Shooting the Rapids
COVID-19 and the Long Crisis of Globalisation
The COVID-19 pandemic marks a turning point in the 21st century.
The Chinese government first reported “cases of pneumonia of unknown aetiology” to the World Health Organization (WHO) on 31 December 2019. A week later, the new virus responsible for the disease outbreak was identified. Tightly connected global systems quickly spread the virus across the world. By the time WHO declared a global pandemic in mid-March, 114 countries had reported cases.
Governments everywhere have scrambled to contain not only a public health emergency that could lead to millions of deaths, but also the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s. Below the surface, a profound political, social, and cultural transformation is also underway.
In an interview for World Politics Review, Britain’s former chief emergency planner, Bruce Mann, said that the spread of such a virus “was always going to be horrible”. But in this pandemic, a good rubric for decision making is to expect the worst. And to prepare to face it with stretched resources and a workforce that from top to bottom is struggling with infection, exhaustion, isolation, and grief.
The signs of strain are clear. “It’s extraordinary how quickly things move and turn,” one UK government official has said. “There seems to be a narrative from some that there’s a fixed body of evidence on how to deal with things. It’s not like that. It sometimes feels like a game of whack-a-mole.”
“It’s extraordinary how quickly things move and turn… It sometimes feels like a game of whack-a-mole.”
The public is also under pressure. People struggle to juggle their response to the crisis and maintain some semblance of mental health. They have had to adapt to remote working and home schooling, to unemployment and isolation. The pandemic is creating new inequalities between and within countries. Life under lockdown is very different in a mansion in the Hamptons than in a shack in a Brazilian favela.
Bill Gates has said that the pandemic pits of all of humanity against the virus. From the local to the global, we face decisions about whether to act from narrow self-interestor in the wider collective interest.
In 2003, the world’s capacity to act collectively hung in the balance in the wake of the disastrous invasion of Iraq. “We have come to a fork in the road,” Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the United Nations General Assembly.
Seventeen years later, the situation is starker than that: we are on a knife edge, and it is razor sharp. Millions of lives, billions of people’s futures, and trillions of dollars depend on whether we opt for a Larger Us approach to the crisis or instead polarise into Them and Us.
Depending on this choice, one of two futures beckons. A breakdown, where infections and deaths are high, economic impacts are savage, and we turn on each other just when we most need to combine our efforts. Or a breakthrough, where the toll of the pandemic is still heavy, but our capacity for collective action grows.
A decade ago, Brookings published Confronting the Long Crisis of Globalization, a report that we co-authored with Bruce Jones. It warned of a turbulent period for globalisation in which risks would proliferate across borders as rapidly as opportunities.
These risks split into four broad groups. The pressure from long- term stresses — such as demographic or environmental change — grows inexorably, but shocks are the trigger for sudden change, with consequences ricocheting across interlinked global systems.
Global vulnerability is exacerbated by deliberate disruption, as malign — but innovative — actors probe systems in search of vulnerabilities, as well as by our own tendency to weaken these systems through stupidity, ignorance, and neglect.
Navigating the long crisis is like shooting the rapids, we argued, a metaphor drawn from Shell’s scenario planning in the 1970s:
During a transit through whitewater, a boat can takemany paths even though the river only ows one way. Many possible journeys end with the destruction of the vessel — on the rocks, hitting the bank, or with the boatcapsized and its occupants tipped into the torrent.
It is the river, not the paddler, which dictates the speedwith which the boat moves. There is no opportunity to take a timeout to rethink strategy or to reverse direction. The only option is to keep paddling, even as rough water makes it harder to control the boat.
Above all, we argued, the challenge is a collective one. As Scott Barrett puts it, the direction of the boat “depends not on the weakest rower, nor on the strongest, but on the efforts of all the rowers.”
At the heart of the paper was a call for a new ‘risk doctrine,’ a paradigm for international co-operation that recognises the potential for breakdown while maximising the potential for a breakthrough by investing in mechanisms for the management of shared risk.
This pandemic is the latest in a series of shocks. It was rooted in loss of biodiversity, shifts in farming practices, increased urbanisation, and other stresses associated with economic and social change. Its impacts are already being magnified by disruptive actors — both state and non-state. And the response has been hampered by astonishingly poor leadership in many countries, above all, the President of the United States.
As a result, we find ourselves in an especially perilous stretch of the river. The tempo is now controlled by the virus. Even best-case outcomes will be messy. And those who are willing to row together must resist both the spoilers who actively pursue a path of destruction, and the tendency to retreat into polarisation at a time when so much depends on our ability to work collectively.
The world did not enter this crisis in good shape.
The last decade has seen a grave erosion in our capacity for collective action. The Trump administration is actively hostile to global systems, while the European Union turned inwards during the Euro crisis and still lacks vision and unity. For the United Kingdom, until recently at least, there has only been Brexit.
Nor are there many glimmers of light beyond the G7. The 2008 crash saw the rise of the BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — as major powers. But today, many of the countries that once looked like new global leaders have slid towards authoritarianism, populism, or both.
The world did not enter this crisis in good shape, but systemic crises are fertile ground for innovations in politics and governance.
As a result, geopolitical tensions have grown alarmingly. This is an era of growing tension between China and America—friction that has the potential to degenerate into open conflict. The multilateral system is straining to adapt to these tensions, weakening its capacity to mount the “concerted global, governmental response” that former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has called for.
In 2008, the G20 was reshaped from a forum for nance ministers to a platform where leaders of the great and major powers agreed on a “global plan for recovery and reform.” In 2020, with Saudi Arabia and the United States chairing the G20 and G7 respectively, similarly forthright action seems out of the question.
But systemic crises are fertile ground for innovations in politics and governance. History is full of conflicts that led to new constitutional settlements, from the Treaty of Westphalia after the Thirty Years War to the United States’ Constitution after America’s War of Independence.
Both wars and economic depressions can also lead to sharp reductions in inequality, as the wealthy pay a higher share of taxes and governments intervene to cut the slice of the cake taken by investors. They can also trigger the rebuilding of the social contract, shifting the relationship between government and citizens, capital and labour, and the young and the old.
Past crises have also transformed global governance: the creation of the United Nations (UN) and Bretton Woods system and what would become the European Union (EU) after World War II; the emergence of the G7 from the 1973 oil shock; and the G20 in 2008.
The COVID-19 pandemic, so damaging in the short-term, could also lead to an international breakthrough that reshapes the world for good. As Milton Friedman famously observed, “Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.”
A breakthrough in the 2020s will only be possible if a foundation is built in the coming weeks and months.
In the first part of our report, we review three interlocking risks: a public health disaster that is unlikely to end fully for two years; an economic, employment, and financial crisis that will take five years or more to unfold; and a political, social, and cultural dislocation that will transform societies over a generation.
The picture is daunting. As a rule of thumb, the complexity of the threat will continue to increase at roughly the rate that infections spread. Decision makers face being forced to play whack-a-mole for the foreseeable future. Better foresight is needed to help policymakers them catch up, creating space to look beyond the urgent to solve longer-term challenges.
When shooting the rapids, we are most likely to survive the COVID-19 crisis if we empower everyone to row, rather than centralising decision making, scaling up surveillance, and increasing coercion.
This will only be possible if we fertilise the ground from which we expect collective action to grow. After a period of denial, the world’s leaders now accept the seriousness of the threats we face and have begun to learn from each other. Every day, the knowledge they need to confront the pandemic grows. The speed of scientific innovation is dizzying — in public and private sector labs, but also on the frontline in clinics and hospitals.
Outside government, a dynamic, innovative, and diverse response to the pandemic has also gained momentum. In communities across the world, people have not waited for permission. Self-help strategies are proliferating, as they rally to feed, care for, and support those they live close to. Local stakeholders — businesses, communities, and ordinary people — are at the forefront of the emergency response.
This explosion of bottom-up activism may be happening locally, but it is organised on global platforms through a mishmash of “google docs, resource guides, webinars, slack channels, online meetups, peer-to-peer loan programs, and other forms of mutual aid.”
And while an unsettling proportion of larger businesses — and whole industries — are currently insolvent, others have rapidly adapted their business models to new realities. The shift towards virtual working is already irreversible. Entrepreneurs are undoubtedly seeding ideas today that will be the Amazons, Googles, and Facebooks of the late 2020s.
The fightback is distributed, and we should build on that. In the rapids, we are most likely to survive the COVID-19 crisis if we empower everyone to row, rather than centralising decision making, scaling up surveillance, and increasing coercion.
Part 2 of our report proposes a vision and practical steps for harnessing the energies of public, private, and non-profit actors and using them to rebuild the political, social, and economic basis for collective action.
But the central message of the Long Crisis of Globalization still holds.
We cannot manage a global crisis without collective action at an international level as well. Leadership is needed from international institutions, both in the short-term and through a vision of what can, and must, be achieved collectively through the course of a decade of action.
Solving global challenges involves the actions and beliefs of billions of people. But it also requires effective co-operation between countries, through the world’s multilateral institutions, and through the proliferation of networks and partnerships that have emerged to tackle transnational threats.
We cannot manage a global crisis without collective action at an international level as well.
In the Long Crisis, we argued against the siren voices advocating the unravelling of globalisation. “Without effective systems for managing risk at a global level,” we warned, “it will prove impossible to provide prosperity and security for a world of nine billion people. Localized resilience will not be enough, especially as an orderly retreat from globalization is implausible in the extreme.”
COVID-19 has already changed the nature of globalisation, perhaps permanently. When countries began to close their borders due to public health reasons, it was briefly shocking but quickly seemed to most like the only rational course of action. Just as freedom of movement within countries will only return slowly, physical borders between countries will be harder to cross than at any time in the past 50 years.
But, as we argue in the final section of our report, borders must remain porous in a broader sense, reflecting deep patterns of interdependence.
International health co-operation — much of which is happening through networked models, not simply through traditional multilateral institutions — is, of course, an essential priority. The politicisation of this co-operation — and its emergence as a forum for great power competition — could lead to large numbers of unnecessary deaths during the acute phase of this emergency.
Unprecedented co-operation will also be needed as the economic emergency deepens. Economists have called not for a traditional bailout but for a programme of economic disaster relief that averts “extreme suffering and permanent damage” to the economy.
This is not the time for naivety. During this emergency, global systems will struggle to fulfil all the functions that we might desire of them. International co-operation is needed to help governments firefight better, to provide security at a time when countries and people feel under threat, and to identify and protect the world’s critical global infrastructure at a time when it is close to breakdown.
However, the urgent should not be allowed to crowd out the important, as it did in 2008.
The UN Secretary-General has called for a plan for the world to recover better. The heart of this plan should be a sustained effort to mitigate the intergenerational impacts of the pandemic and renew the social covenant between old and young.
The world has shut down in order to protect its older people. COVID-19 is also a threat to the young, but their illnesses tend to be milder. If we were all under the world’s median age of thirty, the most effective response might have been to allow the virus to spread, while trying to protect those with pre-existing conditions.
We need a global commitment to quality education, jobs for young people, and stabilising the climate that their futures depend on.
As it is, the young are being asked to sacrifice and step up for the old. The vast majority accept that their parents and grandparents are our immediate priority, but solidarity between the generations must work both ways.
At present, more than 1.5 billion children and young people are out of their schools, colleges, and universities. Many may never catch up on this missed learning, damaging their prospects at a time when economic opportunities will be scarce.
At the same time, investment is being redirected away from children’s needs. Even basic immunisation programmes are threatened, with millions of children missing out on vaccines for polio, measles, cholera, and other infectious diseases.
In response, we need a global commitment to quality education, jobs for young people, and stabilising the climate that their futures depend on.
Older generations must support this action, but also be prepared to pay for it. School and university budgets must be protected and not diverted to pay for urgent health needs. A redistribution of wealth from older people with assets to younger people with little to their name will be needed. And 2019 must be the definitive peak for greenhouse gas emissions, with stimulus packages directed to promote an accelerating decline.
We call for a Larger Us summit to promote these priorities and to build an ambitious programme of action as part of the Decade of Action on Sustainable Development and to fulfil the Paris Agreement’s promise to keep the increase in global temperatures well below dangerous levels.
COVID-19 is the greatest systemic crisis that all but the oldest citizens around the world have lived through. It hit when many institutions and the social fabric were already looking worn.
We now face one of two futures: a breakdown, where infections and deaths are very high, economic impacts are savage, and we turn on each other just when we most need to combine our efforts; or a breakthrough, where the toll of the pandemic is still heavy, but our capacity for collective action grows.
Whether we face a breakdown or breakthrough depends on choices made by thousands of political leaders, millions of organisations and groups, and billions of people.
The major powers will not shape this reimagining on their own, and they may actively oppose it. New forms of co-operation will therefore be needed that draw on new sources of leadership, that bind together states in what will often be uneasy alliances, and that thoroughly blur the line between state and non-state actors.
Which of these paths we take will be the result of a choice — or the aggregation of choices made by thousands of political leaders, millions of organisations and groups, and billions of people. As the long crisis of globalisation deepens, we are all the authors of a story being written in real time. And we still have time to make it a tale of hope rather than of tragedy.
This is an excerpt from Shooting the Rapids: COVID-19 and the Long Crisis of Globalisation. The full report is available to read now at longcrisis.org. For updates from the Long Crisis Network, follow @thelongcrisis on Twitter.
