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The geopolitical contours of a post-COVID-19 world

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Legislators wear masks to avoid the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) during the Legislative Council's House Committee meeting, in Hong Kong, China 24 April, 2020 (Photo: Reuters/Tyrone Siu).

In Brief

While the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy is more dramatic than any other shock in recent history, the consequences of the virus for the geopolitical order could be even more consequential. A radical shift in the global political economy may be imminent in the post-COVID-19 world.

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This shift is conditional on two factors. The first factor is the relative degree of economic recovery seen in nations affected by the pandemic. The second factor is the very different domestic political scenarios that now exist in many affected nations.

Before the pandemic, populism — and its coercive authoritarian tendencies which see the nation-state strengthen in a backlash against the multilateral-globalist order — was on the rise. The outbreak of the pandemic has provided an opportunity for most states to either increase or retract multilateral cooperation.

As the crisis unfolds, critical multilateral arrangements like the G20 are not presenting a unified front. The United States and China have also faced criticism for displaying weak global leadership.

The United States under President Donald Trump is showcasing an inability to lead efforts to fight the virus, let alone offer necessary aid to other countries. Instead, the United States has threatened to undertake protectionist measures to restrict exports of essential medical equipment to neighbours like Canada. Trump is also halting US contributions to the World Health Organization (WHO).

China, on the other hand, has utilised the opportunity to push its state-propaganda internationally, while emerging as a ‘costly’ global supplier of medical equipment. Despite providing for the increased short-term demand for medical supplies, China has continued to receive severe criticism for its information censorship.

In a post-COVID-19 world, many developed nations may consider disentangling direct trade relations with China and decoupling supply chains to restrict the flow of goods and services into and from China.

We are also witnessing signs of authoritarian leaders deepening their control over citizens and redefining sovereign command. China is already commanding greater authoritarian control over its citizens under President Xi Jinping. Despite the United Kingdom witnessing a surge in COVID-19 related deaths, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has in fact seen a rise in his UK approval ratings.

In the United States, Trump is using the crisis to draw more national attention to his upcoming election bid, projecting himself as a ‘wartime president’ and continuing to pursue xenophobic identity politics.

The pandemic has also eroded the credibility of organisations like the WHO. Steps taken by the organisation to exclude Taiwan from emergency meetings and praise of China’s response to the virus make the WHO look like ‘a mouthpiece for Beijing’.

As Yuval Noah Harrari argued in a recent column, the choices people and governments make today will redefine the world. Both sovereigns and their citizens need to be wary of the long-term ramifications of their choices.

One key pattern being observed in most affected countries is how the fight against coronavirus has fostered support for strong leaders.

For example, the nationalist government in Hungary passed a law in late March granting sweeping emergency powers to Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The law grants Orban almost absolute discretionary authority by sidelining all parliamentary process. He now has the power to rule by decree indefinitely.

This politico-economic shift is not new. During the 1930s — after the Great Depression — economic deprivation and rising unemployment rates fuelled the rise of authoritarian leadership across the world.

As Barry Eichengreen explains, ‘There was [in the 1930s] economic nationalism all over in the form of trade wars … there was Oswald Mosley’s antisemitism … there was the harassment and deportation of Mexican Americans, including even hospital patients, by the Los Angeles welfare department and US Department of Labor’.

These events gave rise to the New Deal and the 1942 Beveridge Report in the United States, which transformed the existing social, economic and political order.

The post-Great Depression financial world saw more banking regulations and the collapse of the international gold standard monetary system, which lead to the establishment of a new Bretton Woods order.

While parallel insinuations might be appealing, the post-COVID-19 political machinery might witness a shift towards the adoption of and preference for authoritarian, command-control governance too. A plea for both national and social security is likely to follow. For nations where authoritarianism is already deeply entrenched, there might be a centrifugal effect induced by the pandemic taking public sentiment away from a central-command model of governance.

In China, there is growing consensus that the party leadership under Xi failed in not only containing the COVID-19 outbreak but also in its handling the crisis due to the lack of political transparency. There is likely to be more pressure placed on China from the international community to take moral and legal responsibility for the spread of the virus. China’s foreign relations may not be the same in the new world. In the United States too, in a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, both democrat and republican voters said, by almost a 2-to-1 margin, that they approved of the expansion of the government’s role in the economy to meet the crisis.

Whether, in a post-pandemic scenario, a revival of political populism leads to a transition in greater government control, or change in a nation-state’s economic preferences, is yet to be seen. What is clear is that the social, political and economic landscape of the post-COVID-19 world will be very different.

Deepanshu Mohan is Associate Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for New Economics Studies at the Jindal School of International Affairs (JISA), OP Jindal Global University, India, and Visiting Professor at Carleton University, Ottawa.

This article is part of an EAF special feature series on the novel coronavirus crisis and its impact.

2 responses to “The geopolitical contours of a post-COVID-19 world”

  1. “Before the pandemic, populism — and its coercive authoritarian tendencies which see the nation-state strengthen in a backlash against the multilateral-globalist order — was on the rise.”

    “… the choices people and governments make today will redefine the world. Both sovereigns and their citizens need to be wary of the long-term ramifications of their choices.”

    “Whether, in a post-pandemic scenario, a revival of political populism leads to a transition in greater government control, or change in a nation-state’s economic preferences, is yet to be seen.”

    These are quotations judiciously selected from your article. Deepanshu. For one reason or another, these are remarkably loaded comments, especially the first. You clearly have a preference for a multi-lateral global order … but I cannot think why? Could you elaborate. I also feel you are doing a great deal of conflation here, mixing on the one hand a discussion of national authoritarianism in with a discussion of a multi-lateral globalists order. The links are not very clearly defined or argued.For a start, it is surely possible to reject or question a multi-globalist order through paths other than growing national authoritarianism.

    While we might baulk at the politics of Trump and others (much less so, I think Boris Johnson in the UK) one has cause to wonder as the extent to which your concerns — and visions — are disturbingly self-serving. Perhaps, though, this perception is in err, for want of clarification on your part.

    To make my point as precisely as possible, your global order points, surely, to a massively expanding influence – cultural, economic, and otherwise of the India and China, by far the two most populated countries on the planet. In part, because of the enormous size of their populations — in combination with the inevitably uncomfortable living conditions these numbers bring with them — these two countries have the most rapidly expanding diaspora on the globe.

    Indeed, the demographic implications of these numbers are, overtime, quite extraordinary, as, no doubt your research has alerted you. It is too much a matter of one-way traffic.

    It is not at all clear, why the other nations of the world would wish to fall in behind this. You are much too casual and careless in your reference to issues like xenophobia, especially when the traffic of ‘strangers’ is so, as already noted, mono-directional; you are similarly careless and casual in the negative connotations you apply to populism (although, I concede that, as a word, it has developed pejoratively).

    It is a curious thing that here in Australia, many thoughtful, well-educated, and insightful individuals see the post-Corona period as an opportunity to decouple this nation from the global political order you hold in such regard. Not least, a reason for this is a view that people such as yourself, so deeply engaged in economic matters and the growth of the global economy, give scant attention to environmental issues. No doubt, there is an argument to be made that economic develop can — assuming efforts to arrest population growth — extract people from poverty in a way that will aid poor nations and their natural environments. These circumstances do not exist in the developed world where population-fed economic growth can only do environmental harm.

    So there are pressing and entirely reasonable and coherent reasons to view the post-Corona era as an opportunity to make important and sustainable changes that would, necessarily, reject or seek to curtail or limit your version of global multi-lateralism.

    Your country has quite distinct needs and it will, no doubt pursue them vigorously. But permit us to pursue own without accusations or suggestion xenophobia and populism being levelled. Simply put, what is best for Australia or America or the UK will not necessarily conform to the needs of the developing world, and especially the two most populated within it. (This ought not, for example, be thought to suggest that the west should, say, not address global warming. But it might imply an expectation that India, China and East Asia more generally address population growth more earnestly and responsibly rather than expecting the rest of the world to absorb it … and accuse it of xenophobia if it does not!)

    I suspect your vision and mine might be able to meet somewhere in the middle, but that will require much more movement on your part, than mine.

  2. Dr. Graham Clews’ Comment on Deepanshu Mohan’s “The geopolitical contours…” is cogently reasoned and forcefully stated. I hope there is additional give and take between the two writers into each others’ insights, as they expand their thoughts for our consumption in this forum.

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