A sudden shock upends routine decisionmaking and forces leaders to take urgent action. A combination of mistrust, misperception and fear dissolves the bonds that sustain modern civilization.
The year is 1914, when Europe spent its summer mobilizing for war. However, the description could just as well apply to this summer. The worst pandemic since the 1918 influenza is rapidly morphing into a systemic crisis of globalization, potentially setting the stage for the most dangerous geopolitical confrontation since the end of the Cold War.
Within weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic has shut down one-third of the global economy and triggered the largest economic shock since the Great Depression. Looking ahead, the most important factor that will shape how this crisis evolves is collective leadership.
That crucial component remains absent. With the US and China at each other’s throats, global leadership would have to emerge from somewhere other than Washington or Beijing.
Moreover, to pave the way for renewed international cooperation, three myths must be debunked. The first is that COVID-19 qualifies as an unexpected “black swan” event for which no one could have prepared. Public health advocates and epidemiologists such as Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota have been sounding the alarm for years about the systemic risks posed by coronaviruses and influenza, as have leading intelligence agencies.
The sheer depth of the current crisis is the product of a collective failure to think in non-linear terms or to heed scientists’ clear warnings. Worse, COVID-19 is probably just a dress rehearsal for the disasters ahead that are to result of climate change — especially after the world passes the warming threshold of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, starting in the early 2030s.
The second myth is that COVID-19 has discredited globalization. To be sure, international air travel did spread the coronavirus much faster than older travel methods would have. Yet globalization has also furnished people with the information, medicine, technology and multilateral institutions needed to defeat not just viruses, but all other collective threats, too.
Thanks to a global scientific community linked through information and communication technologies, the genome of the novel coronavirus was sequenced and made publicly available by Jan. 12, within two weeks of China’s report of a cluster of cases. Now, researchers are sharing their findings in pursuit of a vaccine. Never before have so many people across so many countries collaborated on the same project.
The third myth is that policy tools and institutional arrangements can see the world through the crisis. International organizations can mobilize only a fraction of the resources required to contain the virus and its economic fallout.
Unless people change how institutions like the WHO operate and do more to leverage the resources of private actors, expectations will not be met.
The COVID-19 pandemic has come at a critical moment, accelerating a deeper crisis of international cooperation.
Resolving both will require significant innovation, and a massive cooperative effort to achieve a stable equilibrium between economic growth and social wellbeing. This will not be easy. Not only must people change their institutions and broader economic systems, but they also must change themselves.
The agenda to overcome the crisis includes five parts.
First, people need to work toward more inclusive leadership at the global level. Given the current difficulties in the US-China relationship, the rest of the G20 must come together to generate new ideas for addressing the crisis in the global trading system, the intensifying zero-sum competition over technology and the collapse of trust in multilateral frameworks. The EU, the UK, Japan, Canada, Indonesia, India, South Korea and Brazil, in particular, must play a bigger role in filling the leadership vacuum.
Second, people need new multilevel leadership coalitions comprising civil-society organizations, the private sector, think tanks and others. When the usual top-down leadership is not forthcoming, others must rise to the occasion.
Third, governments need to ensure a smooth process of developing and distributing a COVID-19 vaccine. G20 member states must build on their previous pledges to work with international organizations and private-sector partners in creating a platform for delivering a vaccine fast and equitably. This is an unprecedented challenge that demands an unprecedented coalition.
Fourth, more firepower is needed to address the looming financial crisis in emerging and developing economies. The IMF should immediately issue a new tranche of its Special Drawing Rights, and the Paris Club of sovereign creditors, coordinating closely with China, must address debtor countries’ increasingly unsustainable debt levels.
Finally, the international community must start building the coalitions needed to ensure success at the UN biodiversity conference and at the UN climate conference next year. The world desperately needs more engagement on climate and environmental issues, not least to sever the link between habitat loss and zoonotic-disease outbreaks.
Historian Margaret MacMillan concludes her analysis of the world’s march to war in 1914 with a crucial message: “[I]f we want to point fingers from the 21st century, we can accuse those who took Europe into war of two things. First, a failure of imagination in not seeing how destructive such a conflict would be, and second, their lack of courage to stand up to those who said there was no choice left but to go to war. There are always choices.”
The costs of inaction today have already been staggering. Rather than simply accepting the collapse of the multilateral system, people must start imagining the new mechanisms of solidarity that this crisis demands.
Bertrand Badre, a former managing director of the World Bank, is chief executive of Blue like an Orange Sustainable Capital. Yves Tiberghien, cochair of the Vision 20 Initiative, is a professor of political science and director emeritus of the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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