Echoes of Lagos in Davos: Mark Carney’s Davos call mirrors Bolaji Akinyemi’s 1987 Concert of Medium Powers

By Agabaidu Jideani

In the crisp mountain air of Davos on January 20, 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a resonant address at the World Economic Forum, framing the current global order as undergoing a profound “rupture” rather than a mere transition, where great powers wield economic integration as a weapon, through tariffs as leverage, supply chains as vulnerabilities, and financial infrastructure as coercion.

He invoked Václav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless” to critique the “pleasant fiction” of a rules-based international system, urging middle powers, nations like Canada, neither hegemonic giants nor peripheral actors, to forge a “Compact for Middle Powers” through “variable geometry” coalitions: issue-specific alliances in trade, investment, culture, and security that build a “dense web of connections” to foster resilience and positive-sum complementarities. Carney’s rhetoric, emphasizing that “if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” positioned this compact as a pragmatic response to intensifying great-power rivalry, particularly amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s aggressive postures on Greenland and tariffs, advocating “values-based realism” rooted in human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity, while rejecting bilateral subservience or a retreat into isolationist “fortresses.” Yet, this call, hailed by many for its “true global leadership” and earning a standing ovation, is far from novel; it echoes, almost eerily, the intellectual architecture of Nigerian diplomat Professor Bolaji Akinyemi’s Concert of Medium Powers, proposed nearly four decades earlier in 1987 during his tenure as Nigeria’s Minister of External Affairs under General Ibrahim Babangida’s military regime. Akinyemi’s initiative, conceived amid the late Cold War’s bipolar tensions, sought to assemble an informal, flexible consultative organ of sixteen regionally representative medium powers, countries like Austria, Brazil, India, Malaysia, Mexico, and Sweden, that wielded significant regional influence but lacked superpower status, aiming to mediate global conflicts, promote international peace, and serve as a bridge between the U.S.-led West and Soviet East, thereby attenuating interstate distrust and filling governance voids left by hegemonic dominance. This was not mere idealism; it was a strategic maneuver to elevate Nigeria beyond its anti-apartheid focus, which risked pigeonholing it as a “one-issue nation” as South Africa’s regime teetered, and to project Nigeria’s burgeoning leadership as Africa’s most populous and oil-rich state, with a GDP of approximately $71 billion and a robust military, onto the global stage.

The exploratory senior officials’ meeting in Lagos in March 1987 rechristened the group the Lagos Forum in deference to Nigeria’s initiatory role, underscoring a deliberate effort to consolidate regional hegemony through multilateralism, distinct yet complementary to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), where entities like India and Yugoslavia competed for Third World primacy. The historical parallels between these two visions are striking, both emerging from eras of systemic fracture: Akinyemi’s amid the ideological stalemate of the Cold War’s twilight, where superpower proxy conflicts ravaged the Global South, and Carney’s in a post-hegemonic multipolarity marked by the erosion of Pax Americana, weaponized interdependence, and crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics that expose the vulnerabilities of over-integration. Both proposals embody a realist calculus of ‘middlepowermanship’, where non-hegemonic states leverage collective agency to hedge against dominance, prioritizing sovereignty, multilateral cooperation, and positive-sum outcomes over zero-sum confrontations. For Akinyemi, this meant linking medium powers for economic diversification, accessing intermediate technologies from partners like Brazil or Malaysia suited to Nigeria’s developmental needs, while mediating disputes to ensure peace was not monopolized by the UN Security Council’s permanent members; for Carney, it translates to issue-based coalitions on AI governance, critical minerals, and climate sustainability, where shared resilience proves “cheaper than autonomy,” and consistent standards are applied to allies and adversaries alike. Intellectually, they draw from the anarchic society framework, positing order through balanced groupings rather than hierarchy, with Akinyemi’s neutralist, anti-colonial ethos, rooted in dependency theory’s push for peripheral empowerment, mirroring Carney’s normative blend of liberal institutionalism and realist hedging, albeit updated for contemporary concerns like environmental degradation and digital disruption. The impacts of these initiatives, however, reveal the fragility of such diplomatic innovations, particularly when tethered to individual leadership and national fortunes. Akinyemi’s Concert achieved immediate symbolic resonance, marking Nigeria as “the first black African country to project itself so vividly at the centre-stage of international politics,” enlisting non-African support for its agendas, and countering NAM rivals, yet it faltered post-Akinyemi’s 1987 departure, discontinued amid domestic skepticism about Nigeria’s medium-power credentials and external opposition, lacking institutional anchors to endure the Cold War’s abrupt end in 1991. Its legacy lingers indirectly in forums like the D8 (Developing Eight) or BRICS reincarnations, but it remained more aspirational than operational, a conceptual pathfinder that highlighted medium powers’ potential without sustaining momentum. Carney’s Compact, still nascent, has sparked rhetorical fervor, praised for charting a “third path” beyond bilateral capitulation or isolation, it has prompted calls for action, new deals with entities like ASEAN and Qatar, and coalitions on Ukraine, yet its longevity hinges on translating oratory into concrete pacts amid great-power resistance, potentially fading like its predecessor if not bolstered by enduring structures.

This comparative lens sharpens when juxtaposed with Nigeria’s waning global influence since the 1980s, a decline that not only aborted Akinyemi’s vision but underscores the structural hurdles Carney’s compact may face. In mirroring Akinyemi, Carney’s compact implicitly critiques such declines, suggesting that middle powers’ unity could mitigate internal frailties. As Havel might urge, true efficacy demands “living the truth” about these flaws, transforming rupture into renewal through sustained, principled action. In Carney’s Davos Akinyemi’s Lagos was resurrected.