Post by account_disabled on Mar 5, 2024 20:35:58 GMT -7
"What a strange time we are living", a Spanish friend of mine wrote to me yesterday. And strange indeed they are. We do not know when the Covid-19 pandemic will end; we don't know how it will end; and, for now, we can only speculate about its long-term political and economic impact. In a time of crisis, we are infected by uncertainty. But there are at least seven things that make this crisis very different from previous ones. The first lesson is that, unlike the financial crisis of 2008-2009, the coronavirus will force the return of Big Government. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers, many observers believed that the market distrust that caused the crisis would lead to greater trust in government.
This concept was nothing new: in 1929, after Cambodia Telegram Number Data the onset of the Great Depression, people called for strong government intervention to compensate for market failures. In the 1970s, the opposite happened: people were disenchanted with government intervention, so they began to trust the market again. The paradox of 2008-2009 is that mistrust in the market did not lead to a demand for greater government intervention. Now, the coronavirus will bring the government back hard. People rely on the government to organize a collective defense against the pandemic, and they rely on the government to save a sinking economy. The effectiveness of governments is now measured by their ability to change the everyday behavior of people.
The second lesson is that the coronavirus provides yet another demonstration of the mystique of borders, and will help re-emerge the role of the nation-state within the European Union. One can already see this in the closing of many of the borders between countries – and in the fact that every government in Europe is focused on its own people. Under normal circumstances, member states would make no distinction between the nationalities of patients in their health system, but, in this crisis, they are likely to prioritize their nationals over others (I'm not talking about immigrants here from other regions, but Europeans with EU passports). Therefore, the coronavirus will strengthen nationalism, although not ethnic nationalism.
This concept was nothing new: in 1929, after Cambodia Telegram Number Data the onset of the Great Depression, people called for strong government intervention to compensate for market failures. In the 1970s, the opposite happened: people were disenchanted with government intervention, so they began to trust the market again. The paradox of 2008-2009 is that mistrust in the market did not lead to a demand for greater government intervention. Now, the coronavirus will bring the government back hard. People rely on the government to organize a collective defense against the pandemic, and they rely on the government to save a sinking economy. The effectiveness of governments is now measured by their ability to change the everyday behavior of people.
The second lesson is that the coronavirus provides yet another demonstration of the mystique of borders, and will help re-emerge the role of the nation-state within the European Union. One can already see this in the closing of many of the borders between countries – and in the fact that every government in Europe is focused on its own people. Under normal circumstances, member states would make no distinction between the nationalities of patients in their health system, but, in this crisis, they are likely to prioritize their nationals over others (I'm not talking about immigrants here from other regions, but Europeans with EU passports). Therefore, the coronavirus will strengthen nationalism, although not ethnic nationalism.