. When we stop believing in it collectively, it dissolves. When we renew that belief—honestly, pragmatically, and inclusively—it regains its force.
Davos 2026 did not mark the end of the story. It marked the moment when the audience realized that the plot must change, but the narrative cannot be abandoned. The task ahead is not to discard fiction, but to choose better ones—stories capable of sustaining cooperation in a fractured world without descending into chaos.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Davos 2026 was its abandonment of triumphalist narratives. The Forum functioned less as an architect of solutions and more as a mirror reflecting systemic discomfort. Acknowledgment of elite dissonance and institutional distrust marked a departure from earlier certainties. Yet this candor may prove consequential. International law does not fail solely because of power; it fails when pretense replaces honesty. Davos 2026 suggested that renewal, if it is to occur, must begin with an accurate diagnosis of the world as it is.
Davos 2026 will be remembered less for consensus achieved than for illusions relinquished. The rules based international order, grounded in treaties from the UN Charter to the WTO Agreements and sectoral regimes such as the Chicago Convention, is not returning in its former guise. To mourn it is human; to await it is strategically unsound.
The path forward lies in principled realism: adherence to core legal values—sovereignty, territorial integrity, peaceful settlement of disputes, and respect for human rights—combined with pragmatic coalition building. Middle powers, acting collectively, may yet preserve legality from irrelevance and cooperation from fragmentation.
