Philosophical Reflections on State Responses to the Corona Crisis: From Iceland to Denmark
Neither Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben or Thomas Hobbes can help us in this crisis. To avoid the Corona Leviathan and the permanent state of exception we need to first acknowledge that the crisis is real. Only by this can we evaluate which political measures are justified in the exceptional situation.
This text has also been published in an Icelandic version on Hugrás, Vefrit Hugvísindasviðs Háskóla Íslands: “Kórónan sem krísa fyrir heimspekina.” If you are working for a medium interested in publishing it, or parts of it, in your language, feel free to do so with the proper credentials (author: Ole Martin Sandberg, University of Iceland) and please send me an email at oms6 @ hi.is.
Corona as a Crisis for Philosophy
The global pandemic caused by the corona virus, COVID-19, is causing problems for the health and lives of millions of people around the planet, and incredible disruptions to societies and to global production and supply chains. It is also a problem for philosophy. It is difficult to write about this crisis as a philosopher who is in the habit of defending individual liberty and community empowerment against the paternalistic and authoritarian tendencies of the state, because here it seems that what is needed is exactly swift and decisive authoritarian measures justified in a strong paternalism: this is an emergency and the state is restricting our liberty in order to protect ourselves, not just from an “outside enemy”, the virus, but from ourselves and each other as we are all potential carriers of the thing that threatens our lives.
There are no easy positions here. Of course, an authoritarian theorist like Carl Schmitt might feel vindicated and say that this situation is exactly why the state was created: this is an emergency in which the state is justified in declaring a state of exception which is the ultimate proof of its sovereignty. Sovereignty, according to Schmitt, is defined precisely as the ability to decide when the state of exception applies and to bring about a total suspension of the law.¹ But even Schmitt runs into a problem in this crisis. For him, the essential feature of “the political” is the act of making the distinction between “friend” and “enemy”: true political power and sovereignty requires a population of those who are included in the political realm and are constituted by those who are constructed as existentially “other” — the outsiders with whom liberal discourse and legal arguments are not possible.²
The friend-enemy distinction is the foundation of politics in Schmitt, and sovereignty can evoke its power to declare the state of exception when the enemy threatens the unity or health of the body politics. But who is the enemy here? A virus yes, but a virus that can inhabit all of us and jump from one to another without concern for their political status. The distinction might have made sense for the brief period where we naively believed the virus could be contained to “outsiders” — foreigners, tourists, those ethically marked as “Chinese”, etc — but it did not take long for it to “go native” and now we are all potential threats to each other. There is no “outside” to define the “insiders” here: the enemy is all of us.
Opponents of Schmitt fare no better in this crisis. Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy draws heavily upon Schmitt and can almost be defined as one long battle against the authoritarian implications of it. Agamben is the anti-Schmitt. He rejects the friend-enemy distinction and critically dissects the way it has even from the beginning been part of the “human rights” discourse, as the ability to have rights in our time, and thus to be recognized as “human”, is essentially tied to being a citizen of a state, and thus be defined as one who belongs to a particular body politics.³ For Agamben, we need to reject this Schmittian concept of the political and base our political thinking on aterritoriality and exodus as primary concepts.⁴ The global virus is certainly aterritorial and characterized by constant exodus as it jumps from one body to another.
Agamben is also famous for his work on the state of exception and sovereignty. He carefully shows how the state of exception, even in Nazi Germany, did not come all of a sudden but was instituted gradually through an erosion of political and legal norms — in particular by the use of camps as frontline laboratories as they are already defined as being outside the law.⁵ Even as it became a dictatorship, the sovereign had to constantly refer to “the law” in order to justify the most atrocious actions. Emergencies and states of exceptions were invoked to justify the new laws which became new political norms. Rather than a temporary situation, the state of exception, for Agamben, signifies a change that always has the risk of becoming the new governing paradigm: The emergency is declared to give the sovereign unprecedented power, but it is rarely disbanded again and the power is not surrendered.⁶ We should therefore be highly skeptical of any such declarations of “emergency” that suspends established political freedoms and grant the state more power.
Agamben’s theory of the legal measures that ultimately made the Holocaust possible proved very useful after 9/11 2001 when states all over the world used a terrorist attack to declare a state of exception and impose new draconian laws that would give themselves unprecedented powers while eliminating basic rights and liberties of their citizens: the right to privacy, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, was all disbanded in the global “war on terror.” Agamben was right to warn us, because the state of exception never went away, the war proved to be permanent, the enemy was always somehow there, and the power was never given back.
Sadly, he falls flat on his face when confronted with the corona pandemic. We cannot simply import an analysis wholesale from one emergency to another. In his — some would say justified — concerns about the extreme measures some of the states affected by the corona virus have implemented and the condition of fear invoked in the general population, he falls into the trap of dismissing the severity of the emergency that is used to justify these measures. He downplayed the severity of the disease as nothing worse than the seasonal flu, naively cited flawed government resources claiming there was no epidemic in Italy, and even engaged in speculation in conspiracy theory about the disease being “invented” as a pretext for the exceptional measures to replace the threat of terrorism in the new governing paradigm.⁷
We can do better than that. It is possible to acknowledge that the threat is real, that we are in a real state of emergency which may require certain unusual measures, while at the same time be highly skeptical and critical of the ways governments are using this real crisis to expand their power in ways that are not justified and — even when they are — risk becoming permanent. This is a challenge. It would be simple if we could just take our usual philosophical approaches and analyses and apply them to this situation but that would carry the risk of not being taken seriously even when we have legitimate and well-founded concerns.
The first step must be to admit that this is indeed an emergency. Only by recognizing that the situation is exceptional can we be prepared to insist that the measures fit the situation and do not become permanent. People are right to be afraid and we cannot pretend the situation is normal. But we can still be critical. Now where do we go from there?
Hobbes in the Pandemic
I feel this difficulty personally. For the past few years I have been writing and giving talks about another real emergency: the climate crisis.⁸ I have argued that the crisis is most certainly real but that the general fear and anxiety it invokes can lead to contraproductive behaviors: Panic and inarticulate fear of coming changes can people to grant more power to the institutions of authority that claim to protect them and to demand that their way of life be preserved. This is contraproductive because the institutions of power and the “way of life” they protect are actually causing the problem. We cannot solve the crisis by clinging to and intensifying the structures that are the underlying causes of the crisis. We have very good reasons to be fearful, but we need to examine what it is that we fear in order to take constructive actions. The terrifying prospect might not be the collapse of the structures we know, but their continuation.
I have based my arguments in opposition to a close ideological relative of Schmitt: Thomas Hobbes. He invokes the “state of nature”, the condition of war of all against all, not — I argue — as a historical fact but as a warning about what will happen if people don’t heed his lesson and surrender to the given political authority and the status quo. He wants us to believe that society will collapse, and we will all become enemies, if we do not trust the sovereign powers that keep us from turning on each other. A function of that is to reduce the mutual trust among people that makes them into functioning and cooperative communities. Community, based on mutual trust and cooperation, is the antidote to sovereign state power. It is also what we need to survive the coming crises.
This analysis also faces difficulties in the current corona crisis. On the one hand, the pandemic strengthens the Hobbesian narrative. Unlike Schmitt, Hobbes’s sovereign does not need an existential threat from an outside enemy; in Hobbes the enemy is all of us — the state is here to protect us from each other. Few things could fit this narrative better than the virus. It has literally made us fear each other and turned us into the isolated individuals that Hobbes imagines we are “by nature”.
It is hard to cultivate trust and community when neighbors are afraid of getting too close to each other and when communal events are cancelled. Even worse, we have seen neighbors turning upon neighbors and demanding that the state punishes them for breaking the emergency laws or even just the social demands of abstaining from doing certain things like taking a walk outside or going shopping. It saddened me to see a campaign among immigrants in Iceland to have the state close the borders — even though I completely share their concerns and fears. Agamben is not wrong to fear the cultural panic caused by this crisis, making people demand of the state that it removes their liberties in order to protect them from each other.
State Responses: A View From Iceland
In Iceland there has been many demands that the state should close all schools and take more extreme measures, but despite a lot of initial hesitation and reluctancy from the government, there does not seem to be any scientific reason to completely shut down society which would be the result of complete school closures. We can be critical of a government that is obviously more beholden to the interests of tourist companies and was initially very reluctant to take the situation seriously, without going to the other extreme of demanding that the state turns into a full-fledged Leviathan. This is a state of exception but as such it only warrants those exceptional measures that are justified by the situation. It is the recognition of the exceptional state that allows us to judge which measures are appropriate and enables us to demand that they be abolished when the crisis is over.
That is the difficulty with the counter-Hobbesian analysis, because on the other hand the situation does in fact call for suspension of normal procedures and might warrant some state measures. Certain policies that we would never tolerate under normal circumstances can indeed be justified in the current situation. We want to preserve the freedom of assembly, but in this crisis it seems justified to ban large commercial and cultural events like concerts and sports events, where thousands could infect each other. But where does it stop? And when? In Iceland we have instituted rules of “social distancing” in the shops, limiting the number of customers, etc, but we can still go shopping, and we can still go for a stroll outside. In other countries the citizens are not allowed outside their home unless they have a valid reason: All freedom of movement is restricted. That, despite there being little evidence that the virus can spread by lonely walkers in the fresh air, and with the risk that people will get cabin fever and likely break the quarantine if they are completely locked up.
The difficulty consists in calculating which measures are justified and which are not. And we cannot know for sure until the crisis is over (and even then we might not know which policies worked and which did not). We can though, demand that less authoritarian measures be preferred when there are alternatives, and that they are measures that do not carry the risk of becoming permanent.
For example, the Danish government has proposed to use cell phone data to track all citizens — a clear suspension of the existing privacy laws — in order to track the spread of the virus. That approach is similar to, but also substantially different from, the one in Singapore and Iceland where the governments have made a tracking app that the citizens can voluntarily install on their phones and can opt to delete when the crisis is over. Sure, both are problematic in terms of privacy but I have little trust that a government that was legally granted the right to track the movement of all citizens would give up that power when the reason for the crisis was no longer present. There will be another crisis and the Danish government, like most other governments, has been desiring this power for a long time.
Perhaps an argument against the voluntary measure would be that the government does not trust people to implement it, but such an argument has it backwards: If people trusted the government they would be more likely to voluntarily take meaningful actions when asked to do so. The fact that the top-down measure is the first approach speaks to the level of trust between government and the governed.
We can also demand that emergency measures should be based in sound epidemiological arguments. The World Health Organization has not recommended wholesale societal lockdowns, as has been introduced in many European countries. Assistant Director-General, Bruce Aylward has actually warned against it as contra-productive because neither individual people nor societies will be able to tolerate that for very long; it could lead to a backlash and a renewed outbreak which would then occur in a devastated economy and a broken healthcare system.
Targeted measures are a different matter, not just from an economic point of view but in terms of political legitimacy: To isolate those who are confirmed carriers of the virus and those who have been in contact with them is very different from isolating everyone. If people know they are positive they are much more likely to accept the conditions of their isolation, especially when they know it will be for a specific period. People tend to have more trust when they have more information. To tell everyone to stay home all the time during the crisis, or to stay home “if you have symptoms” is to ferment uncertainty and non-compliance.
Of course, the WHO recommendation requires massive testing of the general population — something the European healthcare systems were not prepared or equipped to do after decades of neoliberal austerity. And to realistically expect people to voluntarily quarantine themselves requires that they do not need to fear for their financial security during the period where they are unable to work — something that is also undermined by years of austerity. Maybe it is the case that when the state has squandered its chance to protect people by providing them security, it only has the option of “protecting” them with repressive measures by becoming a Leviathan.
If all the measures are even intended to protect the citizens. The Danish government was quick to close the borders, and even used the military to do so, for all unessential traffic. There was no recommendation to do so and the Danish Department of Health felt compelled to go directly to the media to state that this was not on their recommendation, that there was little evidence that it would have an effect, and that it was a purely “political decision”.
The last part is probably closer to the mark than they realized. The decision to close the borders, and thereby frame the crisis as a national one with an “outside” that does not matter and an “inside” for which the government has responsibility, is in perfect accordance with the Schmittian concept of the political. There might not be scientific epidemiological reasons for it, but there were political reasons: it showed that the government was willing to take the drastic measure that the extreme right has been demanding for decades — an extreme right that the current government has been explicitly placating. It does not matter whether the measure protects anyone from a virus — it matters that it shows strength and a willingness to act for the sake of acting, to impose its will and prove itself sovereign.
Similarly with the equally nonsensical (from a health perspective) laws currently rushed through the Danish parliament, which would create the exceptional legal category of “corona crimes”. This bill will convert violations already covered by existing laws but belonging to the petty department into major crimes with mandatory prison sentences if they can be argued to have anything to do with the corona crisis (such as theft of hand sanitizer or social benefit fraud during the crisis). This has no relevance for managing the epidemic as the courts are not even prosecuting such crimes during the national lockdown, but again, it is merely meant to show that the sovereign is willing and capable to constantly take swift and strong actions.
Once it has started upon that path, it needs to constantly perform the same role, so new measures have to be invented repeatedly even if they make no sense from a non-political point of view. One need not be a conspiracy theorist to explain why the government responds to a crisis with more draconian punishments, militarization of the borders, etc. Those are simply the tools that were already ready in its repertoire. It responds to the crisis by doing what it usually does, only harder and with less debate.
While there is a need for measures that will disrupt the norm and change our behavior, it should also be clear that not all of the measures taken are justified. It is extremely troubling that governments right now are able to push through any legislation at all with even less debate than there was about the counter-terrorism laws passed in the 2000s.
Even more troubling is the cultural climate in which those who are merely questioning the policies are labelled as “enemies” who want the virus to spread and people to die — not by government officials but by regular citizens who police each other and demand complete obedience to their common master. I have seen this kind of interactions on social media and they are the kind of micro-fascism that is necessary for any tyrannical government to establish itself.
Protective Masculinity
Iris Marion Young, whom I have also borrowed from in my work on climate change, introduces the term “protective masculinity.”⁹ Patriarchy, she argues, does not only take the form of aggressive domination and oppression. It can just as easily, and maybe more often, take the form of a benevolent paternalism where the masculine and dominant figure (which can also be a woman) offers to protect the weaker parties against outside dangers.
That protection comes at a price though, because in order to receive that protection the others need to subjugate themselves to the will of the protector. Not because “he” demands it but because his protection demands it — in order to act decisively the protector must be able to rely on his household’s unquestioning support. There can be no quarrel or arguments in the time of crisis. The other members of the household willingly subordinate themselves and “happily defers to his judgment in return for the promise of security that he offers”.
Young used this form of patriarchy as an image of our relation to the state during the fear of terrorism in the years after 9–11. I have used it in relation to the climate crisis. But it applies with even greater force in the present crisis where people are not just expecting their governments to protect them but literally demanding and begging the governments to subjugate them and take away their freedoms in order to give them a sense of protection that may or may not be real. We laypeople have little knowledge about what actually works to fight a pandemic, but we want to feel that the government is doing something, so we demand spectacular actions. And of course, most governments are more than willing to deliver. Even if it is mostly a political spectacle.
Crisis as an Ideological X-Ray
In this crisis state ideologies are being laid bare with x-ray vision. The Danish state’s propensity for punishment, surveillance and nationalism did not come with the virus but has been present for a long time. The virus is merely another causal factor that intensifies the existing tendencies. Likewise, it can come as no surprise that the parliament of Hungary has passed a bill that grants prime minister Viktor Orbán power to rule as a dictator — Hungary has been on that path for a while. And of course the utter lack of organization, infrastructure, and competence that characterizes the US government’s handling of this situation is only revealing what everybody already knew.
In Iceland, what is revealed is a more subtle ideology. Well, a crude take on the initial reluctance and resistance from the government to do anything about this pandemic would be that the government is in the pockets of the tourist industry which is one of the backbones of the Icelandic economy.¹⁰ A slightly more benevolent take would be that the politicians all had a vivid memory of the nation just barely coming out of a financial collapse; this event was traumatizing and it was a bigger concern to avoid another economic meltdown than it was to save citizens from being killed by a virus (before we pass judgement let us keep in mind that economic recessions kill people too, as does extreme social isolation). I don’t think those explanations are wrong, but I think there is a third underlying factor which could help amplify those reasonings and suppress other considerations.
I have only lived here for 7 years and I will always be an útlendingur who doesn’t understand all the fine nuances of Icelandic culture. I admit that, but that is also part of what I consider the Icelandic ideology. This ideology, which is subtle and rarely spoken out loud, is one of exceptionalism. It is the idea that Iceland is a special and unique place that cannot possibly have the same problems as the rest of the world, and cannot be affected by the corruption and pollution and nastiness that characterizes the great mysterious “útlandið.” Iceland is pure and unspoilt compared to the rest of the world. We might have problems here, but they are our problems — our very special and unique problems, which foreigners could never understand. We do things our own way here and we know best how that is done. We are quite literally, an island.
This ideology was unfolded in the leadup to the financial crash of 2008. Iceland had a “Viking economy” — how could the accountants and economists from mainland Scandinavia with their spreadsheets understand what was going on here? And how dared they come and stick their noses in our affairs and question the solidity of our banks? We do not need regulations or guarantees or accounting like those corrupt investment bankers in the rest of the world, because we are innocent and pure. We do things our way, foreigners just don’t understand.
Something along those lines was present in the first period of the pandemic. Again and again the most inane argument for maintaining and promoting tourism was repeated: that tourists cannot contaminate this island because they do not interact with the local population. How the government officials imagine that tourists eat their dinner, do their groceries, get transported around, party at night, etc, is a question few people asked. Maybe it is a mystery to the government officials too, since they’ve probably never had to think about the people who work in this industry — people who are low paid and mostly also migrants and are simply not part of the epistemological reality of the people who make decisions.
But behind this argument is the underlying Icelandic ideology — the firm belief that Iceland is pure and safe from the diseases and problems that exist in the rest of the world. It cannot happen here. And when it started happening, the government was still resisting taking advice from other countries that had gone through it too. What would they know about how to do things in Iceland? We have our own ways. The virus surely affects us differently. They don’t understand.
Since then, Iceland has come around (even if it was forced to by other nations closing their airlines). Measures have been taken. We are no longer pretending it is business as usual. But we have also not shot down our society completely. Schools are still running, although at half speed (and in accordance with WHO recommendations). We can still go outside for a walk. We have not given over all our civil liberties and there are no signs yet of impending authoritarianism. I don’t know which country is managing the crisis best — only time will tell. But I am rooting for Iceland and other nations that have opted for a strategy based on more, rather than less, trust in their citizens. Not just because I live in one of them and would rather not have an explosive, deadly epidemic here — I do not wish that on anyone — but for the political example it would set. Corruption, nepotism and crony-capitalism might be among our problems, but tyranny is not.
References
[1] Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität, 2nd ed. (München & Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot GmbH, 1934), 11.
[2] Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen: Mit einer Rede über das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen (München & Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot Gmbh, 1932), 14.
[3] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, 1998), 8, 127.
[4] Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, First edition edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2000), 24,5.
[5] Agamben, Homo Sacer, 168.
[6] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2.
[7] Giorgio Agamben, “The State of Exception Provoked by an Unmotivated Emergency,” Positions Politics (blog), accessed March 30, 2020, http://positionswebsite.org/giorgio-agamben-the-state-of-exception-provoked-by-an-unmotivated-emergency/.
[8] Ole Martin Sandberg, “Climate Disruption, Political Stability, and Collective Imagination,” Radical Philosophy Review 23, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.5840/radphilrev2020324108.
[9] Iris Marion Young, “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State,” Signs 29, no. 1 (2003): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1086/375708.
[10] Not just the nation’s economy. The most powerful members of the government are personally connected to the biggest tourist corporations and have in the past blocked legislation that would hinder their profits.
