The year 2020 was expected to be fraught with political turmoil. In preparation for the November general elections, America was warming up for a tense contest whose outcome was deemed decisive for the decade-long battle waged between populism and liberalism. The strong performance of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, proponent of a robustly left-wing agenda, threatened what had been the DNA of the Democratic Party’s doctrine: a centrist liberal consensus hitherto viscerally wary of upheavals and, crucially, of the world “Socialism”. In addition, while America was seething with the energy of a fierce electoral year, in Russia, a new constitutional reform project was sketching the future contours of what is the most disruptive geopolitical force of the last decade, Putinism. Europe was in the throes of the post-Brexit trade negotiation, and the void the UK had left behind was prompting a process of internal re-equilibration, which pitted two political brothers increasingly at odds: Angela Merkel’s Germany, who squarely opted for a conservative roadmap for Europe, and Emmanuel Macron’s France, hell-bent on a sweeping rethink of the EU. And, at the gates of the European citadel, war was reigniting in Syria over Idlib, brutally thrusting into a similar highly volatile arena, two of the major regional powers (anti-Assad Turkey and pro-Assad Russia), while simultaneously setting in motion waves of refugees bound for the Western El Dorado. Thus, the menace of a direct confrontation between the Russian and Turkish forces (heightened by the alleged bombing of a Turkish convoy by possibly Russian jets[1]) added to the noxious geopolitical stew of the turbulent Middle East, already simmering with a latent conflict between Iran and the United States.

    This was, as of February 2020, the political landscape of the world. For most observers, the burgeoning new decade felt plainly similar to the last, rhythmed as it was by populist bravado in the West, military unrest in the Middle East, rivalries in Asia and latent fears of economic slowdown or even financial crisis. “Business as usual”, one might be tempted to say. That was until an unknown infection from the family of coronaviruses sent history on a pivot towards uncharted territory. It took the world by storm, literally ripping apart in a matter of weeks the fabric of social life, as we knew it, and ushering in a historic juncture.

   What is COVID-19? The Parameters of a Global Crisis

   Coronaviruses (the name refers to the crown-like spikes on their surface) are a large family of pathogens and were not a novel threat; medical practitioners were well acquainted with its earlier strains, who could cause both benign diseases and more sinister afflictions, such as the 2002 SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and the 2012 MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome). The severity of the new strain (baptized COVID-19 in February 2020 by the WHO) is moderate: it had a mortality rate most likely inferior to 4%[2] and an infectiousness (called reproduction number or R0) of roughly 2.2, meaning that an infected person will contaminate on average 2.2 persons[3]. These metrics are reassuringly manageable when pitted against those of SARS (mortality rate of 9.6%[4]) or MERS (over 35% mortality rate[5]) epidemics, but they still are alarmingly high in comparison with seasonal flu (mortality rate of 0.1 and a R0 of 1.3[6]). Furthermore, the metrics of the Spanish Flu, which caused an estimated 50 million deaths between 1918 and 1920, should act as a sobering wakeup call. With a case fatality ratio of 2.5% (quite possibly widely underestimated, but again it could be the same with the novel coronavirus) and a R0 of 2.2, the 1918 influenza has uncannily similar mortality and infectiousness rates to the COVID-19. Most of the large scale epidemics of the 20th century, essentially respiratory disease, have relatively mild symptomatology and low mortality rates at first sight (at least in comparison to earlier pestilences such as plague, smallpox or cholera), but in absolute numbers they remain devastating. Even a disease with a mortality of less than 1%, such as the Asian Flu of 1956-1958[7] or the Honk Kong Flu of 1968-1969[8], can go on causing millions of deaths, a cost our societies are not ready to accept in search of an elusive “herd immunity”.

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   First traced in China in early January, the COVID-19 spread across the country and the globe at a brisk pace, despite the fact that relatively drastic measures were taken early on. In mid-January, the City of Wuhan and the province of Hubei were placed under quarantine order, but the virus was already circulating globally. Around the 20th of January, first cases were recorded outside China, in other Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea or Thailand, then in the United States (21st of January), Europe (24th of January in France) and Africa (14th of February in Egypt). On the 30th of January, the WHO declared COVID-19 a public health emergency. By the end of February, new clusters emerged in South Korea, Italy or Iran, some of them with no clear source of exposure – such cases point to large-scale community transmissions (meaning that multiple unrelated outbreaks can appear, and new cases were unrelated to the main disease cluster in China). On the 6th of March, the number of infections passed the 100.000 mark, out of which almost 3500 were fatalities. It had taken roughly three months before the 100.000 mark was passed; it took only 12 additional days to reach 200.000 infections. Italy issued a lockdown first affecting the country’s northern Lombardy region (8th of March) and then the entire population (10th of March), and other European countries followed suit. By mid-March, the WHO declared that the coronavirus outbreak “can be characterized as a pandemic” which is defined as the global non-recurrent spread of an infectious disease, for which there is no collective immunity. At the time of writing of this piece, and taking into account a dramatically volatile and unstable situation, over 183 countries and territories around the world have now reported cases. With the world effectively grinding to a halt, and, at the time I am writing this, more than 3 billion people live under imposed lockdown, while societies across all five continents are waking up to a new grim reality.

   A New Way of Working, Consuming and Succeeding: Towards an Acceleration of Digitalization?

   From a social and economic standpoint, it is still too early to muse on the fallout of the ongoing pandemic. Its effect might long outlive the actual bout of sanitary urgency, and prove a catalyst for ample societal tectonic shifts. There is yet no scientific consensus on the duration of the epidemic, and the different forecasting efforts must take into account a slew of unknowns and assumptions, such as whether the pathogen is affected by seasonal temperature variations. If there is indeed a seasonal affect, just like with all the other endemic coronaviruses, a new research from universities in Basel and Stockholm contends that the epidemic might dip in summer only to peak again in the winter of 2020/2021, causing months of disruption[9]. States such as the US[10] and the UK[11] are already bracing for over twelve-month-long scenarios, as internal documents reveal. However, it is not certain whether COVID-19 will display modulated transmissibility and dip during warmer months. In this case, another study conducted by the Imperial College of London shows that if unregulated, the pandemic might peak in April, May or June, and wither away once collective immunity is achieved; however, not before putting tremendous stress on healthcare infrastructures and potentially claiming millions of lives worldwide. Only protracted shutdowns ranging up to 18 months could mitigate the damage, by flattening the infection curve[12]. Other academics paint a less stark picture: a severe lockdown of weeks could plausibly strangle the epidemic, pointing to the Chinese, Singaporean or South Korean way of handling of the crisis[13]. Depending on whether the more drastic containment measures will span for weeks or months, the impact on the post-COVID-19 era will be vastly different.

   It is reasonable to expect a more long-term boom of flexible remote work arrangements and an acceleration of the digitalization and robotisation (robots cannot get sick and are already enrolled in offering logistical support to economies paralyzed by quarantines, for example, by delivering food to infected persons in isolation[14]) of our societies. These societal trends were already well underway, but the pandemic will likely act as a catalyst and break down resistance to change. Similarly, consumer behaviour might be durably altered too. Embrace of e-commerce, contactless payment options and consumption of digital, non-physical goods (especially in the entertainment industry) soared: China, which acted effectively as the Guinea pig (or a crystal ball) of the lockdown economy for many weeks before it generalized worldwide, witnessed a 3% increase in e-commerce transactions[15]. Largely, commerce-related activity for the months of January and February dropped by roughly 20%, so these numbers are remarkable. Mobile gaming companies, food delivery services and remote work software companies are reaching their revenue peaks[16]. In the entertainment and retail industries, for example, these trends are plausibly here to stay, and durably alter the way people consume.

   The imperatives of social distancing made digitalization a crucial aspect of the crisis response of most companies. The “digitally lazy” are the first to face extinction, so the pandemic reinforced a latent hierarchy between “traditional” labour-intensive economy (tourism, bars and restaurants, retail, manufacturing industries) and a much more dynamic tech-savvy business model, epitomized by the roaring rude health of companies like Amazon in these dire times[17]. A new operating architecture is emerging. Companies are moving towards an increasingly non-material “core” based on software, data and digital networks, which do not require more than intermittent inter-personal physical closeness. This describes the habitual white-collar work environment. However, other models require inherent physical proximity to function. The less a model builds upon physical premises and interactions and the more flexibility it allows (for both workers and customers), the better it seems to be resisting. In the post-pandemic economic ecosystem, these are lessons that might dramatically bring forward and accelerate an already burgeoning trend. Such evolutions might pose stringent questions on the long run, if they were to become permanent.

   However, they also raise immediate challenges: more than ever, the coronavirus epidemic exposed, in China and elsewhere, the digital divide of our still imperfectly digitized society. For example, the pandemic risks widening the gap between rural students for whom the closure of schools means all learning activities gridded to a halt and urban middle and upper-class pupils for whom the crisis will only mean learning a little bit differently[18]. Furthermore, continued access to educational and cultural contents depends not only on the material rudiments of connected life (an internet connection, a laptop or a smartphone), but also on the cognitive command of such digital tools. While a younger but economically disadvantaged population may not have the economic resources to buy a computer, older demographics are sometimes under a different type of stress – that of learning new skills, which could save their lives by curtailing unnecessary trips (think online shopping, used by less than 1 in 6 Americans over 50, according to a 2018 International Food Information Council Foundation[19]).

   In a Bourdieusian turn, the crisis shed light on how social capital[20] is not only composed of economic assets but also relies on certain “cultural” resources, such as digital alphabetisation or, in case of businesses, the capacity to digitize rapidly core activities. For individuals and firms alike, the COVID-19 pandemic is highlighting and reinforcing a symbolic cartography of the “have” and the “have-nots”, along lines that are not entirely new, but are a clear sign of the new societal tectonics.

   The Collateral Political Cost of the Crisis: Democratic Uncertainty, Populism and Distrust

   The political fallouts of the current pandemic are equally uncertain, and interesting; unsurprisingly, the sheer magnitude of the crisis disrupted the political tempo of democracy, notably the cycle of elections. Elections or referenda were delayed or postponed in Great Britain[21], France[22], Italy and Spain[23], but also outside Europe, for example in protest-hit Chile, where a much-anticipated constitutional referendum was promised to appease growing social unrest[24]. The primary campaigns in the United States are under pressure, with public rallies banned and candidates trying their hands at the first exercise in virtual campaigning. Indiana, Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland and Ohio have postponed their primary presidential elections, and the elections in New York (which is a major cluster of infection, with tens of thousands of confirmed cases) could be subjected to delays. The public events of the two candidates (Bernie Sanders and frontrunner Joe Biden) have been cancelled, and debates are organized without on-site audiences[25]. Most democracies followed suit.

   The suspension of democratic normalcy, often institutionalised through the declaration of states of emergency, feels justified and often complies with constitutional provisions. While “corona dictatorships” may indeed spring up, it is in the etymological sense (from the Latin dictator) of an extraordinary authority instituted in times of crisis, with a clear limited mandate. Even drastic measures such as forced confinement, restrictions on freedom of movement and mass surveillance are not outside the bounds of the constitutional toolkit of modern democratic authority, and in many cases, it is unlikely that established democracies will struggle with long-term authoritarian tendencies, once the pandemic ebbs away. That is, of course, unless there was already a pre-existing authoritarian tropism. The situation is more strained in countries where democracy is perceived to be less sure-footed, or which struggle with incipient democratic backslidings. Societal acceptance of such unprecedented inflation of coercive power demands a high level of confidence in public authorities. In the absence of it, the emergency is only gaping underlying wounds.

 In Israel, the dread of the coronavirus pandemic has landed in the aftermath of the third general election in twelve months. Netanyahu’s bloc, led by the Likud, ended three seats shy of a majority, and the opposition led by Benny Gantz declared its intention of forging a new majority coalition. Amid escalating tensions, Netanyahu suffered the worst political reversal in a decade-long career, as President Reuven Rivlin tasked Gantz with forming Israel’s next government. Still serving as Prime Minister as the crisis hit the country, Netanyahu enacted sweeping measures and literally incapacitated the opposition, by suspending Parliament, because health guidelines prevented such an assembly. In addition to this move, unprecedented in Israeli history, courts were shut down (thus sheltering Netanyahu from an undignified trial for corruption) and the internal security agency implemented cell phone tracking of citizens, in order to monitor the whereabouts of suspected carriers of the virus (with citizens receiving text messages saying: “Hello, you were in close proximity to someone with coronavirus. You must immediately isolate at home to protect your relatives and the public. Sincerely, Public Health Services.[26]”). Unease over potential breaches of privacy or the reinforcement of the executive have been palpable. While social media was seething with accusations that the country was morphing into a “Big Brother on steroids[27]”, other public and political figures denounced a “power grab” by Netanyahu and even declared democracy under assault. Historian Yuval Noah Harari contended we are witnessing the first “corona dictatorship”, feeding off the corpse of Israeli democracy[28].

   In Hungary, Parliament pushed through (by 137 to 53) a new set of measures, which not only include jail terms for those spreading coronavirus misinformation (a legitimate move at first sight, but one that can be easily weaponized as an effective censorship tool), but also gave the Orban government sweeping emergency power with no clear time limit. The lack of a sunset clause for the emergency powers of the executive played into a decade-old fear that the country is teetering on the brink of authoritarianism. The current crisis did not significantly shift Orban’s communication, whose conservative nationalism buttressed his symbolic management of the pandemic. In the beginning of March, the Hungarian government proceeded to the eight extension of the 2015 “crisis situation due to mass migration”, citing the epidemiological risks of any uncontrolled movement of people[29]. The first confirmed coronavirus cases being Iranian students in Budapest, the government easily weaved together in its rhetoric migration and the sanitary crises as interconnected phenomena. It highlighted the alleged “clear link” between migration and the outbreak, singling out Iran as the major spreading focus of infection and asylum-seekers as its main vectors of transmission[30]. It also developed – albeit more cautiously – another line of argument, criticising the Western alliance and EU’s failure to respond to the crisis, and emphasizing the aid offered by extra-European countries such as China: “We received help from China and Turkish Council. This is the situation now. Despite this, we remain EU members. This is our home, but we must see that this is not where help is coming from now” professed Viktor Orban[31]. This refashioning of the east-bound geopolitical shift of Hungary, by turning against EU alternative solidarities deemed eminently more “operational”, is indeed worrying, but is coherent with the narrative manufactured since 2015 by the Fidesz.

   Populist entrepreneurs did not sensibly alter their discourse, once the cataclysmic scale of the pandemic was revealed, and often tried to obfuscate the relative disinterest (or outright dismissal) exhibited in the early stages of the spread. In a rally held in North Charleston, South Carolina, on the 29th of February, Donald Trump famously floated the idea that the coronavirus was a Democratic “hoax” to undermine his administration and railed the press’ “hysteria” surrounding the epidemic[32]. Prominent Republican figures echoed this rhetoric, deploring undercurrent political motives behind a “makeshift crisis”. Conservative radio host Bill Mitchell concluded that by “marketing” the coronavirus as the “Black Plague”, Democrats try to manufacture the economic crisis needed to bring down Donald Trump in the wake of the November election, in the same underhand fashion the Chinese totalitarian government used it to clear the streets of Hong Kong from protesters[33]. Another conservative media personality, Rush Limbaugh, claimed the “coronavirus is the common cold”, while also suggesting it is a (failed) bioweapon produced by Chinese authorities:

 Nobody wants to get any of this stuff. I mean, you never… I hate getting the common cold. You don’t want to get the flu. It’s miserable. But we’re not talking about something here that’s gonna wipe out your town or your city if it finds its way there. This is a classic illustration of how media coverage... even if this media coverage isn’t stacked, even if this is just the way media normally does things, this is a hyped, panic-filled version. It’s exactly how the media deals with these things to create audience, readership, interest, clicks, what have you[34].

   While the president of the United States and its supporters rapidly back paddled and realized the true scope of the threat, other leaders, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, persisted in downplaying the seriousness of the situation[35]. However, he was increasingly isolated in holding such views, even within the populist camp. The menace of a global spread of the virus perfectly sustained a consistent narrative rehashing anti-globalization tropes, nationalism and critique of international organizations (even if the UN and the WHO were among the most vocal advocate of a prompt response). Pro-Brexit YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson contrasted the death tolls in “left-wing, open-border” Italy and Spain and, on the other hand, Russia, Singapore or Hungary, which enacted tough border restrictions.

 At what point does stopping an immensely dangerous and disruptive global pandemic become more important than the sacred, never to be questioned or curtailed “international flow of people”? The World Health Organization, whose job it is to stop a global pandemic, has repeatedly insisted that preventing stigmatization and keeping borders open is critical, to the point where they seem more concerned about that than actually stopping the pandemic[36].

   The context also fuelled another populist argument, this time related to the effort to avoid that the virus leads to racial profiling of Asians and brings about a recrudescence of xenophobic sentiments. Paul Joseph Watson complained to international bodies and the WHO showed more concern about policing speech and finding non-discriminatory names for the disease (labelled the “Chinese virus” by Donald Trump[37]) than for effectively working a strategy to strangle it[38].

   The analysis of the populist and far-right discourse reveals the crisis did not upend or challenge the basic ideological grammar of populism, but rather reinforced its anti-globalization and nationalist core. The pattern of manufacturing a symbolic response to the sanitary urgency followed proved recipes: identifying the “root cause” of the problem (open borders and mass migration as a sanitary hazard), then labelling political (the EU, international bodies, liberal-leaning national governments) and the cultural (the media establishment, arrogant technocrats) culprits. The morphology of the crisis lends itself to anti-establishment resentment, as it plays persuasively into the angst-ridden populist imaginary. The pandemic is framed as a coalescence of mismanagement by the three archetypal “seats of power”, against which populists historically mobilize the political establishment (embodied by national governments and “liberal” or “left-wing” parties), the cultural media establishment (the mainstream press) and the technocratic experts’ bodies (the WHO, the EU, some senior health advisers). Even medical researchers and professionals are sometimes concentrating the ire of populist rhetoric. The treatment of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and leading expert of the Trump administration, proves that even when technocrats operate under the authority of the political, populists can interpret even minor frictions between the two, as a combat to the death between shady Deep States proponents and brave democratic heroes. Fauci never openly attacked Donald Trump, but his messaging was notably less optimistic, and his briefings sometimes went against the upbeat and confident tone of the presidential administration. He was instantly accused of surreptitiously mocking the president when he was caught off camera dropping his head and rubbing his forehead in apparent exasperation during a Trump speech on March the 20th[39]. Fauci became the target of a hostile social media campaign, mainly under the hashtag #FauciFraud[40]. Dichotomizing technocracy and democracy (“No one elected Fauci nor did we give him the power to destroy this nation” tweeted pro-Trump political commentator John Cardillo[41]) is a long-established populist strategy. It fitted the current drama all the better in the context of an ideological space already structured by conspiracy angsts and anti-vaccine rhetoric. The thematic of health and disease display the embeddedness between political resentment against the powerful (amongst which are counted accredited medical professionals, who are given a voice in traditional media and increasingly gain political salience) and a more unfocused cultural malaise against the mainstream, which prompts compensatory quests of alternative explications (conspiracy theory) or remedies. Homemade coronavirus cures and aberrant bio warfare conspiracies are not successful in spite of the repeated rebuttals and warnings enunciated by healthcare professionals, they are successful because they are so forcefully disavowed by what is perceived as an all-powerful “establishment”. It is neither anecdotal nor coincidental that prominent far-right figures such as InfoWars’ editor Alex Jones have been peddling miracle COVID-19 remedies (such as a nano-silver toothpaste) online, to the point New York’s attorney general threatened legal action against Jones[42]. A very similar pattern could be observed in the case of climate change. The coupling of anti-science dispositions and anti-establishment populist politics, both articulate a form of revolt against the alleged “privileged cast”.

   The coronavirus is, unsurprisingly, another battleground of the culture wars. It offers insights on the psychological and ideological inroads of populism into society. In many respects, it only validates the existing political biases, albeit the frontline has now evolved. When struggling with the ideological management of an unprecedented emergency, political entrepreneurs are not particularly innovative doctrinally and fall back on acquired formulas to mobilize support. However, this does not mean that symbolic struggles are muted, quite the opposite. This is true within nation-states but also across borders, which may be sealed for people but not for ideas. Not only did parties or ideologies try to control the narratives of the crisis, but also countries or geopolitical entities. A prime example of this is the manner in which the Chinese sanitary response to the COVID-19 pandemic became entangled in the crossfire of competing narratives, underpinning two antagonistic geopolitical visions.

   The COVID-19 Pandemic: Liberal Cautionary Tale or Patriotic Tour de Force? Is China Losing Control? The Narrative of the Coronavirus Crisis, or a Case Study in Symbolic Management?

   China made the headlines first, in early January – discreetly, quietly, without fanfare. On the 9th of January, The Guardian reported that a cluster of pneumonia cases in central China, in the Hubei province, might be due to a newly emerging member of the family of coronaviruses that caused the deadly SARS and MERS outbreaks in the beginning of the century[43]. However, with regard to the approximately 60 cases related to the Wuhan live-animal market, Chinese authorities ruled out the SARS and MERS coronaviruses as possible causes, as well as flu, bird flu, adenovirus and other common respiratory pathogens. On the 14th, media outlets reported that what was dubbed as “China mystery illness” claimed the first human life, a 61-year-old man already suffering from a slew of other illnesses[44]. However, at that time, no robust evidence of human-to-human transmission was found, and Chinese authorities assured that no new contaminations had occurred since the 3rd of January. It was not until the 20th of January that human-to-human transmission of the “mysterious SARS-like virus” was confirmed[45]. The spectre of the SARS epidemic that caused almost 800 deaths was invoked with increasing frequency, and the lunar New Year travel period was laden with epidemiologic anxiety, despite the reassuringly manageable mortality rate (around 2%, a very low rate when compared with the 10% exhibited by SARS). As a result, ten cities were locked down and the New Year festivities were scrapped. Already, the effort was gathering global attention because of the sheer scale of the containment: never before had such a large population been cut off from the outside world by a quarantine. The city of Wuhan itself was home to 11 million people, who were barred from leaving the city starting with the 23rd of January. The dominant framework adopted by Western media was shaped by China’s unique power structure, a combination of ultra-centralized authoritarian bureaucracy, dogmatic patriotic ideology and Weltpolitik ambitions. A certain surreptitious narrative of “Chinese exceptionalism” was quietly undercutting much of the media reporting of the sanitary crisis. Most observers saw the epidemic through the lenses of Chinese politics and ambitions, and more specifically, the politics of the Chinese Communist Party. High-capacity authoritarian centralization undoubtedly allowed a draconian level of constraint to be enforced swiftly and efficiently, with minimal opposition, and the State’s mighty surveillance apparatus proved the ideal tool to launch one of the greatest infectious-disease containment enterprises the world had ever seen. The narrower the space of civil society, the easier it was for the authorities to control and regulate it down to the last detail (something curbing the transmission entailed), by tapping into a dense web of embedded social discipline norms. It seemed that a hyper-centralized political system, unhindered by the checks of individual rights and liberties could have a distinct advantage over a free society. While some pondered the eventual merits of authoritarian centralism, in grief-stricken Italy, the videos of mayors’ desperate and sometimes exasperated pleas to lockdown “dodgers” became viral quickly[46]. This seemed to confirm a certain latent anti-democratic bias. Popular vloggers and YouTubers vented their frustration at the uncivil recklessness and individualism of the “democratic citizen”:

 You know what, in this, I have to say I respect China. [...] The consequence of the Chinese dictatorship is that people follow the rules. While I am not a fan of dictatorships, I find that the result - a certain amount of discipline - is quite frankly not bad at all. Really. There, they did contain the epidemic[47].

   Business Insider listed the 12 most aggressive measures taken by Chinese authorities to curb the spread of infection, contending that despite their proven efficiency, they might be “impossible to implement” in a democratic country such as the US. Among them were the systemic tracing of cell phones and the ubiquitous police presence[48]. Even senior WHO officials, such as Walter Ricciardi, recognized liberal democracies may be, at first, ill equipped in tackling the sanitary urgency, as they have to show more restraint[49]. Through the slow and cumbersome response, it opposed the virus. The Western liberal-democratic “brand” was only further weakened and desacralized, argued Stephen Walt in the authoritative (and left-leaning) magazine Foreign Policy[50]. Can the coronavirus become a turning point in the protracted ideological battle between the West and the East?

   The match of China or Singapore – built on fear and respect for authority – and of the cheek-kissing unruly Italy or Spain appeared headed to a foregone conclusion. Nevertheless, while authoritarianism had established a very high threshold for the acceptability of public authority intrusion, allowing mass surveillance and tracking, it posed other problems that Western media was keen to highlight. The death of Li Wienlang, a medical professional under investigation for “spreading false rumours” for having been among the first ones to reveal the extent of the threat posed by the novel Coronavirus, brought to the forefront the cracks in the Chinese narrative. The Coronavirus was compared to the Chernobyl of this century – the debacle that ripped the veil of illusion and exposed the horrendous cost of the “silence pact” forced by tyranny on its press and citizens[51]. The French newspaper Le Monde detailed the systematic censorship exerted by the Chinese authorities and the merciless crackdown on emergent citizen journalism[52]. The Guardian[53] and the New York Times[54] reported on the fresh faces of this new brand of street journalism, such as Li Zehua, an unaffiliated citizen reporter who quit his stable job at China’s state broadcaster and came to Wuhan on his own, and who has gone missing since late February. Transparency and democratic accountability – or the lack thereof – were at the heart of these liberal cautionary tales which, drawing on the reminiscence of the near-catastrophe of the 2002 SARS outbreak, were looking to reveal the corrupt heart of the formidable disease-fighting machine the Communist Party was peddling to the outside world.

 

   The National Review titled “To Protect the Future, Hold China to Account”, echoing the rhetoric of Donald Trump and the U.S. secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The conservative magazine alleged that China’s attitude both before (by its refusal to regulate wet-blood markets) and after (by the extensive cover-ups and suppressing of all whistle blowers’ warnings) the breakout had “unnecessarily caused and exacerbated a world pandemic”. Adding insult to injury, China is now trying to pose as a saviour, leveraging against the West its dwindling numbers of infections and its humanitarian aid to embattled countries such as Italy. The only solution is to hold accountable the previously untouchable Chinese Communist Party for the damage, and definitively reverse the world’s complacency towards Beijing, concludes the Republican-leaning publication[55]. Trump and the US was the only major geopolitical actor to lay the blame on China publicly, the president even conspicuously referring to the virus as “the Chinese virus”, adding the world is paying the price of the Chinese government laxity and opacity. In response, Chinese officials were quick to point out the fact that the harsher tone adopted by the Trump administration represents a pivot (Trump had earlier expressed admiration at the Chinese handling of the virus[56]), motivated by the need for a scapegoat to deflect attention from the U.S.’s catastrophic sanitary situation[57]. The Chinese national news agency, the Xinhua News Agency, published in English an opinion piece to denounce the “political virus” spread by the US:

Ever since the outbreak, some U.S. politicians have been busy with their frivolous political theatrics. These so-called political elites in the White House have taken to heart nothing else but their political agendas to suppress China. Even the virus, a public enemy of all, has been made their anti-China weapon. In face of the COVID-19 pandemic, all countries should not only take effective prevention measures at a national level, but also enhance transnational cooperation. At this critical moment, smearing others or finger-pointing contributes nothing to containing the epidemic nor uniting people across the world, but will only lead to a fearful waste of time and a narrowed window of opportunity[58].

   The Chinese response can be read as a mimetic counter charge to the American line of argument, against accusations that Marxist-inspired authoritarianism and geopolitical selfishness of the CCP crippled an efficient containment strategy. The Chinese narrative strives to reverse the optics and paint the U.S. as an ideological power blinded in its response by political bias, which prioritize internal hate-mongering agendas to the common good:

As infections are rising sharply in the United States, the U.S. government has responded by spending a substantial amount of its energy on shifting blame and ignored the fact that only solidarity and cooperation will defeat a worldwide pandemic that is still developing. Such rhetoric makes sense in an election year in the United States when politicians try to shift U.S. voters' attention from dissatisfaction with the government's inability in response to the epidemic to China and shirk their responsibilities. This reveals the political decay and illusion of "democracy" in the United States. In many aspects, the U.S. administration is setting a bad example in the global fight against the virus[59].

   China’s narrative has been completely devoid of ideological meaning. Declining to engage in Russia’s “culture war” rhetoric, it strategically focuses on pragmatic universalism and the furthering of its image of international trustworthy, reasonable broker. The U.S. aid response is lambasted (“As a major power, the United States should have been at the frontline of helping other countries fight the epidemic[60]”), and contrasted with China’s global solidarity:

As the peak of the epidemic in China has recently passed, China has been readily helping other countries. [...] What China has done has been translated into a popular slogan that reads: "Our partnership, stronger than metal and stone, defies geographical distance.”[61]

   The main tenet of the counter-narrative China manufactured over the last three months was not the ideological or moral superiority of the communist model, but efficiency. In a video series chronicling the “People’s War” against the virus, images of ultra-modern hospitals springing from the ground in days, factories working at maximum capacity to produce equipment and orderly squads of medics, military personnel and volunteers are coalescing into a new political grammar. The legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party is not its ideological purity, but its success in turning the country into a gigantic Fordist virus-fighting machine: the shedding of the emphatic messianic speech that traditionally infused fascism or communism is a significant, historic shift in the totalitarian imaginary. Nevertheless, the verticality of the Chinese model is never denied or turned invisible (“This is because of the government’s leadership and in the same time the cooperation of the people of China. It cannot happen without the two[62]”), and old Leninists conceptions of party vanguard seem to have been diluted into a utilitarian, devoid of ideology, and quasi-managerial paradigm of efficiency.

Both from inside and the outside, the narrative put forward by Beijing has been unremittingly chipped at; for the regime, however, it is a matter of life and death to retain control – at least internally – of how the 2020 pandemic will be remembered in history books.

   The Return of the Big State?

   Symbolic management, however important, is not the sole horizon of the crisis. The coronavirus crisis thrusts immediate, searing questions upon the political system – and the answers offered under dire pressure might mould the post-crisis world durably. Governments took such sweeping and cost-laden actions across all sectors of economic life that we might reasonably content we face with the most massive exercise of coordinated state power in the last decades (at least in the West). Even the most stringent measures taken in the aftermaths of terrorists ploys feel like child’s play in comparison. As stated above, political restrictions (curfews, travel bans, suspension of legislative sessions or courts) are in most cases going to be short-lived, mainly because it took a decree to impose them, and will only take another decree to lift them. It is in the economic realm that these measures will very likely outlast the actual emergency, especially as the economic emergency might be significantly more protracted than the sanitary one - low-interest loans[63], immediate disaster assistance[64], unemployment compensation for laid-off workers[65], deferring fiscal and social security contributions for companies and individuals[66]. The most powerful economies all laid out comprehensive plans to tackle the shutdown of large sectors of activity. In Italy, the social dimension was particularly manifest: layoffs were forbidden, rent was reduced, 100-Euro bonuses will be handed to the most vulnerable employees, parental leaves and tax suspensions were granted. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte hailed this 25-billion effort “the Italian model”, who could be the scaffolding of a pan-European emergency programme[67]. In France, deficits are expected to exceed the symbolic 100% of GDP mark this year. Similarly, extensive market regulations were put in place: the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), the French market watchdog, banned short selling on 92 stocks, a measure that may be prolonged for up to one month to prevent financial speculation[68]. Elsewhere, governments ordered price freezes on medical supplies, basic goods or utilities[69]. Private healthcare facilities, medical supplies, masks or even hotels and available building were requisitioned in Spain or France[70]. But the most striking undertakings were nationalisations: to save Alitalia from collapsing, Italy fully re-nationalized the airline carrier[71] and other countries might follow suit. In the emergency package presented, the French Finance minister Bruno Le Maire resorted to the language of protectionism, proclaiming that nationalizations of certain large strategic companies was certainly not outside the bounds of possibility[72]. Not only could such measures, but also companies such as Renault or PSA target air carriers like Air France[73]. This is all the more remarkable given that before the crisis the French government engaged in a bitterly contested privatisation process, on which it has now completely backpedalled.

This massive injection of capital is going to come, on medium term, with certain strings. In an ideological climate increasingly hostile to neoliberalism, a return to pre-epidemic formulas of deregulation might simply not be feasible, from both an ideological and economic standpoint. After the economy goes out of hibernation, financially drained states will have to compensate for their losses in order to operate even at a basic level – let alone sustain the extensive welfare programs already in place. The imperatives of the post-COVID-19 will be those of any functioning state apparatus, in the wake of the steepest escalation in government expenditure since World War II. Three options are thus available to policy-makers:

1)    An iteration of orthodox neoliberal austerity. It entails drastically reducing government budget deficits through spending cuts and the scrapping of costly welfare programs. This option carries a high symbolic cost: the fraught political dynamics of the pre-epidemic period are likely to be reignited, reinforcing the shift towards populist left and populist right, both fuelled by the economic malaise of the “precariat” and of the low and middle-income classes. With elections looming, the solution of strict liberal orthodoxy and austerity is unlikely to be politically attractive.

2)    Imposing heavier fiscal burdens. This is another unpopular choice, and possibly impracticable in a convalescent economy.

3)    Keeping a foothold on the economy to extract revenues directly once profit returns. This scenario is particularly nebulous but plausible, if a protracted crisis was to prompt public takeovers of crumbling private firms. It is, politically and symbolically, a less costly option. Furthermore, even if mainstream governmental parties will shy away from it, anti-system platforms already championing protectionism will gain electoral ground, accelerating the shift. The awareness of the necessity of a paradigm shift is undoubtedly present. Boris Johnson uttered a discreet “We all remember what happened in 2008, everybody said we bailed out the banks and we didn’t look after the people who really suffered”; the allusion was clear.

   The most drastic political measures – curtailing civil liberties, postponing elections and suspending Parliament – are generating a healthy (up to point) dose of malaise nowadays; however, if the conditions allow it and there is a genuine political will for a return to democratic normality, lifting restrictions can be enacted with a simple signature on an official document. In the economic realm, it will be exceedingly difficult to shift into reverse gear overnight, given the astronomical costs involved. The current crisis will have long-lasting effects on economic policies and political dynamics. It may lead to a profound shift in economic thinking, fuelled by the threat of widespread backlash and electoral upheavals.

   If the 1990s and the 2000s were the high-water mark of neoliberalism and market deregulation, and its ebbs commencing with the 2008 crash, the coronavirus crisis might prove fatal. With cruel irony, the conservative National Review observed that if the coronavirus is known to take off people with underlying pathologies, the diseased neoliberal order might succumb among the first: “High neoliberalism already had a pre-existing health condition, and this global pandemic may be fatal for it[74]”. The totems of austerity and of the minimal state are going up in flames in the urgency of the imminent collapse. Moreover, with right-wing conservative or liberal-leaning governments in power in the United States, Great Britain and France, the current crisis appears increasingly as a bonfire of neoliberal orthodoxies[75].

httpswww.forbes.comsitesmikepatton20200406covid-19-response-brings-economic-hardship-how-will-stocks-react#d0e90685ae5b

   To what extent our familiar economic ecosystem will be restored after the return to normalcy is unsure, and precise estimates depend on the cost (in human lives and GDP points) and the duration of the crisis. A historical excursion, to the 1918 influenza, shows that across Europe – and particularly in Northern Europe, which is the focus of existing literature – the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was a crucial milestone in the century-long construction of the national healthcare system[76] and of the Welfare state[77]. At the turn of the 20th century, medicine was to a much higher degree a fragmented liberal profession, and when doctors did not work on their own it was frequently under the patronage of private or religious charities. Such configuration limited the access to healthcare, but the decentralized structure of the system had another drawback. Many diseases (including the 1918 influenza) were not reportable diseases, which meant medical professionals were not compelled to report cases to the authorities, making the centralized monitoring of the ongoing pandemic almost impossible. The lessons learned in 1918 ushered the age of “managed care”, with many states embracing socialized free healthcare, funded via state-run insurance schemes. Health ministries appeared, bridging professional politics and technical healthcare expertise (after the frustrating experiences of the pandemic, when health leaders were often left out of cabinet meeting), and reinforcing the centralized, state-led character of the transformations. At a transnational level, an international bureau for fighting epidemics was created in Vienna in 1919, and the short-lived League of Nations set up a health branch (the Health Organization, which was later restructured into the present-day World Health Organization). Some countries chose a different route: the United States opted for employer-based insurance schemes, for example. However, universally, the post-flu era was marked with the seal of a stringent demand for rationalization and centralization. It is likely the COVID-19 pandemic will witness something of similar magnitude.

Harking back to the tumultuous history of the 20th century, one can perceive a certain pattern of state interventionism in economy and social life: as a rule, crises (whether they were military, sanitary or economic) have incentivized many of the state-led egalitarian initiatives in the past century. This should not come as a surprise: crises breed fear and uncertainty, and fear and uncertainty, in turn, breed demands for safety, comfort, rationality, and centralization. The hazy rationality of the Invisible Hand is not armed to provide the soothing comfort, which communities at war request, and proves no match in times of crisis to the more robust sense of certitude imparted by centralized state action. Ultimately, bureaucratic organisms such as Social Security are not only products of an egalitarian moral quest, but reflect the rationality imperatives of modern states (whether they are real or perceived), which are only heightened in times of emergency.

   Concluding Remarks

   Few observers doubt COVID-19 will durably alter the way societies think, consume, relate to themselves and to each other, take care of their environment (virtual or physical) and prioritize needs in the future. However, the consensus does not go any further than that. Divination is not something social sciences are – and should be – comfortable with; nevertheless, there are robust leads pointing at what a post-coronavirus world might look like. Some other cues can be taken from history: from medieval plagues, introducing the concepts of quarantine and isolation (but also the ancestor of the hazmat suit, in the beaked form of the infamous “plague doctor” costume) to the Spanish flu popularizing masks, hand-washing and centralized national health systems, from smallpox bringing the first vaccines, to AIDS introducing widespread usage of condoms and ending the centuries-long taboo on STDs, diseases were often “game-changers”, catalysing social change, and thrusting the New upon hitherto reluctant societies.

   One thing is certain: the most uttered phrase during this past month must have been “I’ve never seen something like this before”. History in the making is indeed a strange thing to witness and to live through, even from the cosiness of one’s sofa.

 

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