While
countries around the world have been rolling out emergency measures to respond
to COVID-19, and with millions of people contaminated and hundreds of thousands
deaths, few are actually prepared for what a post-pandemic world will look like
- the demands it will make of the societies left to populate it, and the extent
to which it will blunt the confidence and hyper-individualism that has
characterised the 21st century thus far.
At
the end of World War II, the need for a global framework based on shared values
and interdependence rallied political and policy elites to the cause of a
liberal international order. In the 70-odd years that followed, that framework
was gradually eroded by the combined forces of globalisation, poverty and the
unresponsiveness of mainstream political parties to local discontent.
Until
a few months ago, it seemed almost certain that the resurgence of the political
right from Brasil to Hungary, and India to the United States would
unambiguously come to define the remainder of the 21st century.
Autocracies would consolidate. Exclusion and xenophobia would dominate election
promises; and events such as the European migrant crisis would further the
logic for nativism and tougher rules on immigration and protectionism.
But
will the pandemic, the deadliest since the Spanish influenza, change all that?
Or will the neo-authoritarian character of the last two decades, culminating
dramatically in Britain's exit from the EU, be immune to the indiscriminate,
deadly spread of COVID-19, and the consequences of its universal reach?
While
even the liberal global north takes drastic steps to isolate, quarantine and
restrict the movement of citizens, in the long-term, the pandemic will likely
demonstrate that a world without safety nets, cooperation and deep cross-border
engagement is no longer tenable. Leaders and electorates will have to answer
tough questions about why they were caught unprepared, and the sustainability
of a planet dictated by climate deniers and political chauvinists whose ascent
to power has been enabled by a tradition of misrepresentation, manipulation,
and misinformation.
As
a result of COVID-19, governments not just in Europe, but from America to Asia,
have been forced overnight into solidarity and cooperation: coordinating
international travel rules, sharing information about public health management
strategies, fact-checking domestic news, and exchanging scientific expertise.
Like the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Western Europe, governments will soon need
to cooperate over fiscal stimulus and trade. That will be a big task for an
international system that, under the U.S.A.’s "go-it-alone" unipolar
shadow, has been largely inward-looking, driven by a lack of disruptive
innovation, and eschewed any real alignment of national plans or priorities.
Amid
a scalding oil-price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia, oil producers are now
being forced to discuss how best to stabilise the price of the commodity
against a backdrop of the pandemic.
American
legislators have called on the US to revisit its "maximum pressure
policy" of sanctions on Iran that have hit the country's ability to import
medical supplies. Tehran, for the first time in six decades, has approached the
IMF to help it fight the coronavirus outbreak. In the Far East, members of
Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party have voted to donate their monthly
salaries to help arch-nemesis China fight the outbreak. In response,
Chinese social media quickly filled with gratitude for Japanese well wishes.
As
the pandemic peaks, populists,in power, just like what happened to rump, will
inevitably face a credibility crisis. Many, such as Donald Trump in the United
States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India, were sufficiently
adept at dealing with emergencies geared at otherising a convenient enemy,
immigrants in the case of the former, Muslims in the case of the latter. But in
the pandemic, there is no visible, ethnically identifiable "other" to
strong-arm. Populists will face criticism for their inability to effectively
respond and contain the spread of the disease. It is for this reason, perhaps,
that Indian Prime Minister Modi hurriedly turned to technology by holding a
videoconference between heads of South Asian Association for Regional
Cooperation (SAARC) member states this week. But the fact remains that India
under Modi's authoritarian spell spent the last five years working against
regional integration, instead ratcheting up neighbourhood tensions, including a
lockdown and Internet shutdown for eight million people in the disputed
territory of Kashmir.
Finally,
in China, where the outbreak began, and where the rules against social media
bloggers and activists are strict, even the Communist Party has been forced to
realise the costs of restricting the flow of information in tackling the
outbreak, and the countervailing power of social media and the digital public
sphere in daily governance.
Will
COVID-19 trigger global political change?
There
are two reasons why it might. The first is that unlike "shocks" such
as war, earthquakes and famines, pandemics do not discriminate by geography or
human identity. By nature, pandemics are inclusionary, rendering borders
futile, and requiring global responses that are inclusionary in turn. Secondly,
unlike other security crises that preceded it - the World wars and regional
wars caused by the Uniteed States - governments will be unable to use the
spread of Covid-19 to silence opponents, since it will be harder to label
criticism in these cases as disloyal or unpatriotic. This will make regimes vulnerable
to leadership change, and offer an opportunity to marginalised political
parties to innovate.
For democracies and autocracies alike, COVID-19 shall, should, ultimately be a moral reckoning in the conduct of foreign and domestic policy, as nations' ability to grapple with the challenges of inequality, climate change and social mobility will stand exposed for all to see. Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan has already called on the global north to write off the debt of vulnerable countries. Whether or not that happens, government functionaries will certainly be held accountable for lack of regulation, commitment to social equity, and sufficiently deep cross-border engagement that preceded the disaster. And if and when the storm subsides, new norms will likely be needed to dictate how states behave with each other.
PALESTINA
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