“Coronavirus Pandemic Will Change World Order Forever” (Henry Kissinger)
During the twentieth century the global elites in New York, London, Berlin and Moscow formulated three grand stories that claimed to explain the whole past and to predict the future of the entire world: the fascist story, the communist story, and the liberal story. The Second World War knocked out the fascist story, and from the late 1940s to the late 1980s the world became a battleground between just two stories: communism and liberalism. Then the communist story collapsed, and the liberal story remained the dominant guide to the human past and the indispensable manual for the future of the world – or so it seemed to the global elite. (From the book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" - Yuval Noah Harari)
The 2020 Covid 19 pandemic is moving towards stopping globalization, hardening the borders, freezing economies, and calling it the Third World War in history. The major disruptions we see in our lives are the first heralds of historical transformation in political and social norms. Now, the coronavirus uncovers structural errors of a system that has been deteriorating for decades. Economic inequalities, widespread ecological destruction and widespread political corruption are the result of these unstable systems that rely on each other to survive.
Coronavirus pandemic may reveal changes that may have taken decades to come within weeks. Like a crucible, it has the potential to melt existing structures and reshape them in an unrecognizable fashion. What might the new form of society look like? Whether in democratic or authoritative countries, COVID put 19 states in the driver's seat. Leaders have significant powers across countries. Increasingly, China and South Korea are leading to control the virus, while authorities are developing systems to track people through a variety of applications.
Time may not undo these technological changes. We have seen how surveillance and interventionism have increased in the United States and EU countries after September 11. Governments can always justify these strict measures for security reasons.
Examples;
The 'emergency law' adopted in Hungary will allow Viktor Orbán to rule by decree without time limits. This law is unlikely to be revoked after the crisis is over.
The Chinese government has brought state oversight to new levels, and experts say, "Coronavirus gave the Chinese government an excuse to speed up mass surveillance." Getting around China and entering your home or workplace requires citizens to scan a QR code to give their names, ID numbers and degrees of temperature, which allows the government to see your full movements in recent weeks. After the crisis, this surveillance tool has little chance of removal.
The European Commission is apparently watching what the Chinese government is doing, now they want to track telecom data to model the COVID-19 spread. The USA uses facial recognition and geolocation methods to track COVID-19 patients as well. Now the target may be to reduce the disease, but what if the crisis is over and the EU and the US are still able to access these surveillance tools?
The state of India requires its citizens to send a selfie to the government every time of awakening. The application designed for this will include GPS coordinates so that government officials can verify the person's location. You can imagine what they can do with all this data collected?
We are having a hard time and the world will be a different place when this crisis is over. Although liberalism has developed in the last decades, it seems that this global story of social organization has reached the expiration date. As Yuval Noah Harari wrote in his books, the rise of big data and artificial intelligence can signal the end of Liberalism and liberal democracy.
The democratic world order survived the 2008 collapse. This time he may not be so lucky. Assuming that the coronavirus hits world democracies as hard as we might have predicted, it could strike other surprising blows to the US and the international order it pioneers. If we now look at 2008 as the end of America's leadership after the Cold War, we can see this day as the moment when Washington's global authority really began to collapse in 2020. It is hard to remember now, but twenty years after the Cold War was a golden age for American power. Washington was a geopolitically supreme country; democratic practices and institutions spread over a wider area than ever before. The dynamic US economy was driving the world into a deeper and more profitable era of globalization than ever before.
The 2008 financial crisis first took back the flashy economic model of the United States and raised deep questions about the core competence of American leaders. Second, it has respected the thesis that autocratic governments can outperform their democratic counterparts in terms of stable growth and managing crises. Third, it turbocharged China's geopolitical assertiveness and increased the fears of the American downturn. In international relations, the psychological balance of power - the sense of who is rising and who is falling - usually changes much faster than the physical balance of power. The 2008 crisis dramatically changed the psychological balance and created a widespread and early perception that the American period is over.
The first of the above maps is the map showing the World Health Organization's plans to prepare for the epidemic of the countries before Covid-19. Note here the blue countries that are defined as yellow without plan or old with no plan revised. Also, check out the countries painted in green, whose plans are complete and up to date. The second map on the bottom gives the number of people per million killed by Covid-19 on 7 April 2020 on a country basis. Very surprising compared to that, in countries with full and good epidemic plans, deaths are badly high. Citizens of developed western countries, who seem to be ready for crises, will question their post-crisis management.
The State's role in favor of citizenship should be strengthened after this crisis. A strong state that puts itself first and limits the power of the elite. Political parties and pressure groups that demand private healthcare or transfer public services to private, encourage this and generate income from citizens will be the biggest victims of this process. On the other hand, China is already a global economic and financial power. The countries that are best organized in the fight against Covid-19 benefit from a strong state. Besides China, there are other positive examples. South Korea, for example, is a country that puts neoliberalism in the background. It is one of the successful examples in this struggle.
Is this exhaustion, the vanishing of liberal optimism, a beginning of the death of liberalism? Temporary emergency situations, calls for authoritarianism needed to be more prepared for pandemic challenges are like Moscow or Beijing. These countries should be seen as rivals of the liberal order.
Covid-19 has revealed the vulnerability of our ultra-globalized economy. We now understand how dangerously we are dependent on overstretched supply chains and especially the production capacity of the People's Republic of China. As for the boundaries, the main reason this plague spread so fast was that we didn't cover them quickly enough.
The Coronavirus epicenter of Europe was Italy on 12 March 2020. With a symbolic and rather ironic movement, an airplane landed in Rome, Italy, carrying 31 tons of medical equipment and antiviral drugs, including nine medical specialists and intensive care units, medical protective equipment. Chinese businessman Jack Ma, the founder of the Alibaba Group, offered to donate 500,000 coronavirus test kits and a million masks to the United States, which declared a national emergency over the epidemic in the second week of March. As the Economics Nobel laureate Paul Krugman said, China has been the 'workshop of the world' for the past three decades. Interestingly, now China has been positioned as the doctor and lab of the West. For more than two months, efforts to control Coronavirus in Europe and elsewhere point to a need for revisions in public health management, economic strategies, biosecurity and neorealism, capitalism.
The new pandemic has revealed the most cynical aspects of neoliberalism. The "Capitalism and Coronavirus" debate focused on whether the American model of neoliberal capitalism made the U.S. and its economy particularly unsuitable and poorly equipped to deal with a #Coronavirus sized health crisis. Jeffery Sachs, Director of the Sustainable Development Center at Columbia University; “We don't have a public health system. We have a special system for profit. We have tens of millions of people without health coverage. We don't have systematic tests. We are fluttering and with the proliferation of this virus, weeks have passed, the epidemic is spreading in the USA ”.
Governments can justify these strict measures for security reasons. But if democratic governments want to maintain their confidence, as the Economist wrote on March 28, "they should be as transparent and accountable as possible about how to use the sensor network that can coordinate the responses of individuals and the whole population." But it is also about governments being competent and confident. It is essential to include citizens and civil society in the control of these restrictions and monitoring activities. For the West, the output of locking the Liberal scenario otherwise can have dire consequences for accountability and stability.
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