The Comfortable Hypocrisy of Middle Powers and the Horn of Africa

by Ghidewon Abay Asmerom

Introduction

Middle powers like Canada, Australia, Germany, and the EU present themselves as principled actors in a world dominated by great-power rivalry. They speak of human rights, multilateralism, and a “rules-based international order.” They claim to be neither imperial masters nor helpless victims, responsible intermediaries navigating between power and chaos. For much of the Global South, this posture is familiar, and deeply misleading.

These states are not neutral brokers. They are structural enablers of hierarchy. Their influence is not independent; it is derivative. They benefit from the architecture of Western hegemony while helping manage, sanitize, and legitimize it. They are not outside empire. They are part of its administrative layer.

Within this group are the Scandinavian states: Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Though often celebrated as humanitarian exceptions, they play a similar role: embedded in NATO, donor systems, and Western security networks, they benefit from and help administer a global order that consistently disciplines weaker states while insulating stronger ones. Their humanitarian branding often obscures their strategic alignment. For Africa and the Horn of Africa in particular, this is not an abstract debate. It is lived experience.

Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, DRC, and South Sudan have not encountered these states as neutral peace-builders. They have encountered them as donors, security partners, unjust sanctions engineers, NGO sponsors, and diplomatic gatekeepers, actors who shape policy space, condition sovereignty, and determine which governments are legitimate, which movements are criminalized, and which crises are worthy of intervention.

Middle powers occupy a specific niche in this system. They accept that they are not first in command. But they compensate by asserting authority over the weaker. They help enforce standards that rarely constrain great powers but regularly discipline the Global South. They convert coercion into technicality, domination into development, and hierarchy into procedure. In this sense, they are not victims of a broken world order. They are beneficiaries of its selective operation.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent speech at Davos is revealing precisely because of its timing. He acknowledged openly what much of the Global South has long known: that the “rules-based international order” was never evenly applied, that enforcement was asymmetric, and that law bent to power. For African and Global South audiences, this is not news. It has been policy.

Libya was dismantled and turned into a terrorist heaven. Somalia became a permanent counterterrorism laboratory. DRC’s minerals fueled global industries while its sovereignty was hollowed out. Sudan has become a battleground for proxy warfare. Ethiopia’s wars, breach of international law, and intention of more wars unfold under selective outrage and selective silence. The rules were never absent. They were selectively applied.

What has changed is not the system, but the direction of vulnerability. Canada is speaking now because coercion has reached closer to home. When the bald eagle (great power) to its south is openly threatening annexation, absorption, or colonial-style subordination, the fiction of protection collapses. What was realism when imposed on Africans becomes unacceptable when aimed at a G7 country.

Denmark’s sudden rediscovery of sovereignty follows the same logic. Greenland has long been governed as a colonial possession. But only when a great power openly speaks of taking it does Denmark’s alarm become urgent. The rules did not weaken. They stopped protecting an enabler. For the Horn of Africa, this double standard is not theoretical. It structures daily reality.

Somalia

Somalia shows what managed sovereignty looks like in practice. For more than thirty years, the country has been governed through donors, foreign security forces, counterterrorism regimes, and NGO systems. Somalia has not been rebuilt as a sovereign state. Under the banners of peace-building, counterterrorism, and humanitarian aid, Somalia has been placed inside a dense web of foreign control that substitutes for genuine national reconstruction. It has been turned into a managed security and aid zone, run through external priorities and donor politics. This is not collapse. It is design.

Peace processes have been designed abroad. Security sector reform has been outsourced. Humanitarian systems have replaced basic state functions. Political legitimacy has often been mediated through donor recognition rather than domestic consent. Middle powers and Nordic states have not merely funded this system; they have helped legitimize it, presenting it as stabilization, while it functioned as long-term management.

Middle powers and Nordic countries, in the name of help, have created economic opportunities for themselves. Fragmented authority and contested sovereignty make it easier to strike deals through breakaway and autonomous regions rather than through a unified Somali state. Somalia’s political weakness is not just a tragedy. It is an asset for outside interests.

Canadian-linked firms have entered Somalia’s offshore space through Puntland. Norwegian energy interests have positioned themselves within fragile and disputed political environments. The pattern is consistent: humanitarian diplomacy on one track, resource positioning on another. Aid and extraction coexist, and reinforce each other. This is how managed fragility works. The same donor architecture that sustains institutional weakness also lowers the political cost of external access. A fragmented Somalia is easier to negotiate with, easier to pressure, and easier to bypass.

Ethiopia

Ethiopia offers another lesson. For decades, Ethiopia was treated as a strategic ally and donor favorite. Massive aid flows, security cooperation, and diplomatic indulgence helped insulate successive governments from accountability. Western and middle-power donors praised “developmental state” narratives while ignoring deep structural vulnerabilities.

When war erupted in northern Ethiopia, selective outrage followed selective silence. The same donor states that had helped build aid-dependent systems suddenly discovered human rights crises they had long tolerated in quieter forms. The result was not genuine accountability but a humanitarianization of political failure, more aid, more emergency framing, and more external management.

Ethiopia’s tragedy illustrates how donor-backed governance can hollow out institutions while preserving the appearance of state capacity. When the scaffold is removed, as with recent funding shocks, the institutional emptiness is exposed.

Sudan

Sudan today stands as one of the most devastating consequences of a global order in which middle powers speak humanitarian language while tolerating proxy warfare. The conflict between rival armed factions has been fueled by external financing, regional rivalries, and international complicity.

While donors issue statements and fund humanitarian appeals, they have failed to confront the geopolitical structures sustaining the war. The result is a familiar pattern: Sudan is turned into a humanitarian spectacle rather than a political crisis requiring accountability for those arming, financing, and enabling the destruction.

Red Sea

Nowhere is middle-power hypocrisy more visible than in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb corridor. This is one of the world’s most strategic maritime routes, vital for energy, trade, and military projection. Great powers compete openly here. Regional powers establish bases. External actors militarize ports, airspace, and coastlines.

Yet for Horn states, sovereignty in this space is conditional. Bases are negotiated under pressure. Maritime security is externally defined. Regional alignments are shaped by donor leverage and security partnerships. Middle powers speak of territorial integrity while participating in a system that normalizes foreign military footprints and strategic coercion in weaker states.

When great powers weaponize trade routes and maritime access, Horn states are told to adapt. When middle powers face similar pressure, they suddenly rediscover the language of violated sovereignty.

For Horn and Red Sea states, this is a warning. Humanitarianism without geopolitical honesty becomes theater. It treats symptoms while preserving causes.

Eritrea

Eritrea’s experience reveals the other side of the system. By rejecting NGO-driven governance and aid substitution in 2005, Eritrea directly challenged the development orthodoxy embraced by middle powers and Scandinavian donors. Rather than being seen as a state asserting institutional sovereignty, Eritrea was framed as irrational, isolationist, and hostile.

What made Eritrea unacceptable was not simply its politics. It was its refusal to outsource governance. In a region where aid architectures define legitimacy, Eritrea’s insistence on self-reliance disrupted the model. It rejected the role of managed recipient and insisted on being a governing state.

For donor systems, that is a structural threat. Aid dependency creates leverage. Self-reliance reduces it. This is why Eritrea has been treated not merely as a difficult partner, but as a deviant case, one that undermines the idea that African states must accept external management as the price of development.

These outcomes are not accidents. They are structural.

Moral Authority Built on Unreconciled Violence

Middle powers and Nordic states have played a central role in maintaining this structure. They finance NGOs that replace state capacity. They participate in sanctions regimes that weaken fragile economies while exempting strategic allies. They fund “civil society” in ways that reshape domestic political space. They criminalize liberation movements under counterterrorism frameworks while supporting armed proxies elsewhere. They speak of sovereignty while managing it.

Canada’s own history makes this contradiction especially stark. While lecturing Africa on human rights and rule of law, Canada built its own state through genocide against Indigenous peoples: forced displacement, land theft, cultural destruction, starvation policies, and residential schools that subjected generations of children to abuse, death, and erasure. The discovery of thousands of unmarked graves is not ancient history. It is institutional memory.

For African readers, this matters because it reveals how moral authority is constructed. States that have not reconciled with their own foundational violence present themselves as arbiters of legitimacy abroad. They export standards they have not fully met. They enforce rules they themselves bent or broke.

Even Canada’s celebrated peacekeeping tradition looks different from the Global South. Allegations of abuses in Somalia, failures in Rwanda, and compromised missions elsewhere show that peacekeeping was not a neutral moral space. It was a tool of geopolitical management, shaped by alliance politics and strategic priorities.

The same applies to Scandinavia. Norway brokers peace while selling arms. Sweden speaks human rights while embedded in Western security networks. Denmark invokes international law while administering colonial relationships. Their humanitarian reputations often serve as soft cover for hard alignment.

For the Horn of Africa, the result is a world in which sovereignty is conditional. Governments are sovereign until they resist donor architectures. Liberation movements are legitimate until they challenge aligned regimes. Human rights matter until they conflict with strategic interests. Aid is generosity until it becomes leverage.

Mark Carney’s call to “live in truth” therefore rings hollow unless it includes a reckoning with this history. Living in truth would mean acknowledging that middle powers helped construct and sustain a global system that disciplined the Global South while insulating Western states. It would mean admitting that development aid, peacekeeping, sanctions, and NGO governance have often functioned as instruments of managed sovereignty.

For African and Global South audiences, the lesson is not that the old order is collapsing. It is that its contradictions are becoming harder to hide.

The tragedy of middle powers is not that they lack influence. It is that they used their influence to stabilize a system that marginalized the powerless, while presenting themselves as moral intermediaries.

If a new world order is to emerge, it will not be built by states that only discover injustice when it reaches their own borders. It will be built by those who have lived under selective law, managed sovereignty, and donor-driven governance, and who have long known that the system was broken.

For the Horn of Africa, this is not a philosophical debate. It is a lived condition. And it is precisely why speeches from Davos, however eloquent, sound less like revelation and more like delayed recognition.

Conclusion

What is exposed in the Horn of Africa is not the failure of a rules-based international order. It is its design.

Middle powers and Nordic states have not merely failed to prevent injustice. They have helped institutionalize it. Through aid regimes, NGO governance, sanctions architectures, peacekeeping frameworks, and security partnerships, they have translated hierarchy into procedure and domination into management. They have made selective law look like neutral administration.

Somalia is not an accident. It is a model of managed sovereignty. Ethiopia is not a tragic exception. It is a case study in donor-backed institutional hollowing. Sudan is not simply a humanitarian catastrophe. It is a proxy war tolerated by a system that prefers spectacle over accountability. The Red Sea is not just a strategic corridor. It is a laboratory of conditional sovereignty. Eritrea’s treatment is not about its politics alone. It is about its refusal to accept outsourced governance.

These outcomes are not the result of individual bad actors or policy mistakes. They are structural. Middle powers have played a central role in sustaining this structure, not as architects, but as administrators. They enforce standards that rarely constrain great powers but routinely discipline weaker states. They criminalize resistance while legitimizing proxies. They speak of sovereignty while managing it.

The sudden moral awakening of middle powers, when coercion approaches their own borders, does not signal a new global ethic. It reveals the long-standing double standard. What was realism when imposed on Africa becomes injustice when aimed at Europe or North America. The rules did not change. Their protection shifted.

For the Horn of Africa, this is not theoretical. It is the terrain of daily politics. Sovereignty is conditional. Aid is leverage. Humanitarianism is governance. Peacekeeping is management. The language of virtue masks the practice of control.

If a new world order is to emerge, it will not be built by states that only discover injustice when it reaches their own borders. It will be built by those who have lived for decades under selective law, managed sovereignty, and donor-driven governance, and who have long understood that the system was never neutral.

The tragedy of middle powers is not that they lacked influence. It is that they used their influence to stabilize a system that marginalized the powerless, while presenting themselves as moral intermediaries.

For the Horn of Africa, this is not a philosophical debate. It is a lived condition. And it is why speeches from Davos, however eloquent, sound less like revelation, and more like delayed recognition of a truth long known in places where the rules were always selective, and sovereignty was always conditional.