It began, as great reckonings often do, with a simple question. Czech dissident — and later president — Václav Havel asked in The Power of the Powerless: how does a system that no one truly believes in continue to hold itself together? The Soviet-communist world had built an empire around authoritarianism, It ran less on faith & conviction than on performance & fear. Loyalty was purchased where possible, forced where necessary.

On the streets of Prague and Warsaw, even the most ordinary shop became a stage set for ideology. Windows displayed portraits of "party heroes", their smiles frozen under banners of revolution. Red slogans shouted from walls no one dared to question.

So long as every shopkeeper hung the correct poster, the illusion of perfection endured.

But Havel saw that all illusions depend on consent. The moment one citizen refused — the moment one shop window stood empty — the façade began to crack. The powerless regained power, not through protest or violence, but by ending their part in the performance.

When one shopkeeper — "one powerless soul" — decided not to perform, the spell trembled. In that small refusal, the myth of communist perfection began to fracture and paved the way for democracy, human rights, and civil society.

Communism in the Soviet Union was never built to uplift the people it claimed to represent. It existed to preserve an entrenched elite that supplied, controlled, and profited while the rest remained suspended in a permanent middle class with liberties snatched away from them — the state decided what they would eat, watch & wear, for how long they would work and how they would be remunerated.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and history seems to echo where we least expect it. In the United States, the Republican Party — once a banner of trade liberalism, innovation, and liberty under leaders like Abraham Lincoln who banned slavery — has drifted into the same closed loop of leverage and domination. Under Donald Trump, well-founded accusations of authoritarianism, oligarchy, and state coercion have multiplied. Federal ICE agents now patrol streets, arresting citizens within sovereign states. Their work involves profiling by accent, colour, and face — recalling an old Nazi playbook of fear disguised as order, with "order" revealing itself as blatant Racism.

In the economy, a familiar pattern resurfaces. Businesses face a false choice: pay the tariffs and resist, or buy immunity through allegiance. Ford and General Motors learned this script when tariffs on steel squeezed their operations — until donations & investments bought them a private reprieve. Apple followed suit, negotiating its own latitude on chip imports from South Korea and Taiwan. Privilege was traded for profit; small American firms, farmers, and the middle class paid the bill. Retaliatory tariffs surged, supply chains stumbled, and the cost of living rapidly rose one small fracture at a time.

For much of the past year, Europe’s leaders pursued appeasement, hoping diplomacy would steady the storm. But Trump’s rising militarism — from the invasion of Venezuela to threats against Greenland — has awakened new alliances. At the World Economic Forum, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney and France’s President Emmanuel Macron placed a new idea on the table: middle powers must no longer perform sovereignty; they must embody it.

“When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon,” Carney warned, “we negotiate from weakness. That is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”

Macron echoed him: “We cannot passively accept the law of the strongest. This would be a new colonial order.”

Here lies the turning point. The collapse of old certainties is not a call to despair but an invitation to courage. The world again stands before the same mirror Havel held to the shopkeeper – the choice between performance and principle. As one of Singapore’s founding fathers, Lee Kuan Yew, once reminded us — the answer to global uncertainty is not less trade, but more.

The path forward is not less unity, not less connection — but more. More conversation, more collaboration, more coherence across borders while acknowledging both shared and individual identity. Only then can freedom become more than a performance and finally become a practice.