Article writing on covid - 19
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When we presented the early 2020 issue of the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, no one comprehended what the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, in Wuhan province, China, would mean to the world, to Europe, to any country or any single person in the weeks to come. A couple of months later, life as we knew it fundamentally changed. The mantras of today are ‘stay at home, stay safe’ and ‘social distancing’. Not even the most critical mind working on surveillance – and on what George Orwell grasped in his ‘1984’ novel – would have imagined that almost all over the world, nation states ban individual free movement and the gathering of people, while borders are closed and aeroplanes are grounded. Normal social life and work has come to a halt. It seems the policing of populations might be the ‘only’ way to stop the deadly virus spreading further–or at least slow it down to a pace our medical systems can handle. Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’ appears to be taking on new forms in current times, while Simmel’s ‘psychology of the city dweller’ also seems to take on novel meaning. The effects of the pandemic on social inequality, urban life, citizenship, migration, and core-periphery relations are already becoming visible, but will be only fully comprehensible in due course. What we have to face up to is unprecedented as far as contemporary generations are concerned, and will leave heavy marks, stigma, and perhaps trauma for those who survive the virus (but also for the lucky ones who are not being physically infected).
There is a lot to say on the neo-nationalisation of security regimes we see right now, as well as on systematic failures of national and international politics in securing public health systems, which now renders visible the horrific scale of death counting. Neoliberal capitalism has ignored what society means, and now leaves it to the kinder people in society to fill the care gaps that are man- and system-made. The disaster is televised, and in the daily news, we increasingly see worn out faces of nurses, doctors, and of all involved with keeping alive the livelihood in our neighbourhoods, cities and across the globe. Foremost, the rising numbers of mass deaths as result of the COVID-19 pandemic is streamed into our temporarily (over-)crowded home spaces, and is reversing the notion of public social life and culture. Empty city streets, closed businesses, and people avoiding proximity of each other is a bleak reminder that our urbanist mode of living is fragile, and that everything does not come back to life during springtime. We can only hope that April is the cruellest of months.
The ‘state of emergency’ not only affects the physical and psychological health of populations all over Europe, and the world, but it equally affects the political rights and democratic status of citizens. The case of Hungary is the most explicit one (as far as Europe is concerned) in that it is not merely temporarily interrupting, but fully dismantling, its democratic regime, by granting unlimited powers to its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and for an indefinite time period. Various European Union member states are now mobilising against the rise of this authoritarian system within the EU, but the current reaction seems to arrive too late, as the process has been long underway, and the COVID-19 crisis has provided the Hungarian regime with the perfect context to take their ‘illiberal’ project one step further.
Geopolitically, relations appear to be changing. At the time of writing, China has sent equipment to Italy, and both Cuban and Russian doctors have flown in to support the crumbling health provisions in Europe. Did someone say European Union? Again, the EU has been slow in its reaction, not least vis-à-vis the robust propaganda machines of Moscow and Beijing, and EU member states have reproduced cleavages in their reactions that had already emerged in the 2008 financial and economic crisis – that is, between the wealthy North and economically fragile South. We might have to reconsider the notion of European solidarity, cosmopolitanism and global humanity in the years to come.
One significant consequence that cultural and political sociologists ought to consider carefully is that both the health and social implications (calling for national and European unity and solidarity), and the democratic ones (demanding political reasonability), indicate a return of the political – that is, the existence, centrality, and survival of the political community, as Marcel Gauchet (2020) has recently recalled. Similarly, developments constitute a return of society and of a collective awareness of the significance of society and of the collectivity.
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