Hard to have never heard of Francis Fukuyama, the American political scientist of Japanese origin, author of one of the most discussed books of the last half century, The end of the story. Although the theses of that book were, to say the least, risky, Fukuyama remains one of the most incisive and well-prepared scholars of contemporary political science.
It was he himself who corrected the thesis of the End of the story and recently he has published a very important book, which despite having irritated the liberal critic of the "New Yorker", studies with great discipline and historical breadth a phenomenon that transversally characterizes all contemporary societies and not only those and explains its profound tendencies : the identity. The book is The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (transl. it. The identity, Utet, 2019). Fukuyama writes in the introduction to the book: "The demand for recognition of one's identity is a basic concept that unifies a large part of what is happening in world politics". Could it perhaps be a key to some phenomena that have manifested themselves during the pandemic? Certainly deserves a reflection.
Fukuyama's contribution, published by Foreign Affairs, which we propose below and which concerns the post-pandemic world, is one of the most stimulating and interesting interventions that one can read in these very confused and nervous days. We offer it to you in its entirety in its Italian translation.
Enjoy the reading!
Big crises, big responsibilities
Crises in history
Major crises have severe and usually unforeseen consequences. The Great Depression spurred isolationism, nationalism, fascism and caused World War II, but it also brought about the New Deal, the rise of the United States to global superpower and decolonization.
The terrorist attacks of 11/XNUMX produced two unsuccessful US military interventions, the rise of Iran, and stimulated new forms of Islamic radicalism.
The 2008 financial crisis generated a surge in "anti-establishment" populism that threw liberal democratic societies into crisis.
Future historians will reconstruct the effects of comparable, if not greater, proportions of the current coronavirus pandemic. The challenge is to spot them early.
The reasons for the successful response to the crisis
It is already clear why some countries have responded better than others to the crisis and there is every reason to think that distinctions will remain in post-pandemic management as well. It is not a question of regime.
Some democracies have done well, but some have not, and the same goes for autocracies. The factors responsible for the success of the responses to the pandemic have been state intervention, social trust and leadership.
Countries with competent and responsive state apparatuses, with governments that are trusted and listeners, and with effective leaders, have achieved impressive results in limiting the damage.
Countries with dysfunctional states, polarized societies, or poor leadership have done poorly, leaving their citizens and economies exposed and vulnerable.
Economic consequences
From an economic point of view, a protracted crisis will mean bankruptcies and devastation for sectors such as retail, travel, tourism. Levels of market concentration in developed economies that have already been steadily increasing for decades will soar as the pandemic pushes this trend even further.
Only large companies with significant assets will be able to weather the storm, led by tech giants who will earn more as digital interactions become more and more important at all levels.
Internal and external political consequences
The political consequences could be even more shocking. Population may be called upon to heroic acts of collective sacrifice for some time, but not forever.
A persistent epidemic, combined with massive job losses, a protracted recession and unprecedented debt will inevitably create tensions that will result in a deep political backlash, but against whom it will be unclear.
The global distribution of power will continue to shift eastward, as East Asia has handled the situation better than Europe and the United States.
Even if the pandemic originated in China and Beijing initially covered it up and thus aided its spread, China will benefit from the crisis, at least in relative terms.
It has happened that other governments also initially behaved badly and in turn tried to cover up the seriousness of the situation, but in a more visible way for public opinion and with even more lethal consequences for their citizens.
At least Beijing has managed to regain control of the situation, getting back on the move quickly and sustainably to prepare for the next challenge.
The United States
The United States, by contrast, got its response wrong and has seen its prestige decline enormously. The country has a large potential public and has responded better than to previous epidemiological crises, but today American society is highly polarized and its leader is incompetent.
This situation prevented the state from functioning effectively. The president has fomented division rather than promoting unity, politicized aid distribution, pushed governors to take responsibility for making key decisions while encouraging protests against them, and attacked international institutions rather than galvanizing them .
The world gasped, with China ready to highlight the confrontation between the two countries at the expense of the United States.
In the years to come, the pandemic could lead to the relative decline of the United States as well as the continued erosion of the liberal international order, spurring the resurgence of fascism around the world.
It could also lead to a resurgence of liberal democracy, a system that has astounded skeptics with its resilience and renewal.
Elements of both visions will impose themselves, in different places. Unfortunately, unless current trends change dramatically, the overall outlook is bleak.
Rise of Fascism?
Pessimistic results
Pessimistic outcomes are easy to imagine. Nationalism, isolationism, xenophobia and attacks on the liberal world order have already been on the rise for years. This trend will only be accelerated by the pandemic.
The governments of Hungary and the Philippines have used the crisis to give themselves emergency powers, alienating these countries even further from democracy. Many other countries, including China, El Salvador and Uganda have taken similar measures.
Obstacles to the movement of people have appeared everywhere, even in the heart of Europe. Instead of cooperating constructively for their common benefit, countries have turned inward, bickering with each other, and made rivals the political scapegoats for their failures.
The rise of nationalism will increase the possibility of international conflict. In it, leaders may see a useful internal political distraction, or they may be tempted by the weakness or concern of their opponents and take advantage of the pandemic to destabilize their favorite targets or create new balances on the ground.
However, given the continued stabilizing force of nuclear weapons and the common challenges facing all major players, international turmoil is less likely than domestic turmoil.
Poor countries
Poor countries with overcrowded cities and weak public health systems will be hit hard. Not only social distancing, but even simple hygiene, such as hand washing, is extremely difficult in countries where many citizens do not have regular access to clean water.
Governments have often made things worse rather than better, sometimes deliberately to exacerbate tensions between groups or to undermine social cohesion, or out of simple incompetence.
India, for example, has increased its vulnerability by declaring a sudden lockdown without thinking about the consequences for the tens of millions of migrant workers who crowd every major city.
Many have gone to their country homes, spreading the disease across the country; once the government changed its stance and started restricting travel, large numbers of workers found themselves trapped in cities without work, shelter or assistance.
The powder keg of the southern hemisphere
Displacements caused by climate change were already underway in the Global South. The pandemic will aggravate its effects, bringing the large populations of developing countries increasingly to the limit of subsistence.
And the crisis has crushed the hopes of hundreds of millions of people in poor countries who have benefited from two decades of sustained economic growth. Popular indignation will grow, and we know that disappointed citizens' expectations are ultimately the classic recipe for revolution.
The desperate will try to emigrate, the demagogic leaders will exploit the situation to seize power, the corrupt politicians will seize the opportunity to appropriate everything they can grab. Many governments will stall or collapse.
A new wave of migration from the Global South to the North could be met with even less understanding and meet with more resistance, as migrants could be more credibly accused of bringing disease and chaos.
New black swans on the horizon
Finally, the sudden arrival of the so-called "black swans" is by definition something unpredictable, but increasingly probable the more you look at the situation in perspective.
Past pandemics have fostered apocalyptic visions, cults and new religions that have grown up around the extreme anxieties caused by prolonged situations of hardship.
Indeed, fascism could be seen as one of these cults. It was, for example, a "cult" that emerged from the violence and destabilization generated by the First World War and its economic and moral consequences.
Conspiracy theories flourished in places like the Middle East, where ordinary people had no power and there was no public opinion to counter them. Today, they have spread widely even in rich countries, thanks also to the information fracture caused by the Internet and social media. Prolonged suffering can provide rich material for populist demagogues.
Fascism or Democracy?
The immediate exposure of capabilities
However, just as the Great Depression not only produced fascism but also reinvigorated liberal democracy, so too can the pandemic produce some political outcomes other than fascism or authoritarianism.
A large-scale external shock was often enough to bring sclerotic political systems out of their inertia and create the conditions for that long-awaited structural reform. This pattern of response is bound to repeat itself, at least in some places on Earth, even with the pandemic crisis.
The management of the pandemic favors the emergence of professionalism and competence; the fallacy of demagoguery and incompetence is immediately exposed.
This fact should ultimately create a beneficial selection effect, rewarding politicians and governments that do well and penalizing those that do wrong.
The cases of Bolsonaro and Putin
Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro, who has consistently gutted his country's democratic institutions in recent years, has tried to bluff his way through the crisis and is now sinking as president in a health disaster.
Russia's Vladimir Putin tried to downplay the importance of the pandemic at first, then said Russia had everything under control, and will have to change its stance yet again as Covid-19 spreads rapidly across the country . Putin's legitimacy was weakening even before the crisis, and this may have accelerated the process.
Everywhere the pandemic has put existing institutions under stress, revealing their inadequacies and weaknesses. The gap between rich and poor, both of people and countries, has been deepened by the crisis and will widen further during the prolonged economic stagnation that will follow.
We return to look at the intervention of the state
But along with the problems, the crisis has also revealed the ability of some governments to provide solutions, drawing on collective resources in the process of containing and eradicating the pandemic. A pervasive sense of “alone, but together” has stimulated social solidarity and the development of more generous social amortization schemes.
A bit like what happened in the First World War and in the Depression when collective social suffering stimulated the birth of the first forms of welfare in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs.
This trend could dampen the extreme neoliberal, free-market ideology promoted by University of Chicago economists such as Gary Becker, Milton Friedman and George Stigler.
The Religion of Reganism
During the XNUMXs, the Chicago School provided an intellectual justification for the policies of US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who viewed state intervention in the economy as an obstacle to economic growth and human progress. .
At the time, there were good reasons to reduce many forms of state intervention and regulation. But the arguments in favor of a major laissez-faire they have become fossilized in a sort of liberal religion.
Moreover, the aversion to state action has turned into a real faith for a generation of conservative intellectuals, particularly in the United States.
Given the need for strong state action to slow the pandemic, it will be hard to say, as Reagan did in his inaugural address, that “government is not the solution to our problem; the government is the problem.”
Private initiative, philanthropy vs state intervention
Nor can it be credibly argued that the private sector and philanthropy can effectively replace the state in the event of a national emergency.
In April, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, announced that he would contribute $19 billion to the fight against Covid-XNUMX. An act of extraordinary generosity.
In the same month, the US Congress allocated $2,3 trillion to support businesses and people affected by the pandemic.
Anti-statism may warm the hearts of libertarian protesters fighting the lockdown, but polls suggest the vast majority of Americans trust government experts to tackle the crisis. This could increase popular support for state interventions to address other important social problems as well.
A possible resurgence of multilateralism
And the crisis could ultimately spur renewed international cooperation. As national leaders play accountability ping-pong, scientists and public health officials around the world are strengthening their networks.
If the failure of international cooperation leads to disaster and this downfall is seen as an evil, the era that follows could be marked by a renewed commitment to work multilaterally to advance common interests.
No illusions
A tough stress test
The pandemic has been something of a sudden global political stress test. Countries with capable and legitimate governments are doing relatively well and may enact reforms that will make them even stronger and more popular. This state of affairs will facilitate their future work.
Countries with weak public capacities or poor leadership will be in trouble, headed, as they are, towards stagnation, if not general impoverishment and instability. The problem we have is that this second group far outnumbers the first.
Unfortunately, the stress test was so challenging that few were able to pass it.
To successfully manage the initial stages of the crisis, countries needed not only capable states and adequate resources, but also broad social consensus and competent leaders capable of deserving trust.
South Korea has responded to this need by delegating the management of the epidemic to health professionals. Angela Merkel's Germany also responded well. The New Zealand of Labor leader Jacinda Ardern and the Australia of Conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who had been much discussed for his liquidationist positions on environmental issues, responded well.
Much more numerous governments have failed in one way or another. And as the rest of the crisis will also be difficult to manage, these national trends, both positive and negative, are likely to continue, making it difficult to adhere to broader optimism.
The reason for pessimism
One reason for pessimism is that positive scenarios would presuppose some sort of rational public discourse and social adherence to that discourse. Yet the link between technocracy and public powers is weaker today than when the elites ruled. This bond is essential.
Democratization and the dismantling of authority are one of the results of the digital revolution which has flattened cognitive hierarchies along with many other hierarchies.
The political decision-making process today seems to be guided not by rationality, but by a loud and confrontational babbling. It is certainly not the ideal environment for a constructive and collective self-examination of a community's perspectives. Some irrational policies may last longer than those that solve problems.
The unknown United States
The largest variable is represented by the United States. When the crisis erupted, America had the misfortune to have the most incompetent and divisive leader in its modern history at the helm. His way of governing has not changed when he has been put under pressure by events.
Having spent his entire term at war with the state he was leading, he was unable to deploy it effectively when the situation demanded. He judged that his political fortunes would be better served by argument and rancor than by national unity. He used the crisis to foment social divisions.
The mishandling of the pandemic has several causes, but the most significant was that of a national leader who failed to lead the United States through the crisis.
The polarization of political discourse
If the president wins a second term in November, the chances of a broader resurgence of democracy or the liberal international order will sharply diminish.
In any case, whatever the outcome of the election, the profound polarization of the United States is likely to remain.
Holding an election during a pandemic will be difficult, and there will be pressure from the losers to challenge the legitimacy of the election result.
Even if Democrats were to take the White House and both houses of Congress, they would inherit a country on its knees.
The government's action will collide with a mountain of debt and stiff resistance from an offended opposition.
National and international institutions will be weakened and shaky after so much neglect, and it will take years to rebuild them, if it is even possible to do so.
It takes a miracle, then?
With the most urgent and tragic phase of the crisis behind us, the world is heading for a long and depressing slowdown.
In the end it will come out unequal. In some parts of the world faster and better than others.
An upheaval in the global order is unlikely. Democracy, capitalism, the United States have shown themselves capable of transforming and adapting throughout history which has subjected them to many challenges.
But they'll have to pull a good rabbit out of the hat to do it again.
Da Foreign Affairs, July-August 2020
