Is It Tomorrow Yet? Paradoxes of the Pandemic review – how Covid-19 changed the world forever
“The first thing that plague brought our town was exile,” remarks the narrator of Camus’ The Plague. This notion is the departure point of the brilliant new essay by the ubiquitous political philosopher and commentator Ivan Krastev – Is It Tomorrow Yet? Paradoxes of the Pandemic.
The plague brings isolation in your own home and within your own soul. We are cut off in ghettos of our own fears and apprehension for the future. This is what makes the global pandemic of Covid-19 unique; its impact is huge not least because it has exposed the vulnerability of the super-connected globalised world.
Krastev argues that the new plague has proved a flexion point in how humans see themselves. “Where it is different from previous epidemics,” he told me in a recent telephone interview, “is not so much in destroying human life, but in radically destroying ways of life.”
The book is daring and challenging in its prognostications – full of sparkling turns of thought, and magical phrases. Krastev is evidently a natural-born teacher and essayist. This elegant and beautifully turned essay is more than matched by his discourse in conversation.
This is a piece of inspired conjecture, not wild guesswork – and is the best thing I have read to date on the social, political and human impact of Covid-19. He looks at what it means for us as individuals, as part of political communities, not least the European neighbourhood, on the politics of populism, big data dictatorship, neighbourliness and nationalism, and the “dark side” of globalisation.
The first paradox of the new plague is that initially it seemed to unite the global community. After all, we are in it together, all under threat from an old affliction in a new form. “Suddenly the peasant farmer in my native Bulgaria knew he was under threat from something out of China,” Krastev explained in his phone call from Vienna, where he is now based, though he still teaches and instructs in Bulgaria and America.
Lockdown, restriction, and isolation have brought disunity and fractiousness, borne of suspicion and fear. “The television announcer has become closer and more familiar to the isolated old than their neighbours.”
This has had a profound effect on politics, especially in Europe. His focus on Europe is an extension of his two previous, and brilliant essays, After Europe and The Light That Failed, a critique of the imposition of the Liberal consensus espoused by Brussels on the rest of the EU community, and beyond. The three books sit well together, but the new essay, the shortest, has a greater scope. In it he looks at the legacy of autocratic narcissism, and the democratic deficits across continents in community politics.
The question about EU governance of its community persists: will there be more direction and influence, string pulling and subsidy from Brussels, or less? The Commission got off to a shaky start at the beginning of the pandemic, but since has pulled together the compensation fund in a new spirit of mutuality. This suggests more EU rather than less, and that the EU will converge with stronger direction from Brussels. However, the severity of the new waves of Corona means even more rescue funding will be needed, and for longer. Moreover, there is still no pan-European health and welfare policy – countries like Italy and Spain are very much out on their own.
Persistent outbreaks of Covid-19 bring more fragmentation between member states, more border controls; and within them greater mobility restrictions and lockdowns. The division between rich and poor is growing, as it is globally with the pandemic. This will be accentuated by the introduction of new vaccines and medicines – the rich will always be ahead in the queue.
This is what Ivan Krastev calls “the dark side of globalisation.” Global connectivity, cooperation and supply chains will be frayed. There will be more “near-shoring” sourcing key supplies from closer to home, and even autarky and home-nation self-sufficiency. “You cannot have it that 70% of the world’s supplies of basic medical goods, such as PPE protective equipment, come from one country,” he says.
The lack of intelligence forewarning, and the ability to act on it, is another failure of globalised cooperation and understanding. In this, says Krastev with one of his felicitous paradigms, Covid-19 is a “Grey Swan event.” A Grey Swan differs from a Black Swan because it is a phenomenon understood all along – as with Coronavirus. It’s like have been in the sights of all major intelligence agencies for at least a decade – but the hope was it just won’t happen. “The US intelligence community had been aware for some time of the catastrophic nature of pandemic– but it was almost as if by talking about it, that they could stop it happening.” The pandemic was a matter to be studied and filed, in the hope that it wouldn’t strike – rather like the San Andreas Fault and the next San Francisco earthquake.
The English and Scottish health authorities carried out desktop exercises and conferences, gaming the effect influenza pandemics. There was Op Cygnus in 2016 and Exercise Iris in 2018. Both reports acknowledged weaknesses in resilience and supplies, including PPE protective apparel, and seem to have sent their conclusions into a fog of bureaucratic oblivion.
“From a certain perspective the pandemic had been expected – but when it came, it totally surprised us,” says Krastev.
The Grey Swan of Covid will tilt advanced economies towards big government. The new form of big government will be “stockpile government” rather than command economies nationalising industries and services. But it can’t all be run on a grand national strategy run from the centre by central government. This is something that both the Washington and Whitehall governments are learning the hard way. It is a bit like the old rubric for the con-trick that was English feudal governance in the High Middle Ages – “self-government at the King’s command.” It requires the devolvement of authority and flexibility in managing resources and targets to the lowest critical level – the civil equivalent of the British Army’s doctrine of “mission command”.
Two of the most intriguing arguments put forward by Krastev in his book are on Covid and populism and what it means for “Big Data Totalitarianism”. Covid is bad for populists because it is not a crisis of their creation or manipulation and requires widespread teamwork and trust. Though written more than a month beforehand (our conversation was mid-October) Krastev thought that Trump was unlikely to win re-election owing to the pandemic.
It’s a trap for the populists because they cannot indulge their customary ploy of ducking out of one crisis by inventing another. Covid, with its persistent death rate straining all medical services, is too big for that. The crisis also means sharing the platform with experts, the doctors, virologists and epidemiologists – hence Trump’s wars with the Dr Anthony Fauci and his colleagues.
The populist style is to rule by denial and confrontation. Those who disagree are “the enemy”. Yet science, medical sciences included, are based on dispute, discussion and disagreement – otherwise they wouldn’t advance, test new hypotheses and make new discoveries. The gambit of denial, blame, confront has badly affected the media, says Ivan Krastev. “What is the media for – information and understanding – or reinforcing a political (and tribal) identity?”
The developments in some aspects of big government undermine belief in democracy. One of the biggest menaces is what Krastev calls “Big Data Totalitarianism”. This works on the basis of knowing your people better than they know themselves, through collection and crunching of data on the minutest details of tastes, habits and consumption, from shopping to culture and politics. This colours China’s approach to democracy. “Big data knows me better than I know myself, then government needs have no interest in my opinions. They don’t need my vote. They can manipulate my behaviour – and this is linked to the radical notion of “nudging”. In this kind of authoritarianism, there is no need for police informers,” Krastev explains.
“Voting is superficial – they don’t need my vote – they can push my vote and choice this way and that, so we enter a totally different world.” This is dangerous as well as questionable practice. “If you take from democracy the fundamental assumption that nobody can speak for me but myself, then democracy is not there anymore.”
Big Data, and the working of algorithms cannot calculate emotions – of rage and disgust, and fear. Emotions will drive protests with ever greater intensity as the norms and apparatus of governance and representation are seen to fail. Krastev foresees more activity on the street as parliaments weaken. In the time of Covid and fear, the protesters on the streets of Minsk “show real moral courage.”
Fear is the stalker of the Covid drama. It makes Ivan Krastev’s generation of the 40-to-60-year olds especially vulnerable, he says, “as we fear not only for ourselves and our health, but even more for our parents, who are at much greater risk.”
The awareness of large factors such as climate and environment, migration, demographic shift and the ageing of so many populations make the Covid global crisis of a different order from the previous global crises of this century; 9/11 and the Bush Global War on Terror, the financial collapse of 2008, and the migration and refugee surge of 2015.
Whether it is its catalyst or cause, this brilliant essay suggests Covid is a fundamental part of the change in the way we view history, our past and our future. “We used to look at the future as going to something better, with new projects, and progress. There is a sense now that the past was much better. Now we look at the future with fear.”
Is It Tomorrow Yet? Paradoxes of the Pandemic by Ivan Krastev is published by Allen Lane (£10.99)