Why this pandemic may put globalisation on its deathbed

Are the world’s governments and banks motivated to saving lives or saving their economies, asks Joe Corcoran

‘THIS is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history,” said US President Donald Trump last Wednesday of his decision to ban all travel from mainland Europe to the United States for an emergency period of 30 days, in order to contain the outbreak of Covid-19.

It’s a statement likely to unsettle those who have long feared where his notso-unique brand of reactive nationalism could take the country if faced with a real emergency — however, a great many more people, or so I would imagine, are likely to find it refreshingly on the nose after weeks of World Health Organisation dos and don’ts aimed at ensuring nobody talks about the outbreak in a manner that could possibly lead to stigmatisation.

It is not, of course, that fighting discrimination is an ignoble goal, or that we are wrong to fear a rise in racist and xenophobic behaviour stemming from the outbreak. There is, however, just about no way to seriously broach the topic in a time of emergency like this without signalling a deludedly precious set of political priorities.

In that sense, coronavirus is a far-right issue par-excellence. It simultaneously vindicates so many aspects of the us-versus-them, anti-globalisation worldview, and does so in such unprecedentedly vivid fashion, that we would be fools not to think this will lead to a greater vote share for right-wing parties and politicians going forward.

We could think of Covid-19 as the far-right version of climate change. Both are naturally occurring existential threats to the population at large, but where climate change cannot be solved without international cooperation, the key to stamping out coronavirus is radical self-isolation.

At an interpersonal level, the public imagination can run wild with fears about how every individual entering their country is a living, breathing biological hazard. Trump and his ilk have made many putrid statements about how immigrants, as an undifferentiated mass, are responsible for any number of terrifying crimes, in order to stoke fears about loose border enforcement, but never in their wildest dreams could they have cooked up a narrative as psychologically powerful as the one that has fallen into their laps here.

Fears of sickness and contamination, when they are not purely the ideations of bunker-based conspiracy theorists, run one level deeper than those of violence and disorder. What’s more, while we can actively distinguish criminals from non-criminals, in the case of coronavirus, even the most morally upstanding of potential immigrants can be painted as an exponential danger.

The worldview is vindicated just as surely at the structural level. Never has economic interdependence left so many first world countries in such a vulnerable position. The populist right has consistently decried the export of manufacturing jobs from the US and Western Europe to the developing world, in favour of a robust tertiary sector and an alluringly indecipherable ‘information economy’.

Now as Europe and Amerrightly ica face critical shortages in basic medical supplies such as masks, gloves, beds and disinfectants, China is in a position to deliver or withhold them as it sees fit. For Western economic powerhouses, saving lives could therefore mean making drastic concessions to a major geopolitical rival.

Even if most of them manage to come out of this crisis relatively unscathed, expect big reinvestment in key domestic manufacturing industries over the coming decade, to ensure nothing like this is allowed to happen again.

More broadly, the pandemic has thrown into sharp relief the absurdity of our adherence to global market norms. We are inevitably heading for a recession on the basis of this outbreak. Industry is grinding to a halt because intelligent people are refusing to go into work or to buy non-essential items.

As its latest round of battles with Italy reflect, the European Central Bank is as cumbersome and sclerotic an institution as ever, but even if they were to provide the liquidity we’re hoping for in order to stave off a 2008 level crash, they can’t do much more than that in a world reliant on hectic market solutions to a problem that has people

scared of coming into close transactionary contact with each other.

I have no doubt that many extremely well-educated Davos types could offer me terminologically dense, booklength justifications for why stabilising capital instead of bypassing markets entirely in the short run, is in fact the humanitarian thing to do, but trying to boil them down to an effective electoral slogan will be a herculean, possibly quixotic task. The thumbnail version of this — which the populist right will hammer home from Warsaw to California — is that one group of potential political decision makers cares about preserving your life, while the other cares about preserving your economic productivity.

Where the comparison between coronavirus and climate change runs out is in the impact it is having on the daily lives of ordinary people.

Although many proclaimed 2019 as the year in which people finally started getting the environmental message, aside from the odd storm or snow day, climate problems still sit behind a layer of ever-present abstraction. Ice caps may be melting, but, unless you’re a penguin, nobody you know has died because of climate change yet. If, in three months’ time, you can say the same thing about Covid-19 you will be a fortunate person indeed.

Harvard University epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch estimates that as much as 70pc of the world’s population could end up contracting the virus. With a 3.4pc lethality rate estimate, per the World Health Organisation, this is a problem which is bound to touch everyone’s life in significant ways. An entire generation of voters will draw worldview-changing lessons from what happens over the next few months. Right now, every indicator suggests that they will be moved in a distinctly rightward direction. The high watermark of globalisation is well and truly behind us.

‘Inevitably we’re heading for a recession on the basis of this outbreak’