The Worry of Governance: Coronavirus and Emergency Politics

Pandemics are depressingly common in human history. We all know about the plague, cholera and the Spanish ’flu. What Dani Rodrick called ‘hyper-globalisation’ has stormed across the world since the end of the cold war and has resulted in massive increases in the movement of people, goods, capital – and now viruses.

So, of course it is right that the world at the moment is focused on arresting the spread of Covid 19 [1]. The immediate worry is for our individual and collective health. This is closely followed by a worry about the virus’s medium and longer-term impacts on household, national and global economies. These two worries are bad enough. But a third worry is on the horizon: what could happen to state-society relations and the functioning of states once the pandemic has been brought under control? Which of the unprecedented actions governments are now taking will have impacts – positive or negative – on these relationships and how? This I call the Worry of Governance.

Two strains of commentary and analysis are emerging regarding the Worry of Governance.

1. The first strain compares different responses to the pandemic across the world according to regime type: democratic versus authoritarian. Have the latter performed better than the former? 
2. The second strain seeks to go deeper and asks questions about the potential impact of what is called ‘Emergency Politics’. Emergency Politics is when something has happened that is so serious, so threatening and so outside the usual and accepted ‘rules of the game’ that states are obliged to take on new and hitherto unthinkable powers. After the crisis is over, will states emerge stronger or weaker as a result? And if stronger, will that state power be used for the benefit of the many or the few?

I consider each strain in turn.

Worry 1: ‘Democrats’ and ‘Authoritarians’

Has the nature of the state – the governance regime - influenced its ability to respond to the current pandemic? Are the denizens of the ‘hyper-liberal’ western democracies too flabby and ill-disciplined to practice physical distancing and stay at home? Are the leaders of these hyper-liberal western democracies too concerned about infringing hard-won personal freedoms and liberties to do what the evidence indicates is necessary to contain the pandemic?

Two pieces have been published in the last few days which reflect upon these questions. The first is by Francis Fukuyama (who else!) [2], who argues that, after the dust has settled, it will not be the nature of the regime that will be found to have determined success. Rather, Fukuyama argues, it will be about the extent of trust. Fukuyama notes that trust has two dimensions: trust in the state and trust in the government of the day. Trust in the state refers to the extent to which citizens believe that ‘the state’ (in this case the executive branch of the state) has the expertise, technical knowledge, capacity, and impartiality to make good judgements. That it is has an adequate number of people with the right training and skills to carry out the tasks they are assigned, and to do them in a timely and professional manner. This includes front-line health workers treating patients as well as Chief Medical Officers making higher-level decisions about issues such as quarantine. This differs from trust in government, which is about trusting those currently in power - those holding elected office. Fukuyama concludes:

When the pandemic subsides, I suspect that we will have to discard simple dichotomies. The major dividing line in effective crisis response will not place autocracies on one side and democracies on the other. Rather, there will be some high-performing autocracies, and some with disastrous outcomes. There will be a similar, though likely smaller, variance in outcomes among democracies. The crucial determinant in performance will not be the type of regime, but the state’s capacity and, above all, trust in government.

The second piece is by Rachel Kleinfeld at the Carnegie Endowment (author of sailboats, not trains). Kleinfeld argues that three things will determine the effectiveness of state responses to Covid 19: first, the extent to which governments rely on evidence, most notably from the recent SARS epidemic; second, operating within a legitimate political system which is trusted by citizens [3]; and third, the extent of state capability. Interestingly, after a well-written and balanced piece, she concludes:

If developed democracies cannot pull together to stop the spread of the virus, manufacture the goods the world needs to fight it, and make plans to jumpstart the global economy, China will do so. On the other end of this crisis, the result could be a decisive global shift toward its authoritarian model.

It is too early to tell how public perceptions will play out with regard to state performance, but my sense is that the post-pandemic debate will be more about the reluctance or unwillingness to follow the evidence and less about the fundamental nature of the regime. We shall see.

Worry 2: The Deeper State – and the longer-term implications of Emergency Politics

Little has been written about this strain of the debate to date – or at least little that has reached the public domain. The London Review of Books has some excellent podcasts discussing these issues (listen here), led by David Runciman of Cambridge University (Cambridge England rather than Cambridge Mass. for once). There are two dimensions to this Worry of Governance; one is international and global, the other is national and domestic.

The international and global dimension arises from the concern that addressing the threat of Covid 19 is exacerbating rather than ameliorating international tensions and pushing China and the US (and by extension their respective spheres of influence) on a trajectory towards intensified conflict rather than international cooperation. Apart from the political posturing and name-calling we see in Washington, the fact that most supply chains in pharmaceuticals (in particular) either begin or pass through China increases the vulnerability of rich western countries to trade embargoes and spats.

Countries around the world are now disrupting their trade ties, dismantling their air routes, disengaging their social connections and disassembling their inward capital flows. In a matter of weeks, it has become politically legitimate – even necessary – for countries to self-isolate. It is now normal to insist on the emphatic protection of national interests above all else. No longer is Trump alone in adopting an explicitly nationalist and isolationist agenda; every leader is now putting their own country first. The world has become more Hobbesian over the last decade, with realist approaches to foreign policy crushing more idealist ones. Covid 19 exacerbates these tendencies. Indeed, it has legitimated them; it has made them necessary. The question is once the pandemic is under control to what extent will the world pull back from an ‘us first, everyone else last’ view?