Politics,
people and markets are similar in how they respond to crisis, from natural
disaster, to financial slump, to the onset of war. The instinctive response is
fear and uncertainty; followed by mitigation; followed ultimately by the search
for renewal in the wreckage of calamity.
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.
Capitalism, as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in
the Twenty-First Century shows, relentlessly worsens wealth and
income inequalities. That inherent tendency is only occasionally stopped or
reversed when masses of people rise up against it. That happened, for example,
in western Europe and the U.S. during the 1930s Great Depression. It prompted
social democracy in Europe and the New Deal in the United States.
So far in capitalism’s history, however, stoppages or reversals
around the world proved temporary.
The last half-century witnessed a neoliberal reaction that rolled
back both European social democracy and the New Deal. Capitalism has always
managed to resume its tendential movement toward greater inequality.
Among the consequences of a system with such a tendency, many are
awful. We are living through one now as the COVID-19 pandemic, inadequately
contained by the U.S.A., Brasil, India, and the worst of European capitalist
system, savages people of middle and lower incomes and wealth markedly more
than the rich.
The rich buy better health care and diets, second homes away from
crowded cities, better connections to get government bailouts, and so on. Many
of the poor are homeless or live in slums and precarious households. Tasteless
advice to “shelter at home” is, for them, absurd. Low-income people are often
crowded into the kinds of dense housing and dense working conditions that
facilitate infection. Poor residents of low-cost nursing homes die disproportionally,
as do prison inmates (mostly poor).
Pandemic capitalism distributes death in inverse proportion to
wealth and income.
Social distancing has destroyed especially low-wage service sector
jobs. Rarely did top executives lose their positions, and when they did, they
found others. The result is a widened gap between high salaries for some and
low or no wages for many. Unemployment invites employers to lower wages for the
still employed because they can. Pandemic capitalism has provoked a massive
increase in money-creation by central banks. That money fuels rising stock
markets and thereby enriches the rich who own most shares. The coincidence of
rising stock markets and mass unemployment plus falling wages only adds
momentum to worsening inequality.
Unequal economic distributions (of income and wealth) finance
unequal political outcomes. Whenever a small minority enjoys concentrated
wealth within a society committed to universal suffrage, the rich quickly
understand their vulnerability. The non-wealthy majority can use universal
suffrage to prevail politically. The majority’s political power could then undo
the results of the economy including its unequal distribution of income and
wealth. The rich corrupt politics with their money to prevent exactly that outcome.
Capitalists spend part of their wealth to preserve (and enlarge) all of their
wealth. The rich and those eager to join them at all costs.
Let’s take the example of the United States of America, the
greatest capitalist of all. Ih the US, the rich provide most of the donations
that sustain candidates and parties, the funding for armies of lobbyists
“advising” legislators, the bribes, and many issue-oriented public campaigns.
The laws and regulations that flow from Washington, states, and cities reflect
the needs and desires of the rich far more than those of the rest of us. The
peculiar structure of U.S. property taxes offers an example. In the U.S.,
property is divided into two kinds: tangible and intangible. Tangible property
includes land, buildings, business inventories, automobiles, etc. Intangible
property is mostly stocks and bonds. Rich people hold most of their wealth in
the form of intangible property. It is thus remarkable that in the U.S., only
tangible property is subject to property tax. Intangible property is not
subject to any property tax.
The kinds of property (tangible) that many people own get taxed,
but the kinds of property (intangible) mostly owned by the richest minority do
not get taxed. If you own a house rented to tenants, you pay a property tax to
the municipality where the house is located. You also pay an income tax on the
received rents to the federal government and likely also the state government
where you live. You are thus taxed twice: once on the value of the property you
own and once on the income you derive from that property. If you sell a
$100,000 house and then buy $100,000 worth of shares, you will owe no property
taxes to any level of government in the United States. You will only owe income
tax on dividends paid to you on the shares you own. The form of property you
own determines whether you pay property tax or not.
This property tax system is excellent for those rich enough to buy
significant amounts of shares. The rich used their wealth to get tax laws
written that way for them. The rest of us pay more in taxes because the rich
pay less. Because the rich save money—since their intangible property is not
taxed—they have that much more to buy the politicians who secure such a tax
system for them. And that tax system worsens inequality of wealth and income.
Unequal economic distributions finance unequal cultural outcomes.
For example, the goal of a unifying, democratizing public school system has
always been subverted by economic inequality in the US, and in my country,
Brasil, for the last 55 years. In general (with few exceptions), the better
schools cost more to attend. The tutors needed to help struggling students are
affordable for the rich but less so for everyone else. The children of the
wealthy get the private schools, books, quiet rooms, computers, educational
trips, extra art and music lessons, and virtually everything else needed for
higher educational achievement.
Unequal economic distributions finance unequal “natural” outcomes.
The U.S., Brasil and Europe now display two differently priced foods. Rich
people can afford “organic” while the rest of the population worry but still
buy “conventional” food for budget reasons. Countless studies indicate the
dangers of herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, food processing
methods, and additives. Nonetheless, the two-price food system delivers the
better, safer food more to the rich than to everyone else. Likewise, the rich
buy the safer automobiles, more safely equip their homes, and clean and filter
the water they drink and the air they breathe. No wonder the rich live years
longer on average than other people. Inequality is often fatal, not just during
pandemics.
In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle worried about and discussed
the threat to community, to social cohesion, posed by inequalities of wealth
and income. They criticized markets as institutions because, in their view,
markets facilitated and aggravated income and wealth inequalities. But modern
capitalism sanctifies markets and has thus conveniently forgotten Plato’s and
Aristotle’s cautions and warnings about markets and inequality.
The thousands of years since Plato and Aristotle have seen
countless critiques, reforms, and revolutions directed against wealth and income
inequalities. Why did so many heroic efforts at equality fail?
The answer concerns the economic system, and how it organizes the
people who work to produce and distribute the goods and services societies
depend on. If its economic organization splits participants into a small rich
minority and a large non-rich majority, the former will likely be determined to
reproduce that organization over time. Slavery (master versus slave) did;
feudalism (lord versus serf) did; and capitalism (employer versus employee) does.
Inequality in the economy is a root cause contributing to society-wide
inequalities.
We might then infer that an alternative economic system based on a
democratically organized community producing goods and services—not split into
a dominant minority and a subordinate majority—might finally end social
inequality.
Is it utopic? I am no Thomas More and his treat De optimo reipublicae
statu, deque nova insula Utopiais
still the reference of the “impossible”. However, as his Utopia is placed in the “New World” and
Thomas More links his Raphael's main character travels with Américo Vespucci’s's
real life voyages of discovery, and suggests that Raphael is one of the 24 men
Vespucci, in his Four Voyages of 1507, says he left for six months at
Cabo Frio, in my country, Brasil, before travelling farther to find the island
of Utopia, where he spends five years observing the customs of the natives, I,
as Brazilian, can at least hope that that Utopia might exist, or might be
created – perhaps in my very homeland someday in the future when my people will
have learned from the horrible Bolsonaro’s experience. I know it’s far-fetched,
but allow me to dream, a little bit, as this dreadful year 2020 is ending, but
the COVID-19 is still alive and kicking in.
Ironically,
the COVID-19 has been a blessing for the very country that spread it world
wide, China. The new coronavirus pandemic has created an opportunity for Beijing
to strengthen its burgeoning relations with Iraq’s semi-autonomous oil and
gas-rich Kurdish region of northern Iraq (KRI) through medical aid.
On March 8, the Chinese government sent 200,000 face masks to KRI
to help the Kurdish Regional Government's (KRG) efforts to stem the spread of
the virus in the region.
In the following weeks, Beijing delivered several other large batches of
medical aid containing different types of personal protective equipment (PPE),
medical devices and COVID-19 testing kits to the KRI.
The aid shipments were highly publicised and widely celebrated in the KRI. On April 20, for
example, China's Consul General to Erbil Ni Ruchi and KRG Health Minister Saman
Barzinji held an hourlong news conference to announce the arrival of
a new shipment of aid.
Speaking
in front of Chinese cargo planes at the Erbil International Airport, Ruchi said
China was going to be "a friend of the people of the Kurdistan region
during hard times". At the height of the crisis, the Chinese Consul
General also appeared on local TV channels in KRI, offering advice to
the Kurdish people on how to take the necessary measures to contain the
virus.
China also sent a medical team to the Kurdish region
to help the KRG. During their four-day visit, Chinese doctors visited
local hospitals and held panels to share their experience in treating
coronavirus infections with their Kurdish counterparts.
Chinese
companies also chipped in to help the Kurdish region during the
COVID-19 crisis. On April 1, China Oil HBP group, a Beijing-based oil and
gas resource development company, donated 30,000 masks and 5,400
COVID-19 testing kits to the KRG.
Sino-Kurdish
relations are relatively new despite the overwhelming influence communist
China's founding father Mao Zedong's political thoughts had on the Kurdish
freedom movement.
China
only started to become a real diplomatic and trade partner to Iraqi Kurds after
the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government in 2003.
Jalal
al-Talabani, then leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) who
would later become president of Iraq, paid an informal visit to China in early
August 2003. Subsequently, delegations from the PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic
Party (KDP) visited China. These visits were promptly reciprocated by senior
Chinese officials.
In
December 2014, when the ISIL (ISIS) group was at the peak of its strength in
Iraq, China showed its support for the Kurdish people and the regional government
by opening a consulate general in Erbil. China chose to send delegates to the
region at such a dangerous time because it believed the economic gains
it would make as a result of the move outweighed the risks. At the time,
the KRG had already taken control of the oil-rich province of Kirkuk
and built a link to connect the oilfields there to its newly built
pipeline to Turkey, raising its oil production to 400,000 barrels per
day.
Last
year, China visibly increased its efforts to strengthen ties with the region.
In
April 2019, Li Jun from Communist Party of China's (CPC) Central Committee
paid a visit to Erbil and officially invited KRI President Nechirvan Barzani to
Beijing. Li told Barzani that China's President Xi Jinping "recognises the
vital role the Kurdistan Region played in combating terrorism and
defeating the so-called Islamic State".
A
few months later, in August, the Chinese Consul to Erbil, Ruchi, launched the
official Facebook page of the consulate with a video message. In the Kurdish language
message, Ruchi said the Chinese government is eager to develop its relations
with the KRG, highlighting the two peoples' historic "friendship"
that dates back to the ancient Silk Road.
In
October 2019, a delegation from the Chawy Kurd Center for Political
Development, a Kurdish political education NGO, visited China on the invitation
of the Chinese government to promote Sino-Kurdish ties. The same month, the
centre published "China's Governance", a
two-volume book authored by President Xi in which he highlights his
thoughts on governance, economic development, and leadership.
Also
in October, the KRC's first Chinese language department was opened at
Erbil's Salahadin University. Subsequently, in November 2019, a Chinese
cultural and commercial centre was established in the region for the first
time.
Despite
these efforts, China's relationship with the KRG remained limited and
superficial until recently. The COVID-19 crisis, however, finally provided
China with the opportunity to deepen and expand its relationship with the
region and emerge as a strong strategic partner that could offer crucial help
in times of need.
Indeed,
during the coronavirus crisis, Beijing's image and prominence in the Kurdish
region have improved significantly. Common Kurds who previously viewed
China solely as an exporter of cheap but poor quality goods and products
started to perceive Beijing as a global power that could provide the region
with much needed economic and structural support. Moreover, more and more Kurds
started to acknowledge China as an effective and powerful actor in the Middle
Eastern political arena that could influence the KRG's future international
prospects.
China
has a lot to gain from strengthening its ties with Erbil. If Beijing succeeds
in becoming a prominent player in the KRG, it can not only make significant
trade gains, but also use it as leverage against Turkey.
In
recent years, Turkey has become a sanctuary for political organisations and
NGOs that are working to end the persecution of the Turkic Uighur minority in
China. The Turkish government has also been vocal on the issue, calling on
international organisations and other states to sanction China for its human
rights abuses against Uighurs and other minorities.
China
can try to use its growing influence over the Iraqi Kurdish region to
silence Turkey through engagement with Kurdish organisations and groups
defending Kurdish rights in Turkey. Although there is no indication of such
cooperation yet, Beijing's investment in cultivating stronger political,
economic, and cultural ties with the Kurds could pay off in the long
run.
China's
rapid move into Iraqi Kurdish region could well be an opportunity for the KRG,
but it presents a problem for Washington.
The
United States has been the primary provider of financial, security, military
and political support to Kurds in Iraq since 1991. However, recent events
significantly damaged the relationship between Erbil and Washington.
In
2017, after Iraqi Kurds overwhelmingly voted for independence in a referendum
rejected by the central Iraqi government as "unconstitutional", US
President Donald Trump failed to support the Iraqi Kurds. Consequently, Iraqi
forces and Shia armed groups known as Popular Mobilization Forces
drove Kurds out of Kirkuk. And some two years later, the Trump administration
disappointed Kurds in Iraq once again by abandoning their brethren as they were
facing an existential threat in Syria. All this led to Kurds viewing the US as
an increasingly untrustworthy ally, and starting to look for other
supporters.
Today,
China appears to be capitalising on Washington's fading popularity in the
Iraqi Kurdish region. Eventually, Beijing's multipronged outreach strategy that
is clearly already increasing economic, cultural and political ties between KRI
and China, could allow it to claim the role of primary global power in the
region.
The
Iraqi Kurdish region is one of the US's most successful state-building
projects to date, despite its failures and shortcomings in the rest of Iraq.
Moreover, the KRI, with its vast natural and human resources, has immense
geopolitical importance for the US and its allies. Washington, which is already
at loggerheads with China on many issues, cannot afford to lose the KRG to
Beijing.
But
the coronavirus crisis that allowed China to make significant inroads into the
KRG also offers the same opportunity to the US.
Erbil
still needs significant financial and medical assistance to manage the ongoing
public health emergency. The Kurdish enclave is in dire straits due to the
decline in oil prices and Baghdad's decision to cut its share of the national
budget.
Washington
can easily improve its image in the KRG by sending medical help and helping
Erbil and Baghdad reach an acceptable financial agreement.
Today,
Washington may well think Iraqi Kurdish region is not one of its priorities.
But if it does not take swift action to assure Iraqi Kurds that the US still
has their back, China can easily take its place as the primary benefactor - and
decision-maker - in the region.
