Thursday, March 19, 2020. TODAY IN THE NEWS:
The death toll in Italy soared to 3,405 surpassing China’s total as Europe and the rest of the world braced for a surge of new cases.
Panic grows as the number of U.S. cases exceeds 10,000.
The State Department is expected to advise Americans to refrain from travel abroad.
The U.S. tested its pandemic response last year and found significant problems.
As China reports zero local infections, a new study finds the death rate in Wuhan was lower than previously thought.
Takeaway #1 [19/3]: Evidently, there can be no coordinated response against pandemics at global level.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is tasked to do so but it cannot force countries to play by international rules. And, indeed, what we saw in the case of Covid-19 is that everywhere countries, large as well as small ones, took the decision to close their borders and try to isolate themselves from the outside world.
Global solidarity is mostly – and most noticeably – absent in the fight to stop the pandemic that has already killed people in the thousands and spread to most countries in the world. Other than the widespread hope for the discovery of an anti-virus, there doesn’t seem to be a global plan. Meanwhile, as best shown by pictures from empty airports around the world, globalization is at the moment virtually dead. What we are witnessing is the return of the national state.
TAKEAWAY #2 [21/3]: THE STATES THAT HAVE DEALT WITH THE COVID-19 CRISIS MOST SUCCESSFULLY ARE CHINA, SOUTH KOREA, TAIWAN, SINGAPORE, JAPAN. WHAT DO THEY HAVE IN COMMON?
They represent different regime types: autocracies (China), democracies (South Korea, Taiwan, Japan), and also the unique case of Singapore, which classifies as “liberal autocracy.” But they share other commonalities: they are all eastern-and-southern Asian nations with high capacity states that can reinforce public order behaviors, and effectively penalize misbehaviors. Save Japan, perhaps, they have relatively young populations (especially when compared to, say, European societies) and better health system infrastructures. They have advanced and (until now) growing economies, hence they can spend big. Let’s stay watching closely what happens next in this cluster of countries.
TAKEAWAY #3 [19/3]: THE BIGGEST SUCCESS SO FAR in containing the virus has been china, an AUTHORITARIAN STATE WITH DEEP POCKETS AND TECHNOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE, while several liberal democracies HAVE performED poorly.
Even when considering the distortions in information caused by state propaganda and the Chinese government’s censoring of criticisms of her mishandlings of the crisis, it now seems that China is the first country to have contained the virus internally. Already by early March, the reported number of new causes in it had fallen to a trickle.
Although China failed to contain the outbreak of virus in its early stages of development, the government adopted draconian measures to halt the spread. China’s bold response to the virus included more than a month of city-wide lockdowns in Wuhan and other areas, strict social distancing and the public monitoring of citizens, in addition to various methods of punishment and rewards to make people adhere to restrictive measures. The WHO praised China in these words: “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile, and aggressive decease containment effort in history.”
TAKEAWAY #4 [23/3]: WHETHER AUTOCRATIC (E.G., CHINA) OR DEMOCRATIC (E.G., ISRAEL), STATES ARE DISCOVERING BIG TIME THE MERITS FOR THEM OF USING SURVEILLANCE OVER PRIVATE CITIZENS AND TRACKING PEOPLE’s SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.
The thing is, to quote Yuvai Noah Harari in a recent op-ed for the FT, “temporary measures have a nasty habit of outlasting emergencies, especially as there is always a new emergency lurking on the horizon.”
TAKEAWAY #5 [21/3]: living in a state of pandemic, and pandemic fear, leads Societies in a new quandary: how much of indiVidual and political liberty are we willing to sacrifice in exchange for better protection by states that, in oder to provide security, have to rescind established liberties?
For many centuries, political philosophers thought that the main dilemma in democracy was the one between liberty and equality. And that these two are inversely related: when individual liberty increases, social equality decreases, and vice versa.
We don’t know exactly how things are going to develop, of course. But, at the time being, the pandemic seems to be creating a situation in which both individual liberty and social equality decrease in tandem! This is simply to say that, while restrictions of citizens’ liberties are horizontal, most of the crisis cost in societies will be borne by the poorest and weakest. Immigrants and refugees, in particular, will find it almost impossible to get a foothold in this new world.
Instead, the pandemic is bringing to the fore a new dilemma: Individual liberty vs. collective security. This is of the same type of dilemma that appeared in previous years in countries hard hit by terrorism, but now the dimensions are much broader as the fear is bigger, constant, and extends to an unknown future. Living in a state of pandemic means above all that human lives depend on (a) big states with (b) the capacity to enforce certain collective behaviors. It also means that the peoples’ top priority is access to security and health services that only big and efficient states can provide.
takeaway #6 [23/3]: populist-RUN states will find it hard resisting the authoritarian temptation.
First case in point: Hungary. Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán had Parliament giving him more powers during the coronavirus crisis, including the power to run the country by governmental decrees, which is to say, bypassing the other powers of the state. The important point to keep in mind is that such unlimited power by decree has no clear endpoint. How other populist democracies are going to react to Covid-19? How about Poland? Mexico? Brazil? Argentina? And, of course, the United States?
TAKEAWAY #7 [19/3]: Perhaps the major and most visible outcome of the covid-19 crisis, is going to be a new world order system led by China. This is likely to create a wave of authoritarian regimes WITH STRONG LOYALTY TO CHINA AND broad support FROM OWN POPULATIONS.
As it has now managed to control the spread of the virus in its own territories, and as global solidarity simply doesn’t exist, China has already mounted a humanitarian aid campaign in countries around the world, including Europe, struggling with their own outbreaks. This way, China is stepping into a role that once belonged to the West, particularly the U.S. which still continue their self-isolation tactics and further distancing their historic allies in Europe and Latin America.
