Does the COVID-19 Pandemic Really Change Everything?

It lies in the nature of crises that they come out of nowhere. We wake up one morning and the world is not the same anymore, it has changed, and we see ourselves suddenly confronted with a problem we had previously ignored or localized elsewhere. During such periods when it is “impossible to attribute a reasonably definite probability to the expected outcome” (Siegenthaler 1997, p. 752) of the events that unfold, many people tend to engage in wild speculations and premature analyses.

Perhaps nothing shows this better than the current COVID-19 pandemic, where, from one day to the next, every baker becomes a virologist and every journalist is convinced that this must be the most important and life-altering event since World War II. The post-pandemic world, we hear repeatedly, will be a different one. From personal habits to the foundations of our society: the crisis will change everything. I want to contest this view and contend that we can witness an unhealthy inclination to overestimate the impact of this pandemic on macro-political trends and developments. Although it may possibly accelerate or halt them for a brief period, there are good reasons to assume that our judgment of its long-term impact is clouded by the influence it currently wields over our daily lives.

This argument could be made in much greater detail but consider only the financial crisis of 2007-08, which has been largely erased from the public memory already. At its peak, there was not a single day without someone declaring, with ample pathos and utter conviction, the end of capitalism, the end of neoliberalism, the end of life as we knew it. Then the crisis ended, the economy started to recover, and we all came to the realization that the world around us was still more or less the same as before. Both capitalism and neoliberalism are well and alive today, and even the banking sector did not suffer anything but a temporary reputation loss. What we learned from this crisis, we learned entirely on a technical level. We readjusted some parts of the financial machinery, introduced legislation that rendered it more resilient, and gave it an aesthetic overhaul. All the rest remained the same.

Re-Nationalization, De-Globalization?

Now let me draw your attention to one particularly popular claim about the current pandemic, namely that it will spark a renaissance of the nation state – everything seems to do these days. Why? Because, so goes the argument, only the nation state has risen to the challenge and proved capable of handling the fallout of the crisis. With international organizations and supranational authorities being sidelined, it is, once again, the nation state’s prerogative to define the rules of the game. This line of thought is emblematic for much of what we can read today. Intuitively correct yet misleading, for it conflates the description of what has happened and the prediction that this will constitute a long-term trend.

The first part is hardly contestable by anyone watching the news, although there are prominent cases where we did not see the nation state but its subunits – German Länder, U.S. states, Swiss cantons – at the forefront of crisis management. What is contestable, however, is the conclusion that the nation state has shown strength and demonstrated its irreplaceability during the crisis. Quite the contrary is the case. Within only a few weeks, we have seen so much helplessness and irrationality, so many uncoordinated and outright contradictory response attempts, that drawing any such inference is more than just questionable. Or, to reference Joseph H. Carens’ famous opening sentence from Aliens and Citizens (1987, p. 251), it is doubtlessly true that “borders have guards and [these] guards have guns.” Yet holding a virus at gunpoint is always an idle occupation, and so is cherishing the illusion that this eclectic mix of national solo efforts has worked the way it should. And, of course, that it constitutes a viable strategy to lead us through a future – perhaps even more devastating – pandemic. If there is any lesson to be learned from our current predicament, it is rather that blindly placing our trust in the nation state is a failure. A failure which may very well lead us into the abyss one day.

Yet many of those who cheerfully welcome the idea of re-nationalization are aiming at an even bigger prize: the end of globalization. For some strange reason I have never been able to grasp, many Western Europeans who benefit immensely from globalization revel at the prospect of its demise. Perhaps it is nostalgia for an imagined past; perhaps it is unhappiness with the present. Perhaps it is also rooted in the negative connotations that the term still exudes. Globalization, for all its numerous advantages, does not have a good standing in the public eye, and decades of populist diatribes have clearly left their mark on our collective disposition towards it. But even if we ignore the upside of living in a globalized world, the naïve, almost childlike expectation of an impending de-globalization should astonish us. As if globalization were a monodirectional process to be reversed at will, and not a highly complex and multidimensional phenomenon that penetrates the core of social and economic life in the 21st century. In fact, we may resemble the figure of the dreamer in Jorge Luis Borges’ The Circular Ruins (1964): finding ourselves solely concerned with our own agency, until we realize that it originates in the agency of someone else.

A Mere Fever Dream

Many similar examples have hijacked the feuilletons since March. At best, they are overly speculative or unrealistic; at worst, they are politically corrosive. Borrowing Edgar Morin’s (1984) distinction between the crisis as an event that reveals and an event that has an effect, I would argue that this crisis has certainly revealed a lot but is unlikely to have any lasting effect, at least not at the systemic level. And if I were to engage in further speculation, I would even consider it a more realistic option that, once we have managed to contain it, the whole COVID-19 episode will rather soon vanish from our collective consciousness. Not any different from a bad fever dream that we all have dreamt at the same time. Indeed, some dreams are prophetic and can have an impact on our behavior in reality – but most are not and, after a short while, we forget about them and simply go on with our lives.

Post Scriptum: Of course, none of this changes the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic remains a crisis and, as such, a reason for great concern. Nor does it devalue or minimize the important and interdisciplinary work of scholars who monitor the situation and critically assess it. I think here in particular of my colleague Lorenzo Piccoli who, together with Jelena Dzankic, has written an instructive blog contribution on how COVID-19 affects conceptions of citizenship. If you have not read it yet, you are highly recommended to do so.

Marco Bitschnau is a doctoral candidate at the University of Neuchâtel and a fellow of the nccr – on the move, where he works in the project Mobility, Diversity, and the Democratic Welfare State: Contested Solidarity in Historical and Political Comparative Perspective.

References:

– Borges, J. L. (1964). The Circular Ruins. In J. L. Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, 45-50. New York: New Directions.
– Carens, J. H. (1987). Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders. The Review of Politics, 49(2), 251-73.
– Morin, E. (1984). Pour une théorie de la crise. In E. Morin, Sociologie, 139-53. Paris: Fayard.
– Siegenthaler, H. (1997). Learning and its Rationality in a Context of Fundamental Uncertainty, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 153(4), 748-61.