The State and Global Politics in the time of the Pandemic

In an award winning article, “The International Relations of Crisis and the Crisis of International relations”, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed argues that the twenty first century heralds unprecedented acceleration and convergence of multiple interconnected global crisis —climate change, energy depletion, food security and economic instability. He goes on to note that these are deeply interwoven manifestations of a global political economy that has breached the limits of the wider environmental and natural resource systems in which it is embedded. Orthodox IR’s flawed diagnoses of global crisis led to their ‘securitisation’ leading to a lack of holistic approach to thinking about not only global crisis but their causal origins in social, political, economic, ideological and value structures of the contemporary international system. Writing in 2011 Ahmed did not add global pandemics as contributing to the multiple crises. However, his analysis seems relevant today in terms of its discussion of the structural flaws that the current crisis has revealed in the present international system particularly its inability to holistically interrogate systemic causes of the crisis. Part of the problem was that the pandemic occurred at a juncture when the global system was in transition and an eventual shift towards re-shaping global governance and the relationship between sovereignty, institutions and economic calculations was already on the cards. Here, there were predictions of a ‘new world order’ in the making, proposed by a China with more involvement in global affairs, openness to immigration and with the aim of building a global community of shared interests and responsibility through economic corridors.

Implicit in this was also the assumption that global dynamics related to the management of infrastructure across borders would contribute to the creation of semi-autonomous governing bodies and to a redefinition of social and labour laws and relations across a number of states. This would result not just from strategies developed by the Chinese government led companies but also because these would confront diverse relations between public governance and private policies about economic corridors in different states requiring the development of new forms of diplomacy and geopolitical projections and a subsequent redefinition of relations between representative institutions and the governance practice of global logistic organizations. It would also create the possibility of a situation where governance itself moves from traditional sites to the competing sites of economic corridors that would coexist on a global scale. The corresponding reduced emphasis on the sanctity of sovereign limits, that the proposed large scale logistical arrangements would necessarily entail, brought with it debates on how this would change the rules of the game as far as global influence is concerned. Along with this came suggestions about a waning of the sovereign state predicated on the logic of national territory, though not necessarily in the sense in which the ‘disappearance’ of the state was debated in the 1990’s. The pandemic questioned many of these assumptions particularly those that predicted the demise of state legitimacy.

The closing of ‘national’ borders and the general positive perception about state intervention in the face of the global pandemic brought into focus the renewed significance of the state in times of crisis particularly its role in public health and the fact that in such times trust reverts to what people are most familiar with, in this case the state. While the emergence of significantly stronger states bolstered by nationalist images of a ‘war’ against the pandemic will remain problematic, in terms of global politics the failure of ‘regional’ or even ‘global’ organizations to respond to the pandemic will eventually acquire deeper unease. It was also this failure of the ‘regional’ to offer support and a reversal to bilateral responses through transactional relationships that brought the state back into reckoning. Interestingly, in certain cases the state itself was challenged by the visibility and enhanced role of sub state/ non state actors seeking to acquire political legitimacy through policing roles and provision of public services. Drug trafficking gangs of Rio de Janeiro imposed curfews in the city’s favelas and organized relief in the face of the Brazilian government’s lack of action. Similar responses by the Taliban in Afghanistan and in the Kurdish led regions of northeast Syria may further reinforce alternative systems of inclusive governance particularly in spaces where the government is seen as ineffective or divisive. Generalizations are therefore problematic. While in certain situations the visibility of the state in public life will increase to the extent that its reduction in a post pandemic world is being questioned, in other parts of the world the economic fallouts of the crisis may well prove to be a pivotal test for survival of governments as economic distress strengthens social unrest.

While generalizations about the future of the state seem premature, the emergence of a new ‘globality’ is probably imminent. Sectoral de-globalization is also possibly on the cards with the understanding that global corridors of engagement may well be disruptive with the capacity to lock more people inside their homes than a war. The tragedy of the commons that this would create along with discernable ultra-nationalism may further question the legitimacy of international structures premised on the cooperative working of five big powers. While a holistic approach to the issue is the need of the hour the mechanisms to strengthen multilateral cooperation or even the capacity to intervene seems absent in the contemporary system. It is no longer important whose soft power triumphs in the post pandemic era or whether the global power centre shifts from the west to the east but how health security and global structures to protect it emerge with substantive monetary and disciplinary powers. A return to the ‘securitization’, that Ahmed refers to in his article and which the global community seems to be exhibiting at the present moment with each state acting unilaterally, scrambling to protect interests within its borders and creating separate supply chains may not be the optimal response to dealing with the causal origins of the present pandemic or its prevention in coming years.

Anita Sengupta

Director, AGA

20 April 2020