128 CHAPTER 6
POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES IN ACTION . . . NATIONALISM AND THE PANDEMIC EVENTS: Towards the end of December 2019, reports started to emerge of a cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown origin in the Chinese city of Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province. In late January 2020, the cause of this outbreak was identified as a new strain of coronavirus, Covid-19. Although Covid-19 turned out to be less deadly than some earlier viruses, it spread at devastating speed. In part, this was because the disease can be transmitted without people having symptoms and so without them knowing that they are ill. Declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11 March 2020, the areas worst hit by the disease shifted first from East Asia to Europe, and from there to the USA, South America, India and Africa. The worldwide death rate from the Covid-19 pandemic passed 2 million in January 2021. SIGNIFICANCE: One of themajor consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic has been a general strengthening of nationalism, reinforcing a pre- existing trend for nations to turn inward. This was demonstrated most clearly by the fact that during the pandemic national governments were the chief decision-making bodies, international institutions playing little or no role. Policy responses to the mounting crisis also tended to be isolationist and exclusionary in character: borders were closed, international travel was restricted and controls were imposed on exports such as protective medical equipment. This drift towards nationalism was bolstered by heightened great-power rivalry, especially a further deterioration in Sino–US relations. Thus, while the USA focused on Chinese
responsibility for the pandemic and the virus (the ‘Chinese’ virus, as President Trump sometimes put it), China used its success in speedily bringing the disease under control as a means of demonstrating the superiority of its system of rule. Furthermore, it has been claimed that national populist leaders and regimes responded to the intensifying public health crisis in broadly similar ways. After all, the leaders of the three countries that, in July 2020, had the highest death toll from Covid-19 each, in his own way, cultivated a populist ‘strongman’ image – the USA’s Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jai Bolsonaro and the UK’s Boris Johnson. It has been argued that while some national populist leaders used the severity of the outbreak to enhance their own power and silence their critics, others treated the threat as bogus or at least seriously exaggerated. Bolsonaro (to use but one example) consistently downplayed the crisis and defied his health minister’s advice on social distancing by going into the streets to eat doughnuts and mingle with his supporters.
CORE THEMES To treat nationalism as an ideology in its own right is to encounter at least three problems. The first is that nationalism is sometimes classified as a political doctrine rather than
a fully-fledged ideology. Whereas, for instance, liberalism, conservatism and socialism constitute complex sets of interrelated ideas and values, nationalism, the argument goes, is at heart the simple belief that the nation is the natural and proper unit of government. The drawback of this view is that it focuses only on what might be regarded as ‘classical’ political nationalism, and ignores the many other, and in some respects no less
Political nationalism: A form of nationalism that regards the nation as a natural political community, usually expressed through the idea of national self-determination.
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