There’s an interesting though not entirely unsurprising dichotomy emerging around opening the economy or sustaining the lockdown, or at least some restrictive measures. This is a false dichotomy. It is possible to both save the economy and prevent the Covid-19 virus from spreading, infecting more people and causing more deaths.
The interesting part is an alignment of public intellectuals behind the position that may best be described as “economy first”. The unsurprising part is that it’s the usual suspects: free marketers, market fundamentalists, economic rationalists, rightist libertarians and good old John Birch Society (JBS) types, with their fiercely ideological opposition to the UN system.
Speaking of the UN system, the Covid-19 crisis provides the world with a magnificent opportunity to better understand and get global governance right by strengthening the multilateral system, making it more democratic with a clearer focus on justice and equity, and removing the disproportionate influence Europe and North America have had on global governance.
Let us first dispense with some of the characters that are driving the “save the economy” (and let the market take the rest) movement. I will leave it to my old friend, the economist Branko Milanovic, who wrote a marvellous passage on his blog about these know-all, economy-first types. “How can people who had lived such boring lives, mostly in one or two countries, with the knowledge of at most two languages, having read only the literature in one language, having travelled only from one campus to another and perhaps from one hiking resort to another, have meaningful things to say about social sciences with all their fights, corruption, struggles, wars, betrayals and cheating? Had they been physicists or chemists, it would not matter. You do not have to lead an interesting life in order to understand how atoms move, but perhaps you do need it to understand what moves humans.”
That’s them done then. Back to the old JBS angle, especially its opposition to the UN system, the so-called multilateral system which includes specialised agencies created as far back as 1865 (the International Telegraph Union). As fast as you could say Donald Trump, in an article published on its website, The Daily Friend, the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) echoed the US president’s opposition to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
The Daily Friend is convinced that the WHO “has grown fat, authoritarian and ineffective”. This is profoundly similar to the sentiments of John Bolton, George W Bush’s UN representative, and then of Trump. While he was at the UN, Bolton was accused of undermining the very foundations of the multilateral system with his observation that the body had become “bloated [and] inefficient”.
There is a sliver of truth in that statement, but the solution is not to slash and burn the multilateral system. At about the same time Trump attacked the WHO, a lot of racism was directed at its Ethiopian leader, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Nobody is accusing the IRR, Trump or anyone else of being racist. As it goes, there is so much racism in the world it’s impossible to find a racist ...
Trump’s “withdrawal” from the WHO is part of the US’s steady detachment from the global political economy. As explained in this column in February with reference to increased tension in Nato brought on by the US, the transatlantic nexus that has dominated the global political economy has been growing rapidly. Thus the Washington Post opined in February, “the transatlantic differences have grown so wide that they can no longer agree about whether they disagree”.
In June 2017, the US also withdrew from the Paris Agreement, a UN-initiated framework convention on climate change. The US withdrawal from the WHO is therefore not an isolated incident. And there is no sign this will change. In a recent interview with Fox News, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo confirmed: “… it may be the case that the US can never return to underwriting, having US taxpayer dollars go to the WHO”.
The US is also “chipping away at the World Trade Organization ... as President Trump seeks to upend the global trade system”, The New York Times reported in December 2019.
We have reached a point where the US, which established and held sway over the post-war liberal international economic order, is starting to withdraw from and undermine the institutions of global governance.
This may be a great opportunity to establish a more just and equitable post-Covid-19 global political economy. For now, we should probably cover our eyes and ears and ignore the either/or arguments of those who have fallen into the availability heuristic trap.
• Lagardien, a visiting professor at the Wits University School of Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank, as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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