The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic poses a fundamental question: Is this one of those historic moments when the world changes permanently, when the balance of political and economic power shifts decisively, and when, for most people, in most countries, life is never quite the same again? Put more simply, is this the end of the world as we know it? And, equally, could the crisis mark a new beginning?
Genuinely pivotal global moments, watersheds, or turning points are quite rare. Yet if the premise is correct, that there can be no return to the pre-COVID-19 era, then it poses many unsettling questions about the nature of the change, and whether it will be for better or worse.
For countless individuals and families, normal life has already been upended in previously unimaginable ways. But how will the COVID-19 pandemic influence the future behavior of nation-states, governments and leaders, and their often dysfunctional relationships? Will they work together more closely, or will this shared trauma further divide them?
Putting the COVID-19 pandemic into a historical perspective encompasses two-stage analysis. The first task is to analyze the pandemic itself as a global health setback. The second is to evaluate its consequences for national, international, and global governance. Currently, the focus has been on global health, plus the COVID-19 pandemic’s dire economic consequences. However, it is important to begin assessing how the world’s geopolitical order will be affected.
The fundamental question is: Will fighting the COVID-19 pandemic reinforce national governments as the core of the international system, or will new degrees of global governance emerge as a natural response to this global health disaster? In any historical process, there are always contradictory tendencies. The same will be true in this context.
The 1918-1919 Spanish-flu pandemic didn’t head off the nationalist movements of that era. The nationalist fanaticism that had produced World War I continued unabated and eventually led to World War II. The first war was fought based on alliances, and the second war was as well. The United Nations, established in 1945, signified an advance compared to the weak League of Nations created in 1920. But it remains an intergovernmental treaty organization, not a world government.
Its main institution, the Security Council, is based on five national governments, each with effective veto power. The conflicting policies and priorities of the United States, China, Russia, France, and Britain prevent unanimity on the most basic problems of international security.
Today’s geopolitical structure is often portrayed as a matter of rivalry between the United States and China for global leadership. This explanation has the virtue of simplicity, but simplicity is not the way geopolitics works. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Beijing’s Belt and Road program to build infrastructure connections with countries ranging from China’s borders to Europe seemed essentially a geostrategic policy; one channeled through economic and financial avenues. It intends to sway governments toward China, meaning away from the United States.
One part of the strategy is to increase trade and investment, i.e. the Chinese economic and political market share, in a given country. The other part, some people thought, was to ensnare foreign countries in a debt trap.
If these were Beijing’s goals, they haven’t been working out so well. Belt and Road projects are stalled in many places, while a number of the involved governments have turned to the United States for balance. Not least, China’s financial situation has deteriorated.
In any case, Beijing’s leaders know that global hegemony is very expensive; they have the instance of the United States to learn from. The idea that Washington and Beijing are the Athens and Sparta of our time, one power declining while the other rises, haplessly driving toward the Thucydides trap of inevitable war, is a simplification as attractive as it is false. China has little interest in military conflict with the United States, and vice versa.
Furthermore, attitudes toward China are inevitably colored because the novel COVID-19 coronavirus began in China. The pandemic could have begun elsewhere, but it started there. Governments around the world have, admirably, not stigmatized China. Nonetheless, China has work to do to reclaim its reputation.
In January and February, as the COVID-19 pandemic started in China, U.S. companies exported significant quantities of masks, ventilators, and other equipment. A week ago, it was the reverse. The first of 20 Chinese aircraft delivering medical supplies landed in the United States. China now is the largest source of masks and other medical equipment, including ventilators, not only to the United States but to many nations of the world.
Less widely reported, Russia has also supplied medical equipment to the United States. Are such developments a sign that global governance is emerging that inevitably one would say out of governments’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic? The answer seems to be no. National calculations have been reinforced by the pandemic.
The European Union is an important case in point: When the first European institutions were created after World War II, the total catastrophe out of which they were born seemed to create favorable conditions for moving beyond the nation-state, as the Europeanists put it.
After seven decades, nevertheless, the European Union is not the United States of Europe, and it will not become one. Nationalism has defeated the Europeanist impulse. If that was not obvious before, the COVID-19 pandemic has offered a clarifying moment. There is a French policy regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a German, Italian, Spanish and British one.
In trying to find sources of masks and medical equipment they even compete with each other, as well as with the United States. Besides, the historic north-south difference is re-emerging within the European Union, as it happened during the 2008 financial crisis.
The economically more dynamic and better-managed nations of Europe’s north such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries disdain the southern Latin countries, Italy and Spain, where the pandemic has been particularly severe. France is a hybrid case, with southern-grade contagion but better management.
At the level of world governance, the U.N. globalist logic has had a bit better luck. The World Health Organization (WHO) just announced a decade-long plan to reduce the 1 billion cases of various flu that occur each year, with an emphasis on managing the situation in poorer nations. However, the key U.N. institution, the Security Council, remains silent as national governments organize their national responses. Meanwhile, the WHO has come in for vitriolic criticism by U.S. President Donald Trump.
The issue with any global response is effectiveness and legitimacy. A powerful world government might try to impose a global, tightly run program. But such a plan would lack the legitimacy that only national governments provide because the latter represent actual peoples and nations. This is as it should be. Who knows what sorts of conflicts could arise out of a globalist intention to do the right thing?
Felix Larry Essilfie is the Executive Director of the Institute of Development and Economic Research (IDER), and a consultant with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Capacity Building Center (CBC). He is a member of the African Evaluation Association (AfrEA), International Association of Impact Assessment (IAIA), and International Society for Development and Sustainability (ISDS). As a Development Economist whose aim is to undertake research works that drive evidence-based policy decisions, Felix’ research interest covers areas including Health, Education, Agriculture, Political Economy, Behavioural Economics, etc. Email: [email protected]
