Saturday, April 25, 2020

Will globalization survive the COVID-19 pandemic?

There has already been a lot of discussion about what the political and economic climate - even the meteorological climate - might look like in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, nobody really knows, but that hasn't stopped people from opining ad nauseam about the possibilities and the likelihoods.
For example, will the current necessity of big govermment action extend afterwards, or will there be a sharp reaction against it? Will the liberties being taken by some of the more repressive and autocratic governments - such as those in China, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Brazil, Philippines, Belarus, etc - lead to a more repressive political landscape overall, or will these would-be despots be forced to walk back their excesses? Which country and/or state leaders will get a boost from their exemplary pandemic performance, and which once-popular leaders will be shunned by the voting public for their perceived failures? Will liberal democracies start to rethink the value of some of our more poorly-paid (but clearly essential) workers, like nurses and care workers and delivery guys, or will it just return to business as usual? Will the clear, unpolluted air and the car-free roads lead us to care more for our environment, or will environmental regulations and agreements be trashed in the rush to rebuild decimated economies?  Will we be more, or less, amenable to political actions that curtail our freedoms, supposedly in the interests of the greater good? Will we all become exercise freaks, or will we end up Netlix-addicted couch potatoes? Which businesses will go under, and which will thrive like never before? Which international and intranational agencies will receive a severe shake-up, and which may not even survive in their present forms? Will we ever use Zoom again?
One big discussion, perhaps the biggest of all, is the effect of the extended pandemic on globalization as a whole. While the advantages conferred by globalization during normal times may not be so obvious to the guy or gal in the street, some of its drawbacks have been well and truly underlined by the pandemic. And not just the fact that a virus (and this will not be the last) can spread so quickly and so thoroughly in an integrated and globalized world, but the fact that, unbeknown to most people, the world and its economy has become so interlinked and interdependent, that countries cannot even function without the contributions of all the different parts of the jigsaw. And, in particular, how many of those jigsaw pieces happen to be located in one country, China, which is able to pay its workers so little that it has made itself indispensible to almost every other country in the world.
Globalization may not be dead, as some of the more dramatic commentators are predicting. But, as countries pick up the tatters of their economies after the pandemic subsides, some hard questions will start to be asked about priorities, supply chains, self-sufficiency and trade pacts. This will not necessarily play straight into the hands of nativist/protectionist politicians like Donald Trump, but it seems inconceivable that globalization will remain unscathed and unchanged by the events of the last few months.

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