2023-11-13 09:00:09
“The world will never be the same again,” we have often heard people say during the pandemic. But, according to 50 Quebec researchers, the world “after the COVID-19 crisis” is far from having changed.
In their book The world after. The consequences of COVID-19 on international relationspublished this week, these researchers sought to understand whether the COVID-19 crisis has caused profound changes in health, the economy, international relations and society.
Frédéric Mérand, professor and director of the Department of Political Science at the University of Montreal and researcher at the Ethics Research Center, answers our questions.
Has the pandemic changed the world as much as we thought?
It’s still enormous, what happened in 2020. We can say that it is the first total global social event; it is the first time in history that we have a phenomenon which affects almost all dimensions of human life, all continents, all social classes. No one has escaped the grip of this pandemic.
Have we emerged from this crisis in a better position?
When we started writing in April 2020, among researchers, there was more optimism.
No, the world after is not better than the world before, if we can summarize that. The results are generally negative. I believe that there are very few lessons that have been learned about the vulnerability of all people.
But yet, you write that crises have often been the source of innovations in terms of cooperation and international solidarity. But not for COVID-19. What happened?
We believed that the pandemic would be proof that international solidarity can work. And there, that is not at all what we observe. The results are truly catastrophic from this point of view. It’s difficult to find good examples of international cooperation.
We haven’t seen a lot of solidarity during the pandemic, either within states or outside states.
If we think about vaccine diplomacy, it was done on the strength of the blocs: the Chinese and the United States gave vaccines to their allies. This is not what we would call solidarity, but rather geopolitical rivalries.
Small solidarity mechanisms, such as the COVAX program, have been put in place, but it is rather an observation of failure. It was not a great outpouring of solidarity and we cannot say that it left any traces.
In terms of international relations, there is a lot of acceleration of trends.
The pandemic arrived at a particular time: the end of 40 years of pax americana, of American unipolarity. The edifice of international relations was beginning to crack. And there, the pandemic leads all states to turn in on themselves. It was not a favorable context and the pandemic contributed to this erosion.
For example, the rivalry between China and the United States already existed, we had seen it growing for several years. But it took a turn during the pandemic and that continues to be the case. These two countries have not yet recovered from the decisions they made in 2020. They wanted to manage this crisis by politicizing it and saying that it is the other’s fault.
Countries wanted to make the COVID-19 problem disappear domestically by closing borders. It was the worst thing to do, although it’s understandable. And we continue to do this thing.
Still in 2023, we are in a world which accentuates the exclusively national treatment of problems, not only by closing borders, but by not cooperating with each other.
Open in full screen mode
Solidarity mechanisms, such as the COVAX program which allowed doses of COVID-19 vaccine to be shared, were put in place during the pandemic. (Archive photo)
Photo : UNICEF
Does this erosion of international cooperation have an impact at other levels?
The best example is cooperation in the fight against climate change. Essentially, we reduced our GHGs in 2020 because of the lockdowns. People said at the time that this is proof that, if we really want to, we are capable of reducing our emissions. We had hope in 2020 that this would relaunch climate discussions.
But the climate agenda has been suppressed by the economic recovery that everyone wanted to emerge from the 2020 crisis and which came at the expense of the environment.
It is an undeniable disaster. The solution found was to consume, produce and pollute more. Not only have we caught up with all the emissions that we had reduced, but we have even exceeded previous levels. People wanted so much to move on to the next step…
We can read in the work that the pandemic has caused the shattering of the deepest convictions in matters of tax policy. What has this crisis revealed?
The fact that there was such rapid and significant public spending, no one thought it could be done.
Of course, spending has not remained at the same level, but it shows a possibility that we had perhaps forgotten: that in times of great crises, the State can mobilize very considerable resources.
In Western countries, as we had not experienced a major war for 70 years, we had forgotten what a State does: it involves major expenses. The pandemic reminded us that this is something possible.
There has been a paradigm shift on what politics can do. It’s a bit comparable to great wars. This is one of the things where there has been a real change.
During the pandemic we also saw vulnerabilities, injustices, things that we didn’t really want to have before. This was revealed and made worse during the pandemic.
The State has put in place instruments so that no one is left behind in rich societies, but not in poor societies. We have seen that if you have the right passport, the right citizenship, if you have a house to protect you or if you live in a country with protection policies, it is crucial.
Inequality did not arise with COVID, but the discussion about inequality is more sophisticated now.
Open in full screen mode
The pandemic was an opportunity to become aware of the vulnerability of the supply chain, says Frédéric Mérand, professor and director of the Department of Political Science at the University of Montreal.
Photo : Archyde.com / China Daily CDIC
Has the pandemic increased the tension between free trade and protectionism?
Where change has become more lasting is in terms of trade policy. For the last 40 years, free trade has dominated; value chains had become global. We were used to buying products in nine different countries, on three continents.
It hasn’t gone away, but there has been an awareness of how vulnerable companies are with the supply chain.
And there, we see all the states in the world trying to reestablish their sovereignty, to ensure that they are able to meet their needs as much as possible in the event of an emergency.
This therefore means a rise in protectionism, the return of industrial policy, or the fact of investing in national industries, which has been a taboo for several decades.
Is it still possible to improve the world after? Or have we lost the momentum?
There were hopes in 2020. Most are disappointed as we speak.
There could have been a momentum in 2022, when societies were trying to rebuild themselves, to redefine international relations, but this momentum was stopped cold by the war in Ukraine – which has nothing to do with the pandemic. We have not had time to rebuild international relations since the pandemic.
This war has meant that international cooperation is currently at a standstill.
For us, writing this book was a gigantic collective therapy. But there has been no reflection exercise at the national or international level. Is it because people didn’t have time? Or because the situation in international relations was sufficiently degraded that no one wanted to participate in the discussion?
For this discussion to take place, the United States and China must agree to sit down and talk together. But relationships are rather cold and that prevents this exercise.
Many of these issues are perhaps seen by citizens as ideas far removed from what they can influence: the reform of global governance or monetary and fiscal policy and coordination between states.
But it is still important to understand them because all these policies are carried out by the governments we have elected. We have a real impact, even if it may seem distant.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
1699875383
#world #changed #COVID19 #pandemic #COVID19 #pandemic