Guest Contributor
Jonathan Hearn, Professor of Political and Historical Sociology at the University of Edinburgh & President, Association of the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN)
As the war in Ukraine increasingly eclipses COVID-19 in the daily news round, and responses to the pandemic are levelling out, it is perhaps a good moment to reflect on COVID-19 and the imagining of nations. I am always interested in how people invest personal senses of agency and identity in larger collectivities, especially nations and nation states. How do nations come to represent the agency and identity of actual persons?
I explore this by examining recent controversies around the COVID-19 pandemic in these terms. But first let’s try to clarify the origins and process of the pandemic. It appears to have been caused, in the usual way of such things, through the virus mutating and jumping the animal-human boundary in some conducive environment such as a ‘wet market’ where non-domesticated meats are sold. The early hypothesis of a ‘lab leak’ in China appears to have gained some credibility as time has gone on, but the fact is at this point we just don’t know. But the very presence of these two alternative interpretations is significant because of how they relate to the idea of nation states as actors. In the former (and in my view still more likely) scenario, the pandemic is like a natural disaster to which the world is generally susceptible, albeit conditions of modern life and mobility make it more likely. It could have happened in many places. In the latter scenario, the Chinese state is cast more as an irresponsible actor. To compound the difficulties of interpretation, not only is it difficult to know the causal process involved, but the ideological predispositions to read national actor-hood into a course of events with political consequences, might be a driver of contending interpretations in the first place.
Beyond the pandemic’s origins, we can also ask how various states have performed when confronted with it, as formulators and implementors of policy. However, this is seriously complicated by many factors, including: uneven collecting and reporting of data; asynchronous epidemiology (country by country); fundamentally different conditions such as population density and mobility, genetic propensity to the disease, and baseline healthcare systems. Another set of factors is the close correspondence of morbidity and mortality to health factors that already carry risks (age, obesity, and other conditions), making the distribution of these traits something that affects comparisons. On top of these variations and absences of information, national policy responses have varied wildly, from ‘Sweden’ to ‘New Zealand’, in ways that may not correspond closely to the variations in circumstances just listed, making comparisons of actual effectiveness extremely difficult. I suspect experts will be trying to assess ‘national strategies and performances’ for years to come.
All this suggests to me that in an analysis of the impact of COVID-19, notions of nationhood, nation-ness, national identity, nationalism, etc., will have to be primarily notions of political rhetoric and discourse, only loosely and provisionally related to actual statistics about the pandemic, such as they are. I propose to look at this briefly through two lenses: (1) nation states represented in their ‘outer’ relations as moral agents with responsibilities to one another, and (2) discourses on ‘inner’ relations, as the pandemic triggers moralised identity questions about ‘who we are as a nation’?
Early on we had an ugly taste of the first process with Donald Trump’s insistence on calling it the ‘Chinese Virus’, casting it as something done by China to the rest of the world, and more generally advocating tight migration controls, on the view that the virus was something ‘foreign’ that could be ‘kept out’. This was obviously naïve in epidemiological terms, and instrumental in playing to Trump’s political base. More generally, the entire national media representation of the rolling state of the pandemic on the basis of available statistics has read something like a horse race, with nations variously pulling ahead and falling behind in national performance, in a somewhat meaningless comparative discourse of ‘critique’, given the problems of variable conditions and asynchronous national epidemiology mentioned above1. At present the major international moral issue, about which we can expect both internal and external discourses among the ‘community of nations’, is the globalisation of a vaccination campaign, to improve global protection and reduce the scope for the emergence of new variants of the coronavirus. This involves the obligations of the more affluent and industrially and scientifically advanced countries to other countries that are less so. But it also involves the corporate autonomy of the vaccine producing companies, who on the one hand can be represented as the agents of those affluent nations, but on the other can also be viewed as semi-autonomous corporate actors, already operating at international scales. Is their agency, and moral responsibility (e.g. to agree to suspend patenting rights for a period) the agency of the nation states that house them and provide a home base for them? Or are they relatively autonomous actors? This is a conundrum (and perhaps ‘escape clause’) characteristic of the liberal-capitalist-democratic model of the nation state. More autocratic regimes can less easily plead constraint by respect for the legal and property autonomy of internally based corporate actors.
On the ‘inner face’ of the nation state we encounter a different cast of characters. Again, for obvious reasons, divisions are more readily visible in liberal forms of society which do not try to mute and conceal internal dissent. Early on COVID produced a cast national heroes in the form of frontline workers, but especially healthcare workers, whose service was regularly marked by applause. But increasingly over the last year or so, after the roll out of vaccines, pressure has grown to move back towards normality, and scepticism has grown about the efficacy of some of the health measures such as face masks and easily faked ‘COVID passes’. This is partly just a sign of exhaustion with the limitations of lockdowns and other restrictions. But it dovetails with movements of those who were always more sceptical about official communications on the pandemic, those particularly suspicious of the vaccines, and with those who hold strong views about individual bodily sovereignty and against mandated vaccination, such as the movement of long-haul truckers and supporters in Canada. From the other end there are those more prepared to accept the orthodox advice of governments and health policy professionals (debated and uncertain as it is), and inclined to see the ‘resisters’ as irrational, and free-riding on the caution and sacrifice of those who ‘follow the rules’. And as we know, some of these tensions between different attitudes to the pandemic have been exacerbated by the very social conditions of lockdown, and prefigured by tensions of populism and political polarisation indicated by Trumpism, Brexit, BLM, global warming, and so on.
In my own neck of the woods, the UK as a multinational state means that one gets a peculiar variant of ‘international’ competitive comparison housed within a single nation state. England under the Westminster government of Boris Johnson has often been portrayed as too slow to react and incompetent, while the devolved governments of Scotland and Wales have generally been seen as more cautious and effective. At first Scotland seemed to be in the lead under the calm leadership of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, but more recently Wales has seemed to be the star performer overall2. However the actual final public health performances may be compared, this has been grist for nationalist mills, as people take pride in their Scottish and Welsh national performances as compared to the somewhat bumbling performance of Conservative Westminster government, bedevilled by its own contingent of those arguing against too much state regulation, and for a ‘return to normal’ as soon as possible.
These tensions over response strategies within liberal nation states encode basic differences in how people understand their relationship to the state as the safeguard of their liberties (which is to say, agency). In the sense of Isaiah Berlin’s classic distinction, some see the state’s role as ‘negative’ one, protecting the individual from too much interference in their liberties by the state, while others see the state as playing a more ‘positive’ role in using its power to secure the well-being of society. Those in the latter camp are more inclined to see ‘the science’ enabling, those in the former camp, as overweening. The point is that this tension is about how people understand the relationship between their personal power/agency, and that of the nation (state) they are part of. Do they see the state as enhancing or inhibiting their freedom? This bears upon whether or not they see the state as they proper vessel and expression of their personal agency, on whether its legitimacy is being enhanced or weakened by this historical drama.
The liberal nation state, which I would claim is the historically leading type of nation state, invites such tensions. Precisely because people’s agency is not subsumed into a single state project, or embedded in kin networks, but rather diversified and ramified through a range of corporate agents populating civil society, national identity expresses itself as a contest over which sets of agents have the most authentic claim on the identity of the nation. Who best represents the ‘we’ of the nation, and is most qualified to shape state action with their own agency? Who should constitute the ‘nation’ that animates the state? As many have pointed out, ‘populism’ is the assertion that a portion of the population constitutes an ‘elite’ in opposition to the ‘real people’, and thereby disqualified as ‘agents’. My argument is that such tensions are a perennial aspect of the liberal nation state, built into its foundations. And thus the pandemic presents people with yet another collective drama of their helplessness and yet resourcefulness in the face of misfortune, much like wars and natural disasters, in which to define and display national character. It becomes not just a practical struggle, national or global, against a microbial threat, but a moral drama in which national rights and duties are invoked and contested, and the international reputations of state forged.
- Indeed, when and where national borders are relevant to the epidemiology is a question to be asked. It seems to me more likely that analyses will eventually reveal a series of macro-regional patterns, linked by specific international population flows, rather than discretely national epidemiologies.
- Scotland showed an early strong performance in limiting the spread in the 2nd wave (Winter 2020-21), but this was reversed in the third wave (late Summer 2021).
Note: This blog is extracted and adapted from a paper given at the Covid-19 and Nationalism Workshop given in Belgrade, 5-8 March, 2022, sponsored by UCD Dublin and London Metropolitan University.