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Pandemics: a threat for democracy and an opportunity for international order.

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Giorgio Agamben, Italian philosopher, spoke recently again about the “State of Exception”, term used for the first time after 9/11, to show the risks for Western democracy to go towards totalitarianism. Besides terrorism, the world connected with information technology that spy on us started to erode democracy and freedom. But today the pandemics, more than terrorists or the Big Brother, are creating permanent States of Exception. The Corona virus is just the first one. Twenty years after the terrorist threat narrative now states have a new one: pandemics. And will be a longer lasting one.

Donald Trump won the presidency with the motto “America first”, inaugurating the idea of new competition in the international system, as I wrote three years ago on this E-IR article. This started to erode the Western liberal order based on cooperation among Western countries and also with the rest, to see if it was possible to transit toward a new world order, after 30 years since end of Bipolarism and Cold War. In the meantime, China tried to launch its race in the competition for the new World hegemony, taking advantage of American retrenchment, with the Belt and Road initiative. But no American or Chinese presidencies can do for the international order what a small germ is doing right now.

Domestic level: threats to democracy

The State of Exception is when the states are applying unusual extension of power, with the potential to transform democracies into authoritarian states. Even if we are still far from that, Western liberal democracies are more and more eroded in the last decades, with a process that we could define of authoritarianization making them increasingly resembling autocratic national models.

This State of Exception is based on the process of “securitization”, that transform an issue into matters of “security”, to enable extraordinary means by the state, and to make the population more and more controlled. It is always accompanied by the propaganda machine, the idea that something has to be sold to the population, before to be realized, and by the persuasion of the masses by the state using psychological tools as a famous BBC documentary showed. The problem is that today, with the current technological power, the mass surveillance can have new tools to closely monitoring people’s lives, with smartphones, cameras, drones and even bio technological tools (like in the need for checking the coronavirus infection)

Securitization and State of Exception happens for many reasons: risks of mass hysteria in social media times, fake news that fuel nationalism and populism, but mostly because the threats and challenges to national security and social cohesion are becoming more and more global but also immediate. This means that there are no borders that can protect from them and there is no time to discuss in Parliaments for solutions to acute crisis, when the gradual escalation become an explosion. This can happen for big terrorist attacks as well as for pandemics, natural disasters or even a meteorite that fall in the atmosphere (that by the way is still a possibility in the near future for the planet Earth).

Threats like pandemics, nuclear risks or natural disasters happen suddenly and give nation states no time to think, or debate in Parliaments, and no space to defend, with the need of creating global norms, and in future even a world government. Artificial intelligence and climate change are more gradual, but they also will have tipping points and moments of explosion. With the Corona virus crisis this has been evident. And nobody was prepared, not institutions and less populations, as usually happens. Italy has been the political experiment this time, like the US had been after 9/11. Italians were the first to be forced to stay home, actually more than a quarantine, in a de facto curfew, suspending Constitutional rights as possibility to assembly or meet together. The government had continuous interventions, with executive power growing at the expenses of Parliamentary discussion and sharing of information (actually the lack of clear information about the lethality of the virus is functional to the acceptance of extreme measures by the population).

The same is happening now with the rest of European continent, again the place for political experiments for the future of the world: the regional unification is the first example, and now with the emergency of the virus there will be a stronger unification, with the closure of the borders and even if initially the nation states tried to recuperate their sovereignty (some states closing independently the borders in the Schengen Area) the European Union retook the power. Great Britain is the only one that to keep economic growth and democratic survival will not shut down a society completely, also because made just in time to go out of the EU in a real clairvoyant way. They announced that the strategy will be to increase immunity and to accept in the meantime more losses: tears blood and sweat again.

But the point is that this democratic erosion is not eternal, and will see a Renaissance from the population, that will demand a new “social contract”. A social contract where the people will pretend from the institutions to participate more in the social security, in a new Res-publica with stronger social capital and a new resilience of the population. Modern nation states actually will have to develop it through a new “Civil Defense”[1] of national security (besides the military one) against these new threats for which the old national security institutions cannot do much.

This will make the Western democracy to adapt, transform and be born again, in a new style, more adept to modern times, where executive power is stronger because has the trust of the citizens, that will be able to control it with new tools.

International level: opportunity for new world order

At international level, the current international competition, after almost three decades of cooperation since the end of Cold War, is like a new war, but a nonviolent one. To make a winner it uses mostly economic power, but also soft power (and sharp one from the dictatorships like Russia and China). Until now China seemed to win. Now things will start to change.

China will bring more and worst SARS in future as they did in the past, losing its even small soft power of attraction (even if will try to regain it helping the countries around the world, like is doing now with Italy). To change a culture is not like to change an economic system: if Deng Xiao Ping was quick to open China to international markets, Xi Jinping will struggle to convince one and half billion of Chinese to stop eating and trading wild animals. But China is only one of the many countries from where viruses and pandemics could come in the future (as Ebola showed us). So, the international system will see competition among states, to make clear who will resist and react better to these new threats.

At the beginning the “natural selection” among countries with different abilities to survive and strive in times of crises will come out. Nevertheless, with the time the countries will try to create a new international order. These countries, the “winner” in the international competition in time of crisis (mostly economic but also social crisis, as the pandemics make people more depressed and less resilient) will be able to agree on a new international system, based on reciprocal support for the times of crisis. This initial natural selection will be based mostly on economic struggle.

The world economy with this pandemic crisis will create a gigantic shock that will force states to cooperate. With the virus there will be an economic crisis probably much worst that 1929. If we don’t freeze the system in the next few months, we will actually need a new Marshall Plan as weak countries will collapse, failing even in the West. We don’t have much time, unless we act soon 2020 will be remembered as the worst year of modern times in world economy, with the worst global economy and financial crisis until now. But maybe the renaissance could come from the green economy. Actually, with the virus for the climate change there are very good news: we had a big reduction in carbon dioxide and this will continue as more states are shutting down. This is good news also for the economy: we could come out of this gigantic crisis with new ideas for a green and sustainable economy.

Therefore, for global threats we will need international cooperation, even a new world government before the end of this century if we want the species survival, as the treats will be quite big (in particular pandemics, artificial intelligence and climate change). Actually, the human species will be able to survive probably only if it finds a way to deal with these global threats in a unified way, and the sooner the better, at least by the end of this century. Competition will make space to cooperation relatively “soon”.

Unfortunately, human race always come together only through real suffering. This virus will also make humankind more united, but much bigger pain will come. We don’t have to give up to democracy and international cooperation though, as they are the two pillars that made us come till here. We must continue this path. Will not be easy but we owe to our future generations.

 

[1] Civil Defense or Civil Protection is the protection of the citizens of a state from external attacks or natural disasters, following the principles of emergency operations like prevention, mitigation, resilience or emergency evacuation and recovery. It has never been really applied, even if the nuclear era made it a possibility, but today and in the future of our world will be more and more important, as the threats will not be military but more and more health crisis, natural disasters and maybe even spatial ones in the near future.

Americas, Europe, Middle East

Robert Kagan recent article “America’s Dangerous Aversion to Conflict”: looking always to the past instead of to the future

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Robert Kagan(1) is back. In his recent article on WSJ, with his classical realist pessimist self-fulfilling prophecies of inevitability of violent conflict because of “has always been like that”, he explains us that similarly to Europe after WWII, “who sought an escape from the tragic realities of power that had bloodied their 20th century”, the US, after Iraq and Afghanistan wars, “seems to be yearning for an escape from the burdens of power and a reprieve from the tragic realities of human existence”. And it goes without saying that for Kagan human existence is based on power, conflict and war.

In its very much debated and famous article written on the aftermath of 9/11, “Power and Weakness”, he explained to the world how the US and Europe were to be considered always on a different track in their approach to international politics, order and security. We had “to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world”(2). The bases of unipolarism were explained with this impacting analysis and the “New American Century” had to start, because Europe and the US had different identity and perceptions and could not go together towards a new world order after the end of the Cold War. Kagan believed that the European insignificance in solving major conflicts was based on its faith in the international law: European comes from Venus, with a vision of peace and rule of law while Americans comes from Mars, with a dream of “Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness”.

Let’s analyze more in depth his old “Power and weakness” article, to see from where comes his idea that “raw force remains a key element in international politics”. The sharp distinction that Kagan did between the US and the EU didn’t give much space for mutual rapprochement, as the US will always be more prone to the use of military force while European will always look for diplomacy and less harder interventions (like economic sanctions). According to Kagan this depended not only on different military powers and ability to project them (when European powers were strong they were using strength and martial glory, now it was the turn of the US) but on their identity based on different values: America has a Hobbesian vision of the world while Europe a Kantian one. So the European project and the mere maintenance of peace in Europe has always depended on the American military protection with the NATO presence (a clear realist view that deny any role to economic interdependence or construction of common values) not on the idealist construction of integration and institution of supranational sovereignty. Today, Kagan says, also “a majority of Americans (and of the American political and intellectual classes) seem to have come close to concluding not only that war is horrible but also that it is ineffective in our modern, globalized world”. And instead of considering it an achievement he defines it a danger.

My criticism to Kagan (and all the realists as Mearsheimer) is that even if he is right on shaping the differences of identity between the US and Europe and on the fact that European invasion from Russia could have been avoided overall because of American presence, the European “Kantian paradise” is not a result only of the US protection. France and Germany didn’t attack each other anymore not because of the American presence but because of the will to build a ‘new identity’, based on the European integration. As constructivism teaches us ideas shape policies and social practices creates new ideas and new identities. Plus the US never had fortunately the experience Europeans had of national ideological folly and war tragedies since millennia and this make the American realist analysis unable to grasp European reasons behind its evolution.

As Cicero said “history is master of life” so if Kagan and his realist friends keep just looking back to history,  from Peloponnesian war to WWII, just as a cyclical repetition, they are not helping to envision the future, on the opposite: they are trapped in a self-fulfillment prophecy of repeating the past. True, the European legal order is something that is still in process, but an international order based on law cannot be created “from the day to the night” (as we say in Italy) in particular in a world that is constantly shifting and moving from one side to another as our modern globalized, complex and liquid world. Each institutional building that change the bases of an international system needs time as it must change minds and hearts of people and political wills of states. The fact that the ICC born after many years of discussion (even if with many countries outside its sphere of action, like the US indeed) is a demonstration of that.

Besides this we saw also how long the American unipolar moment lasted, with the disaster of Iraq war and the consequences we are living today, so we cannot take for granted that the diplomacy is not a valid approach to security as much as powerful interventions. Even if the US is now still a “primus inter pares” it has not anymore the global hegemony, and notwithstanding the fact that is the world’s longest democracy and wants to bring freedom and happiness with its Manifest Destiny, we can say with President Jimmy Carter that “America didn’t invent the human rights, human rights invented America”(3). So it is time for the US to stand up to its democratic principles (created in the European enlightenment) also on his actions in international arena. America has to listen to other perspectives of great or less great powers overcoming the thought of being the only entitled power that have the duty to bring order to the world(4).

At the end of the day the recent diplomatic efforts of the US and Europe in the Middle East (Iran, Syria and Palestine) demonstrate that the US is starting a new track respect to what Kagan keep saying about the ‘inevitability of Hobbesian intervention’ (since already the “New beginning” speech of Obama in Egypt in 2004). And I believe that Middle East has to be let to govern itself sooner or later, as Jeffrey Sachs argue(5) , as the regional powers of Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia will have to decide by themselves if going on during this century with their cleavages and national interests or create a community of security and economic integration (as the EU did, even if after two world wars) for the stability of the region and as a seed of the future world order.

 

1) Robert Kagan is senior fellow at Brooking Institute, Council of Foreign Relations and co-founder of “Project for the New American Century”/PNAC (famous think tank that promoted American leadership and strongly influenced Bush administration). His recent article on WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/articles/robert-kagan-why-the-u-s-wants-to-avoid-conflict-1409942201

2) Robert Kagan, Power and weakness, Policy Review, June/July 2002.

3) Jimmy Carter, speech at FLACSO, Quito, Ecuador, 2009 http://www.cartercenter.org/news/editorials_speeches/FLACSO_042909.html

4) See on this “The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy”, William Pfaff, 2010.

5) http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/jeffrey-d-sachs-wants-the-us-and-europe-to-allow-the-region-to-govern-itself