In a globalized war on disease, the populists are deserters
The Coronavirus should spur us to rebuild our global institutions
I keep hearing that COVID-19 is the final nail in the coffin of globalization. I am not convinced. In fact, if there is any justice, the disastrous mishandling of the outbreak should end the era of populist nationalism, and we may find globalization has only just got started.
Populist leaders — you know who they are — have thrived by making out that their nation is the greatest achievement in history and that it will continue for a thousand years. But the people of the world are facing a slew of global problems where politics dominated by rival nation states is not the answer, especially with charlatans at the helm. COVID-19 has made that plain.
It’s certainly true that globalization, as we commonly understand it, has lost its way.
Donald Trump has pulled out of a slew of international treaties, wrecked global trade governance and erected barriers, both literal and figurative. Vladimir Putin has dynamited the rules of war, assassinating, annexing, invading and abetting war crimes, continually stoking conflict to keep Russia relevant. The European Union, shaken by xenophobic madness from Britain to the Balkans, has carved up the Mediterranean into defensive zones of death and detention, leaving migrants and refugees to rot and drown. The levers of justice — the UN Security Council, the International Criminal Court and the World Trade Organization — are all in trouble. Arms races are back on. Walls are going up. Things are not good.
Surely globalization, which surged in the 1990s with a spate of international rule-making, is dead?
But wait. Perhaps populist leaders have overplayed their hand? Putin, Trump, Bolsonaro, Johnson and their fellow He-men have thrived on claims and promises that are demonstrably untrue. We’ve all been watching, mouths agape, wondering how long they can keep lying and getting away with it. Is there anything that can stop them?
Every man among them is in charge because he knows best, better than the experts, and certainly better than any foreigner. Every man among them is willing to take ruinous economic and environmental decisions to back up his own fantastical claims.
But cometh the hour, cometh the pandemic.
“Pandemic” literally means a disease that affects all people. It doesn’t respect national borders. They are just lines on a map. Disease doesn’t make exceptions.
The populists won politics by rewriting the rules and reshaping the game. COVID-19 has pulled the same trick on them.
Britain appeases, France goes to war
When the coronavirus COVID-19 blew up in England, Johnson was blithely bluffing, relying on bravado and a whiff of Blitz spirit. We’ll just resort to “herd immunity”, he said, a strategy that literally means allowing everyone to get infected so that the disease passes over and moves on. This was in keeping with the cult-like ideology of Brexit, which requires everything to be seen in terms of plucky Britain standing alone, like it did against Nazi Germany in 1940. The irony is that Johnson was advocating a strategy of appeasement against the disease, while France was going to war.
Meanwhile Trump was in his usual demented denial, dismissing the virus and promising it would vanish “like a miracle”. This was surely his Marie Antoinette moment. When the virus explodes, as it will, even members of his base will surely realise that the emperor has no clothes.
So, at a calamitous cost to the populations of Britain and the United States, COVID-19 may finally break the spell of the populists. As Johnson and Trump are learning, and this may yet happen to Putin and others too, Papa doesn’t always know best. We can’t function without experts — in this case, the World Health Organization, an arm of the United Nations that Trump is gradually suffocating.
If we manage to survive this pandemic without a terminal collapse of the world economy, we may wake up to the fact that public health is a global issue, and that we have a global system and global standards because we need them, and we ignore them at our peril. Many citizens — especially Americans and Brits — are now asking that inconvenient question: why is my government doing things differently from what the world experts advise? Why does my leader think he knows better than science? Soon, perhaps it will be: why did I put my trust in an egoistical idiot?
President Macron has likened the fight against COVID-19 to a war. It’s a war where all humanity is on one side, led by the experts. The populists, meanwhile, have effectively deserted their posts. One day, we will look back over the ruined battlefield, and ask ourselves: how did we get into this mess, and how can we ever avoid doing the same again?
This was a question that was asked at the end of the First World War and the Second. Both times, we created institutions to stop the world suffering another disaster. After the Great War, the League of Nations was set up but it flopped and the Second World War ensued. After that, the world came together to create the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and (eventually) the World Trade Organization.
History is repeating itself: we are at war because we have undermined the institutions that were meant to protect us. COVID-19 has been allowed to explode because the global system has been sidelined and ignored. Exactly the same has happened in world trade and in international humanitarian law. But nothing has hit households in the gut like COVID-19.
Whatever doesn’t kill us…
It is a shock worthy of a blockbuster movie, as if an asteroid has hit the planet. Another 9/11, on a wider scale. It will trigger a radical change of perception about what matters, and what we are really capable of when faced with a life-and-death challenge.
Hundreds of millions of people are already hunkered down at home, communicating via Whatsapp and social media and using Zoom and Skype to work and study and travel virtually, beating the virus’s attempt to destroy us. This is a shared ordeal — the solidarity, the humour, the advice, it all cuts across borders. Those of us who survive will all wear the same veteran’s medal. And just like our grandparents and their grandparents, we will vow: “Never again!”
New habits are being formed. My kids and their friends are at school without leaving the house. Saudi Arabia, of all places, has called a virtual summit of the G20. How refreshing. How revolutionary. It remains to be seen if COVID-19 will put a noticeable dent in the unrelenting march of CO2. But at least we can now visualize the kind of radical action that we will need to take if we want to save the planet.
The populists have done little or nothing to halt global warming. Just like with COVID-19, the science is undeniable and the impact on human lives will be merciless, regardless of borders. Now we know we really can change, as long as nationalist leaders do not hold the world to ransom. But they are standing in the way of many things that the world needs to resolve jointly. It’s not just health and environment, there’s also internet governance, cyberwar, tax havens and nuclear disarmament. And — if we have an ounce of humanity and sense, we would recognize that human rights and migration are also global problems, not national irritations that can be ignored if we are on the right side of the barricaded national drawbridge. National governments are failing us again and again.
We’ve learned not to put any faith in predictions of “world government”. It may be an idealist’s dream, but the nation state has remained the indispensable unit of political power.
Could that change? Technology offers a new route for people to organize and influence political power. Social media fosters networks of friendship, support, resilience and shared values. For all its faults, it can turn international public opinion into a force that obliges national politicians to listen, not dictate. Most governments would never have liberalized gay marriage, for example, if international public opinion had not forced their hand.
Could COVID-19 really change the way our planet is governed? I can only hope. What I do know is that our countries have become dangerously selfish, and we need a reset. This is a moment to stand back and recognize that our problems, like our habits, have outgrown our national borders. The best way to solve them is not by re-electing someone who denies science, or who insists he knows everything better than all the experts.
