Carney's solution to hegemonies and hyper-clusters is networked sovereignty, and he just pitched it at Davos 2026.
Over the course of a ~20 minute speech, Mark Carney described how to build a network state at the nation-state level. Imagining a future where we don't need to dissolve nation-states to get network benefits, because nation-states are the network nodes.
What is a network state? 🌐
Rather than geographically centralize a society of ideologically misaligned people, a network state is an ideologically aligned but geographically decentralized group of people.
It's a concept foreign to many because it prioritizes land ownership lastly, but thats the revolutionary insight. Instead of trying to claim territory and then attract people, network states build decentralized communities of shared values and cultures first.
Carney used the key term "variable geometry" in his Davos speech. Canada may need different coalitions for different issues, and this is exactly how networks operate versus hierarchies. Nodes connect based on functional relevance, not permanent structure.
The "state" being networked is Canada, other nation states "middle powers", and the "network" is what Carney describes as a variable-geometry coalition system.
Carney specifically mentioned these "network nodes":
"Ukraine Coalition" (global defence)
"Nordic-Baltic Eight" (arctic security)
"TPP-EU Bridge" (1.5b person trading bloc)
"G7 Buyers' Club" (critical minerals)
"Like-minded Democracies" (AI governance)
Each coalition has a different membership, but with overlapping participants. This creates resilient classical network redundancies.
Radically, Carney is quite literally saying that sovereignty isn't about building fortresses. He's describing a modern politics of networking instead of isolating oneself. Where relationships matter more than location, where access to the "collectives" membership is voluntary, through purpose-driven association, not strictly geography-based blocs.
In his speech, Carney proposes that the next evolution of geopolitics is network-based. He describes sovereignty as a power that comes from being too interconnected to be isolated, as the network state which can't be coerced.