Wake Up Call: Why the pandemic has exposed the weakness of the West review
Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan seems appropriate today in numerous ways. Not only does our coronavirus world seem solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, but Leviathan was written at a time when the East provided the most efficient models of government. China was the centre of administrative excellence, the world’s most powerful country, with the world’s biggest city, and the world’s most sophisticated civil service, selected from a system of supreme education and rigorous examinations. The West, meanwhile, was an unbalanced battlefield with demented, distracted leaders.
How can one avoid comparing that with the East-West divide in the age of coronavirus, as John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge have done beautifully in their new book, Wake Up Call: Why the pandemic has exposed the weakness of the West – and how to fix it.
Geopolitics has changed drastically between the 1600s and the 2020s, of course. The book highlights the rise of the West through the American and French Revolutions, designed to birth a new vision of freedom and democracy and dislodge inefficient aristocrats; the Industrial revolution, which allowed Victorian liberals to build schools, hospitals and sanitation; and the welfare state, which continues to provide security, protecting citizens from the extremes of Hobbes’ theory of the world. China in this period became insular and incompetent. Like a boomerang, good governance moved from East to West over a period of four hundred years.
The problem for the West is that the boomerang is now not only returning East, but it is doing so at a much faster pace. This book traces the decline of the Western state only to the 1960s. In Britain, the 1970s were defined by left-wing overreach, with Britons encountering the state in every facet of life, leading to stagflation. The schools became crowded, the architecture became dull and slum-like, and critical national infrastructure was hobbled by constant strikes. America was similarly stagnant, with the occasional oil price shock. And, while Thatcher and Reagan spoke of a liberalising counter-revolution, Wooldridge and Micklethwait note that the state continued to expand. The civil servants often became contractors.
There is a crucial distinction to be drawn between a big state and an effective state. Good governance is not synonymous with more governance. Take Singapore, which spends less than 20 percent of GDP on government, yet has better schools and hospitals than the vast majority of Western states, the longest life expectancy in the world and the lowest infant mortality rates. “It pays its top civil servants spectacularly well, but weeds out poor performers, notably bad teachers,” says the book.
Singapore is one example of what is described as an “Asian Renaissance”. South Korea, Taiwan, and to a large extent China are following a similar path, investing in government led by elite, intelligent mandarins, willing to sacrifice tradition at the altar of innovation.
When coronavirus arrived, these nations immediately initiated mass testing operations, surveying large parts of their populations tracing those who had come into contact with confirmed positives. By 1 March, South Korea was testing 10,000 citizens a day and America had tested a total of 427. By June, the death rate in Japan and South Korea was just five and seven per million people respectively. By contrast, Belgium’s and Britain’s rates were 850 and 650 per million respectively.
The West’s response was characterised by dither, delay and populism. As the book details in a most depressing way, “Hungary started turning back asylum seekers. Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Northern League linked the disease to the docking of the Ocean Viking, a humanitarian ship …. Emmanuel Macron advised the people of France to display ‘individual and collective discipline’ on 12 March, but then allowed municipal elections to go ahead on 15 March.”
In the United States, the president was publicly characterising the virus as “a hoax” by the Democrats to bring him down. In Britain, government ministers allowed mass events such as the Cheltenham Festival and football matches to continue – the latter bringing in hundreds of supporters from Spain, where the outbreak was more severe.
One could write a book from the list of failures alone, with names from all sides of western politics. Bill De Blasio of New York urging people to continue to go to bars, Christine Lagarde urging governments to tighten fiscal rules at the outset of the biggest economic crisis in three centuries, Merkel’s government grumbling about resources going to the hard-hit European South, and so on. The stench of incompetence cuts deep into the West, which looks weaker by the day.
Yet, this isn’t Rome – at least not yet. Wooldridge and Micklethwait believe there is room for recovery. Their ideal government, led by Bill Lincoln (the combination of William Gladstone and Abraham Lincoln) would, among other things, build resilience in the American healthcare system, invest in improving the quality of people in the public sector, reintroduce national service, devolve power to local authorities and unleash the full might of technology.
But what is supposed to be a hopeful end to the book begets even more depression. Use those suggestions as a reference point and you too will conclude that the West is not prepared to adopt them. Rather than transforming the NHS into a more resilient service, we have entrenched it as a national religion. Rather than investing in genius civil servants – and paying them their due – we continue to allow too many chartlatans to devise policy on the hop. Rather than learning the lessons of this disaster, we find comfort in blaming China.
The East is rising as an economic and cultural centre because its governments understand and value good governance. Read this book to understand how our governments have forgotten what that means.