Covid-19 and the new global chaos
Breno Bringel[1]
We could define the current moment as one of global chaos. Chaos does not imply the total absence of any kind of order, but rather evokes the turbulence, fragility, and geopolitical uncertainty of contemporary times in the face of multiple "global risks" and possible destinies.
Unpredictability and instability become the norm, and this refers not only to greater volatility in the face of threats, but also to the very dynamics of political forces and contemporary capitalism.
The world order that emerged with the fall of the Berlin Wall sought to extend formal democracy in the world (even though the major powers destabilized and interrupted it whenever they deemed it convenient) through neoliberal globalization in a kind of "global social-liberalism".
A narrative of global “prosperity” and “stability” was created that confined democracy to capitalism. This strategy is now being challenged by the notion that the international market can continue to function well even with authoritarian tendencies, neo-fascism, and constant violations of individual rights.
If the pandemic produces a geopolitical inflection point, it is necessary to discuss some of the main emerging geopolitical trends and representations, as well as the contested scenarios at the global level. This is the focus of this article.
Neither deglobalization nor the end of capitalist globalization
We are not, as some hasty positions argue, facing the end of globalization and the emergence of “deglobalization”, although we may possibly be facing the end of capitalist globalization. as we know it.[2]
The degree of radicalization of the territorial and financial expansion of capital over the last few decades was made possible by the construction of a grand agreement led by the West – with the United States at the forefront (even though its hegemony is increasingly diminished) – which allowed the construction of a dominant narrative of growth, in tune with the unlimited expansion of transnational companies and the approval of various power groups and national and international organizations.
Its implementation, as is well known, occurred with the removal of all barriers to a grammar of deregulation, flexibility, and liberalization that consolidated neoliberalism worldwide, while simultaneously destroying the environment and the social fabric. Alongside this came a process of cultural struggle to entrench neoliberal globalization not only as an economic model, but also as a societal one.
Despite fierce criticism from the alter-globalization movement and a diversity of territorial resistances – and even though the 2008 crisis exposed the most tragic and lethal dimension of financial capitalism and globalization – the response was not an alternative to that, but a radicalization of the model.
The losses were socialized across the entire population, and states implemented adjustment and austerity policies while bailing out the banks, which, in turn, privatized the profits. Capitalist globalization was thus able to continue its course of accumulation and exploitation, deepening the extractive model.
The recent scenario, amplified in times of pandemic, seems to be something different: among different sectors of the right and the extreme right, “anti-globalist” and nationalist positions are emerging everywhere, whether in the heart of the system, in the “emerging powers” or in peripheral countries, trying to reorganize capitalism in a more closed and authoritarian way.
There is no single strategy or direction. In fact, Luis González Reyes and Lucía Bárcena show how the three main nodes of capitalist globalization are pursuing different strategies: the United States is promoting protectionist policies while simultaneously intensifying the trade war with China, which, like the European Union, seeks to strengthen global economic chains, albeit in different ways. In the first case, by promoting an ambitious economic expansion plan, notably the Belt and Road Initiative; in the second, through bilateral trade negotiations and investments.
Meanwhile, international trade, privatizations, and capital flows may encounter further public regulations proposed by various actors; dependence on inputs and products from other countries (visible in the pandemic with masks or respirators, but whose reality extends, in many cases, to essential products), is leading many countries to review their policies for the future, thinking about self-sufficiency or, at least, reducing dependence.
On the other hand, strategies for specialization and internationalization of production are being reworked, and central states and transnational companies are reorganizing themselves, with increasing investments in technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence.
The world, therefore, seems to be moving in the short term not towards deglobalization, but towards a more decentralized, networked and ultra-technological capitalist globalization.
Global value chains will tend to reorient themselves, although they will likely continue to hold considerable sway. The supranational institutional framework designed to facilitate accumulation, in turn, may lose strength in the face of a more complex economic and political system of accumulation in cities and hierarchical networks.
Not everything is new, but the pandemic may accelerate and consolidate geopolitical changes that have been underway for the last decade. This is the case with the relative strengthening of China, which, although it will play a more decisive role in the global system, is far from becoming a hegemon in the short term.
The gap between center and periphery, on the other hand, tends to increase even further, due both to the centrality of technological development and to the economic recession, which has usually been accompanied by a well-known and disastrous macroeconomic recipe for the countries of the South.
These scenarios and trends reinforce the idea that the current geopolitical order will foreseeably be marked by greater rivalry in the interstate system, distrust between political and economic actors, but also by the deepening, on the part of the dominant actors, of global militarization, which may strengthen systemic chaos.
It seems unlikely that a new global governance of health can emerge, both because of the WHO's wavering role and the lack of commitment from individual states. International and multilateral organizations of all kinds have also failed to rise to the challenge of the pandemic, whether through silence, incapacity, or inconsistency. Precisely for this reason, they need to reinvent themselves, as Bernabé Malacalza and Mónica Hirst recently argued in New Society.
Most regional blocs have emerged weakened and, in some cases, dismantled and lacking moral authority in the face of the pandemic. This is the case of the European Union, which during the global health crisis missed the opportunity to position itself as an alternative to the failed US response to the pandemic, but also to the centralized and authoritarian Chinese model.
The fissures and asymmetries within the bloc resurfaced, hindering internal coordination and external projection. Those regional projects that a few years ago attempted to project themselves in Latin America as counter-hegemonic regionalisms, such as UNASUR, CELAC, and ALBA-TCP, have gone almost unnoticed during the pandemic and have not had sufficient scope to build any relatively well-articulated supranational political response.
In the cases where they did function to some extent, such as in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, this occurred primarily with the aim of exchanging information and coordinating policies to stimulate trade and business. Thus, in some cases, the pandemic may spell the end for certain regional projects. In others, regionalism will tend to reorganize itself in response to broader geopolitical and geoeconomic changes.
Between containing the virus and social unrest: shock national and local alternatives
During the pandemic, national sentiments mobilized massively, and the interventionist state was even championed by neoliberals. A kind of “"Transitory Health Leviathan", as Maristella Svampa rightly pointed out. With it came, in many cases, social and health protection policies, but also the military in the streets, states of emergency in which everything is suspended, and the establishment of a dangerous war narrative.
And that's because constant surveillance – from the most traditional forms to digital tracking and drones – the control and management of big dataNew facial recognition devices and other sophisticated forms of social control are not being expanded solely to combat a virus. Measures that concentrate power, adopted to fight COVID-19, may even be necessary to enable public healthcare and the “protection” of the population. However, there is a very fine line between that and authoritarian practices.
State responses have been diverse, varying according to the profiles of the political regimes. In some cases, authoritarian state capitalism prevailed, while in others the more socially oriented side of the state emerged. However, much of the analysis of state management of the crisis sought to highlight cases of “success” and “failure.”
The main variable, therefore, was containing the number of infections and deaths. Of course, some strategies may be more effective than others, and there are cases where denialism, coupled with incompetence (in this, it's hard to beat Bolsonaro and Trump), represents the worst aspect of the responses offered. But we cannot forget that in the case of dependent states in the global periphery and semi-periphery, the difficulties in confronting the pandemic are even greater: virtually nonexistent public health systems, undermined access to water, precarious and overcrowded housing in urban peripheries, and limited state capacity.
However, the importance of the state and the nation coexisted with a strong revaluation of places and the local scale. Throughout the world, a series of local initiatives proliferated, seeking to generate dynamics of mutual support and to build neighborhoods and communities with the aim of providing collective, grassroots responses to people's everyday needs.
Given the difficulty of protesting in the streets in various parts of the world, much of the analysis of resistance in times of coronavirus has tended to emphasize the key role of digital activism, but also the creativity of social movements in generating innovative spaces and proposals.
The press, as usual, tends to focus on the most visible aspects of citizen actions and social movements, such as flash mobsbanging pots and pans or electronic petitions. But while this has been an important part of the protest actions during the pandemic, it is also essential to observe what is happening beneath the surface, such as self-organization and the protection of workers who have had to continue working, whether for survival or because their tasks fall under what are considered "essential services".
Despite the restrictions and difficulties inherent in protest, revolt can always be sparked by a catalyst, even in unlikely times like a pandemic. This was the case with the brutal murder of George Floyd, an African American man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, which unleashed a wave of anti-racist protests unprecedented in the United States since the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, impacting the entire world.
Although it's commonly said that older people are the most vulnerable to the coronavirus, recent events have made it clear that being African American in the United States (or Black in Brazil) does mean belonging to a "high-risk population." In other words, the chances of dying from structural racism are greater than from the coronavirus, which has led to a relativization of protests during the pandemic.
Beyond material shortages and immediate needs, the commitment of many groups and communities to community and to rebuilding social bonds in times of profound individualization has been one of the most significant features. There was also an effort to highlight the inequality in the distribution of care work, solidarity, and food and energy sovereignty. The confinement of a third of the world's population also served to spread a message that feminists have long emphasized: the body must also be considered as a scale.
But the local scale has not only been important in a transformative, non-institutional, and in some cases, anti-institutional sense. In countries that failed to implement decisive measures across the entire nation, there was a strong struggle with local and regional leaders who, along with unofficial initiatives, assumed the institutional leadership in the fight against the pandemic. In other cases, progressive municipalities also sought to promote and foster collaborative care platforms or directly took the reins of crisis management.
This “new return” of places and their centrality to social resistance and social movements in times of coronavirus cannot lead us to fall back into dichotomies that seemed to have been overcome, but which are circulating widely again today, such as the global scale being the place of capitalism and the local scale the locus of resistance.
As I have insisted on several occasions, in the last two decades localized social struggles have been the most globalized or, if you prefer, territorialized movements are those that have most successfully become internationalized.
This was the case, for example, with peasant and indigenous movements since the 1990s, but also with the diverse experiences gathered around the alter-globalization and global and environmental justice movements. However, the emergence of what I have defined as a new “geopolitics of global outrage” during the last decade seems to have led to a lower level of organizational density among social struggles worldwide.
The fact that the protest is spreading globally, or rather, across different countries of the world, does not necessarily mean that it is globalizing in a strong sense, that is, that it is being articulated with solid ties and building a truly global response to the capitalist world-system.
On the one hand, it is necessary to distinguish between global actions and global movements. On the other, given the argument that we are facing new political cultures without such strong internationalist roots, as suggested in a recent article by Christophe Ventura and Didier Billion, we should delve deeper into the debate about the changes in the “movement-form” and the modalities of activism in the world today. Although these continue to coexist with more traditional formats, they compel us to question previous perspectives in order to grasp cognitive, generational, and identity shifts, with significant repercussions for resistance practices, political articulations, and conceptions and horizons of social transformation.
Geopolitical scenarios after the health crisis: recovery, adaptation or transition
Classical geopolitics featured a strong "geo-determinism" in the sense of the constraints placed on environmental or geographical conditions in political actions. Furthermore, the prevailing anthropocentrism of modernity allowed for virtually unlimited territorial expansion and capital accumulation once humankind had "domesticated" nature and natural resources.
Although ecosystem limits have long since been exceeded, the pandemic seems to mark a turning point in terms of the centrality of the environment and possible geopolitical scenarios vis-à-vis social and economic models.
Three different projects are vying in the contemporary political debate to determine the course of the post-pandemic world:
- el business as usual, focused on GDP growth, predatory development, and the search for new market niches to overcome the crisis, based on adjustment policies that demand, once again, the sacrifice of all to maximize the profit and gain of a few;
- he "Green New DealThe concept, which initially emerged a decade ago within the UK environmental movement, has gained greater resonance in recent years following a proposal by Democratic members of parliament in the United States to generate social and economic reforms that would lead to a transformation of the energy system. It also spread very rapidly during the pandemic, with various adoptions by companies, international organizations, and the EU itself, which is creating its own “European Green Deal.”
- el paradigm shift towards a new economic and ecosocial matrix, proposed by more combative environmental movements and various anti-capitalist sectors that advocate for degrowth and more disruptive measures as the only possible alternative.
These projects seem to lead us to three possible scenarios that do not occur in a "pure" form and can be intertwined in multiple ways, although they all have their own logic: the recuperación of the most aggressive logic of economic growth, the adaptation from capitalism to a “cleaner” model, albeit one that is socially unequal; or the transition towards a new eco-social and economic model.
Faced with these projects and scenarios, it is important to consider the implications of each. Implementing “business as usual” would further strengthen militarized globalization, the biopolitics of authoritarian neoliberalism, and a destructive model of exploitation that would foreseeably lead to even more catastrophic scenarios, including wars and a deepening of the ecosocial crisis. The “return to normal” or even “the new normal” are discourses that justify and endorse this type of scenario, given the anxiety of a large part of the population to regain their social interaction and/or employment.
In the case of adapting to green capitalism, profound geopolitical and geoeconomic readjustments are anticipated. According to this view, mere greenwashing, which began with the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the labeling of development as "sustainable," is no longer sufficient. Now, a further step is required.
And we know that if capitalism agrees to give up environmental protection, it doesn't necessarily do so for the sake of the environment, but rather because it can be a way to maximize profits. New strategies for coexistence between capital accumulation and environmentalism may grant local politics greater autonomy, but they could also exacerbate North-South inequalities and environmental racism.
But to be fair, this largely “adaptive” scenario is still the subject of intense debate. On one hand, a significant portion of the dominant groups, primarily in the West, see it as the right path forward. On the other, political forces advocating for social justice and sustainability are seeking to push it in various ways toward a complete rupture and reconfiguration.
This is the case with proposals that advocate, from the Global South, the “decolonization” of the logic of Green New Deal; or that critically engage with their assumptions, but grounding them in other realities such as Latin America, giving more centrality to the State and the contributions of popular struggles with the aim of fostering, as suggested by Maristella Svampa and Enrique Viale, a great pact of ecosocial and economic justice that can serve for some national realities and as a basis for essential North/South dialogues.
Finally, the third scenario is the most difficult, but also the most necessary to ensure that the environment is not just, once againThis is not a banner to save capitalism, but to save humanity and the planet. It is the social movements themselves, territorial experiences, and a diversity of popular and political-intellectual struggles and fronts that are driving this scenario, pushing the boundaries of green capitalism narratives. The transition to a change in the ecosocial matrix is a goal shared by several social movements today. However, this can hardly be achieved solely through autonomy. Nor will it be possible if all efforts are focused on the state.
At a systemic turning point where attempts at a capitalist solution to the crisis are combined with growing political authoritarianism, it is essential to generate broad democratic and transformative platforms that bring together activists, engaged citizens, and social organizations with the aim of halting the destruction of ecosystems and the multiple inequalities made visible by the COVID-19 crisis.
There is no single recipe for this, but rather a multitude of strategies for disengaging from capitalist globalization and articulating a new globalization of translocal struggles. Many are already underway, seeking to reinvent transnational solidarities and militant internationalism, broadening the horizons of the future.
With this spirit, the proposal for a Southern Ecosocial Pact, of Latin American scope, was launched on June 2, 2020, and supported a week later by more than 1.400 people and 300 organizations. One of the central points of the initiative is the articulation of redistributive justice with environmental, ethnic, and gender justice.
To this end, concrete proposals, also disseminated in several other areas (such as solidarity-based tax transformation, the cancellation of external debts of States and a universal basic income), are combined with broader horizons associated with the construction of post-extractivist economies and societies, the strengthening of community spaces, care and information/communication from society.
Moving in this direction will require sacrifices and drastic changes ranging from the personal (change of habits, reduction of consumption or decrease in travel) to the macro level (policies that enable the relocation of food and a change in the food system or degrowth in sectors such as oil, gas and mining), also including labor relations and social life as a whole.
It also implies territorial resistance, seeking new forms of articulation, connection, and intelligibility within the global map of emerging struggles. Or, in other words, articulating, from the struggles of our time, a global movement to contest the course of this world. new alter-globalization momentOnly in this way can we move from a destructive globalization to a "pluriverse." Only in this way can other possible worlds emerge.
[1] Researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Social and Political Studies of the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Editor of Open MovementsHe is the director of the Latin American Sociological Association (ALAS) and president of the Research Committee on Social Classes and Social Movements of the International Sociological Association (ISA). He is a member of the CLACSO Working Group on Critical Extension: Theories and Practices in Latin America and the Caribbean. His latest books are Critical Geopolitics and Regional (Re)Configurations (London, Routledge, 2019) and Brazil – a changing era: crises, protests and political cycles (Madrid, Catarata, 2018).
This text was originally published in Open Democracy June 18, 2020. A longer version was published as Geopolitics of the pandemic, scales of the crisis, and disputed scenarios, published in Geopolitics(s): Journal of Studies on Space and Power, 11 (special), 173-187. The author thanks Maristella Svampa, Enara Echart, Heriberto Cairo, Teivo Teivainen, Geoffrey Pleyers, José Maurício Domingues, Paulo Henrique Martins and Franck Tavares for their comments.
[2] “As we know it”
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