Realism is sometimes regarded as the foundational international relations theory. In this thoughtful piece, Seth A Johnston notes that realist scholars of international relations see the coronavirus pandemic as helping to validate the realist school of thought. But, asks Johnston, has the pandemic also exposed realism’s shortcomings as a source for successful policy?
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Is the pandemic not just a test for healthcare systems around the world, but an international contest for which country has the best political system? Did democracies really respond to the Covid-19 pandemic less swiftly than authoritarian systems – and if the determining factor is not the political system, what are the key elements in crisis response?
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Bruno Tertrais proposes a provocative list of trends might be exacerbated or accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis. The list begs the tantalising question of how each of these trends might impact on the progress and direction of the others. How might the decline of globalisation affect the rise in authoritarianism and the risk of conflict? How might sovereignism and isolationism retard responses to the ecological and climate crises of the Anthropocene?
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After COVID, the world may once again be flat and hyperconnected. Alternatively, coronavirus may be a turning point in the era of globalisation.
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Governments point to scientific advice. Who gets included in powerful expert groups, who gets sidelined and why? Why is epidemiology dominant? What values are implicit in behavioural science techniques like ‘nudging’?
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Former Australian politician, Dr John Hewson, now chair of Australia’s Commission for the Human Future and a professorial fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, warns that ‘the coronavirus pandemic should be seen as a dress rehearsal for what awaits us if we continue to ignore the laws of science, the physical world and the demands of several catastrophic threats such as climate change’.
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How appropriate is behavioural economics as a basis for making public policy? Should it be called ‘science’? What does the evidence tell us?
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By Mike Scrafton | For the moment, reducing reliance on overseas supply chains appears to be a big lesson out of the COVID-19 pandemic. But reluctance to regulate corporate and commercial activity has been a hallmark of governments across the world. Are neoliberal governments capable of reversing the direction they have been taking for three or four decades?
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Yuval Noah Harari thoughtfully examines the issues around the rush to put in place technological surveillance-based responses to COVID-19 pandemic management, and governments’ pivot to nationalistic solutions to problems which are essentially global in nature.
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New security issues presented by global warming, and now, pandemics, constitute existential threats. They go to the heart of national security, showing that the scope of national security policy needs to transcend traditional defence and law enforcement models by comprehending climate change, human security against pandemics, environmental degradation, food security, water shortages and refugee flows – to identify just a few issues.
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David McCoy makes some important observations on the relationship between the scientific and non-scientific elements of COVID-19 decision-making; the inherent limitations of modelling – particularly when dealing with a novel virus about little is known.
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In government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Evgeny Morozov sees a ‘feast of solutionism’ being unleashed. [W]e can see two distinct strands of solutionism in government responses to the pandemic. “Progressive solutionists” propose that timely, app-based exposure to the right information could “nudge” people to behave in the public interest, while “punitive solutionists”, by contrast, want to use surveillance infrastructure to monitor and manage daily activities. The risk, he argues, is that the pandemic will supercharge the solutionist state, … creating an excuse to fill the political vacuum with anti-democratic practices.
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The choices made by governments are not based on science, but policy, that mixture of ideology, politics, and pragmatism. Governments are operating on the basis of choices between a range of possible outcomes produced by modelling. That is, projections built on a range of assumptions and suppositions. Governments should not be able to avoid scrutiny and accountability for their actions by leaning on the authority of science.
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This German Council on Foreign Relations policy brief suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic could see Europe heading for a much deeper recession than the economic downturn after the 2008 financial crisis. The brief argues that governments can act to mitigate the effect on national defense sectors, but that to safeguard political and defense priorities, the EU and NATO States need to act jointly and decisively.
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There is a growing chorus calling for smartphone proximity technology to fight COVID-19. But smartphone tracking may not solve the problem, and contact tracing applications raise difficult questions about privacy, efficacy, and responsible engineering of technology to advance public health.
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Two possible paths to ending the pandemic exist, neither of which is guaranteed. In either case, the first step is to reduce the rate of new infections by social distancing; by drastically reducing contact between individuals. Another crucial component is diagnostic testing for SARS-CoV-2 infections.
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The COVID-19 crisis will affect the global geostrategic situation in a number of ways. Economic conditions within nation states and across the globalised world will have shifted; governments will be juggling austerity policies, tax increases and welfare demands. Liberal and democratic values, and confidence in political leadership, are likely to have suffered. And internationally, the future geostrategic situation could turn on whether China or the US bounces back best from the current predicament.
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While it is difficult to see an inflection point during a crisis, missing that moment is potentially catastrophic. To subsequently persist with former paradigms when the world has shifted is folly. The artefacts of neo-liberal economics—globalised production, transnational supply chains, international finance, the erosion of the welfare state, and the abandonment of responsibility to the faceless market by governments—have produced a world not-fit-for-purpose in a crisis.
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In an article in The Guardian, David Runciman shows how the pandemic has removed “one layer of political life to reveal something more raw underneath”. He writes, “As Hobbes knew, to exercise political rule is to have the power of life and death over citizens. The only reason we would possibly give anyone that power is because we believe it is the price we pay for our collective safety. But it also means that we
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Gloomy assessments of the status and prospects for liberal democracy are increasingly common, reflected in numerous surveys and a range of research which variously blames neoliberalism, globalisation, capitalism, media and the failure of democratic institutions. Governments’ responses to the Covid-19 pandemic seem likely to at best aggravate the current trend and at worst accelerate it. The prognosis for liberal democracy post-Covid-19 is not auspicious.
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