Review: Gerard Delanty (ed.), ‘Pandemics, Politics, and Society: Critical Perspectives on the Covid-19 Crisis’
Review of Gerard Delanty’s (ed.) Pandemics, Politics, and Society: Critical Perspectives on the Covid-19 Crisis (De Gruyter, 2021), 270 pages.
Abstract
Does a regional treatment of a global pandemic make sense? Yes, if it is empirically grounded and discusses dilemmas and debates in the region. This book is mostly general. Authors talk about their fields and their work and make observations about Covid-19 on the side. The chapters were written when Covid knowledge was limited, much of Europe was in shutdown, and the character of the volume is general rather than empirical.
Reviewed by Jan Nederveen Pieterse
A flurry of books on Covid-19 has appeared and is in the making. This volume is part of the early round of publications. The editor, Gerard Delanty is also the editor of the European Journal of Social Theory and professor of sociology at the University of Sussex. The contributors are all known experts in their fields. Several are European scholars in political and social theory and their chapters focus on European politics and policy with a critical bend.
Delanty’s introduction is informed by extensive study of the history of epidemics, offers insightful historical and analytical perspectives and is a formidable opening of the book. Several contributors write on pandemic policy in Europe—how epistemic regimes affect policy (Claus Offe), the role of experts and expertise (Stephen Turner), relations between scientists and politicians (Jan Zielonka), emergency policies and decision-making (Jonathan White, Daniel Innerarity). Other contributors write about themes adjacent to the Covid crisis: digitalization and datafication (Helga Nowotny), the anthropocene (Eva Horn), political theology (Bryan Turner), cosmopolitan thinking (Daniel Chernilo), social theory and social democracy (Frédéric Vandenberghe, Jean-Francois Véran, Sylvia Walby), social movements (Donatella della Porta), and inequality and precarity (Sonja Avlijaš, Albena Azmanova).
The book carries a general title but is a European treatment with some reference to the United States. Does a regional treatment of a global pandemic make sense? Yes, if it is empirically grounded and discusses dilemmas and debates in the region. This book is mostly general. Authors talk about their fields and their work and make observations about Covid-19 on the side. The chapters were written when Covid knowledge was limited, much of Europe was in shutdown, and the character of the volume is general rather than empirical. We learn about social and political thought related to Europe, but not much about Covid-19.
Eva Horn remarks, ‘Covid-19 is the Anthropocene in fast forward’ (132). Bruno Latour also noted that the Covid crisis may signal a new age of Anthropocene politics: ‘the current biopolitical securitization that we are witnessing is a “dress rehearsal” for climate change’ (in Delanty 2020: 13). A different twist in view of new evidence is that the origin of the virus in a Wuhan lab may be as likely as a zoonotic origin, transfer from a bat. In this light, security dimensions would become more important, in the double sense of lab experiments with viruses for preventive public health security purposes, and security practices in lab experiments.
Diverse themes come up. Because the material is diverse reviewing the chapters would yield snippets. It works better to take up key themes and controversies. A striking theme is the resistance against government measures of shutdown also on the part of some on Europe’s political left, such as Giorgio Agamben. Agamben wrote a widely discussed paper in an Italian blog, Quodlibet in February 2020. He criticized the shutdown in Italy by noting that what ‘the epidemic has caused to appear with clarity is that the state of exception, to which governments have habituated us for some time, has truly become the normal condition’. The European Journal of Psychoanalysis translated and published Agamben’s blog along with related material (Agamben 2020).
Agamben revisits his well-known work on normalizing the state of exception, which follows Carl Schmitt’s 1920s ideas about how states can use emergencies to create a ‘state of exception’. The approach also resonates with Foucault’s work on biopolitics. These points make sense, though nowadays they are more often used in relation to banks and corporations than to states per se, as in the 2008 crisis and notions of disaster capitalism. But do they make sense in relation to a global pandemic and Covid-19?
Gerard Delanty (2020) questioned this in an earlier paper and several chapters take up the issue. Delanty observes: ‘Responses to Agamben, whose contribution in some ways is less than serious, have been quick to point out that this interpretation amounts to conspiracy theory. Is the state really using the pandemic to create a permanent state of exception? Probably not; the Italian state seems incapable of even basic governance, let alone a sanitary dictatorship’ (2020: 7). Bryan Turner notes, ‘In Italy the populist Five Star Movement in 2015 led a campaign condemning mandatory mass vaccination programmes only to be challenged by a major outbreak of measles in 2017’ (153). About Agamben Bryan Turner observes, ‘This view on the political left is ironically consistent with the antinomian views of conservative evangelical Christians in the United States who regard the closures as the over-reach of a government that is now socialist and the work of the devil’ (153).
This controversy is relevant for wider Covid discussions. It illustrates features of European political thought, in short, at least in the context of this volume, a) an inward looking perspective with little reference to other forms of governance, b) in several chapters a key problematic is capitalism and the state, however, there is no problematization of capitalism (as in varieties of capitalism, varieties of market economies) and no problematization of the state, as if state power, by some accounts, is short for authoritarianism.
However, in liberal market economies, the US and UK, neoliberal since the 1980s, the problem is not state overreach but state abdication, government rollback and deregulation, which in effect means the corporate and financial takeover of society, in which private healthcare outshines public health. Here the problem is not state authoritarianism but market authoritarianism. In Europe, austerity polices led to social neglect and decay of institutions. Furthermore, the issue isn’t state power per se but what kind of state power and what is done with state power, with what intention it is used; a state of exception for what purpose? In a pandemic, the core variable is public health.
Delanty’s paper ‘Six political philosophies in search of a virus’ (2020) does refer to other forms of state and governance and to experiences outside the ‘western’ world. Nevertheless, a basic question is: why does it take six political philosophies to address a public health crisis? Is it because Europe and the Americas are arenas of culture war? Is it because philosophy in Europe and the Americas is more advanced than in Asia, the Middle East and Africa? The answer is much simpler. It is, first, lack of experience with infectious diseases—Asia experienced SARS, MERS and Africa, HIV, Ebola, Zika and Chikungunya. Secondly, the collective lesson of these experiences is that it takes capable government and trust in government to deal with a pandemic. Before we carry on about philosophies and cultural clashes, let’s simply note that in a global comparative setting these basics are more important than philosophies and attitudes in a public sphere that reflects a limited collective experience.
Many Asian countries have been most successful in dealing with the pandemic. Also in mid-2021, after experiencing virus surges and while lagging in vaccines, their Covid-19 deaths per million of population remain minimal by comparison to Europe and the Americas. South Korea and Taiwan, Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Australia and New Zealand have been successes in the Covid crisis, while India has not managed well. A key part of this in a confluence of variables is experience with infectious disease (Nederveen Pieterse et al. 2021). A friend in Kigali, Rwanda emails: ‘the history of the genocide and other health scares are relevant. If you've been through a genocide the idea that wearing a mask is some sort of hardship is manifestly ridiculous, and the horror of Ebola has made fear of infection a potent motivator’ (Kigali, June 2021).
Awareness of infectious disease makes a difference also within countries. Note the starkly different Covid-19 outcomes in Lombardy (disastrous because of inexperience of medical staff and no hospital surge capacity, from Milan to Bergamo; 33774 Covid deaths, per June 2021) and neighboring Veneto, where medical staff and hospitals were more prepared because of the region’s historical awareness of infectious disease (11612 deaths per June 2021; Statista survey, June 27, 2021, www.statista.com). Veneto limited the spread of the virus by adopting an ‘out-of-hospital’ model of management, increased the number of swab tests among the population and promptly quarantined and treated infected patients, which reduced hospital admissions (Mugnai and Bilato 2020: 161). Venice has experience with infectious disease going back to the 14th century bubonic plague.
According to Agamben, ‘A society that lives in a permanent state of emergency cannot be a free one. We effectively live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called “security reasons” and as a consequence has condemned itself to living in a permanent state of fear and insecurity’ (2020). In the same blog: ‘It is almost as if with terrorism exhausted as a cause for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic offered the ideal pretext for scaling them up beyond any limitation’. The ‘invention of an epidemic’ is not a fortunate choice of words when worldwide over 4 million people have died from Covid-19. There is no shortage of conspiracy ideas, right and left.
Agamben framing the conversation as a contrast between freedom and authoritarianism as the main societal alternatives is narrow and inappropriate. Freedom in the sense of individual rights doesn’t clash with nor does it override public safety. Though it does include the right to be stupid. Meanwhile the issue is as simple as following traffic rules. Public health measures belong in the same category of caution in the public interest, however in several countries, especially those without experience of pandemics, they fall in uncharted legal territory. The Danish prime minister decreed Covid restrictions and was supported by parliament and the public. The Dutch government sought legal counsel and parliament support and only then mandated Covid restrictions and shutdown. Thus, in fact, in most of Europe the opposite of what Agamben claims has been the case; instead of an expansion of state authority, a state of exception, government restraint applied—which in some instances hampered public health. In Italy it was the urgency of a public health crisis that led to drastic government action.
Historically, ‘freedom’ carries many meanings and doesn’t necessarily refer to individual rights, which is a liberal notion, an American variant which in recent decades comes with consumerist overtones. Liberté in the French Revolution sense means freedom from oppression, which echoes in ‘Libertad o Muerte’ from Saint Domingue and Simón Bolívar to Fidel Castro and throughout decolonization struggles. Thus, a key meaning of freedom is people’s self government, not the absence of government (see Dijn 2021). Now of course also climate change, sustainability and energy justice require capable government. Sergio Benvenuto offers wise counsel: ‘Forget about Agamben’ (20/03/2020).
Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher, in a recent book (2020) also adopts a narrow register: the choice, after the pandemic, is ‘barbarism or some form of reinvented communism’ (in Delanty 2020: 13-14). This turn to late-19th century options is another shortcut.
The controversy also illuminates that ‘the state’ carries different meanings. In Europe it comes with associations of fascism, Nazism, communism (Auschwitz and Stasi) and the welfare state (with social democracy and Christian democracy). In Eastern Europe and Mediterranean Europe, the associations are different in emphasis again. In the postwar Keynesian consensus, the active state moderates economic cycles. In (neo)liberal market economies, the US and UK—narratives are red tape, the nanny state, big government, a stand-in-the way of growth. Meanwhile the American state is also a massive security state that pursues hegemony. In Asia, most emerging economies and developing countries, from Japan onward to Singapore, Vietnam and China, a keynote is the developmental state; more recent notions are the smart state and the entrepreneurial state, as in the Emirates.
If a regional treatment of Covid politics takes on a general rather than an empirical character, to be meaningful a treatment should engage diverse understandings of the state within countries (as well as internationally) and do so explicitly, or else the conversation turns into a dialogue of the deaf, a rhetorical performance in which people bunker themselves in a limited position and talk past one another. Because Covid-19 is a global pandemic, many problems are shared while approaches, of course, are different. Hence, Covid discussions require rising to a new level of pluralism and multicentrism.
References
Agamben, G., 2020 ‘The invention of an epidemic’ https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/ (original published in Italian on Quodlibet, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia) 26/02/2020
Delanty, G., 2020 ‘Six political philosophies in search of a virus: Critical perspectives on the coronavirus pandemic’, LEQS Paper No. 156, May 2020 http://www.lse.ac.uk/european-institute/Assets/Documents/LEQS-Discussion-Papers/LEQSPaper156.pdf
Dijn, Annelien de, 2021 Freedom: An unruly history. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press
Mugnai, Giacomo and Claudio Bilato, 2020 ‘Covid-19 in Italy: Lesson from the Veneto Region’, European Journal of Internal Medicine, 77: 161–162; doi: 10.1016/j.ejim.2020.05.039
Nederveen Pieterse, J., Lim, H., Khondker, H., eds., 2021 Covid 19 and Governance: Crisis Reveals. London, Routledge
Žižek, S., 2020 Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Jan Nederveen Pieterse is Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Distinguished Professor of Global Studies and Sociology at University of California Santa Barbara. He specializes in globalization, development studies and anthropology. He was previously at National University of Malaysia, Maastricht University, Freiburg University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, University of Cape Coast, Ghana and University of Amsterdam. He is the author or editor of 30 books. He edits book series with Palgrave MacMillan and Routledge.
