Our debt to those beyond our shores: how do we reinvigorate internationalism after coronavirus?
The pandemic is stretching us in two opposing directions. On the one hand, we are more domestically focussed than ever before, spending most of our hours at home and following local news obsessively. On the other, we are living through one of the few truly global events of our lives – a challenge that has emerged directly because of our worldwide interconnectedness, that is affecting everyone everywhere, and that will only be met through concerted international effort. How we manage this tension over the coming months will determine our futures for years to come.
Those of us committed to championing international causes must begin from a bracing realisation: the most prominent global intergovernmental forums – the United Nations Security Council and the G20 and G7 groups of nations – have all demonstrably failed to rise to the coronavirus challenge. The Security Council has lost itself in debates about whether tackling the virus falls within its remit, whether to support the UN Secretary General’s call for a global ceasefire and who to blame for the emergence of the virus in the first place. The G20 and G7 have similarly been unable to reach consensus and the European Union is also struggling, with its long-running fault-line between the richer northern states and the weaker southern ones becoming even more pronounced.
Away from the diplomatic circuit dominated by the world’s richest nations, the virus has highlighted the vast inequality in wealth, wellbeing and life-chances that persist between the richer countries hit first and hardest and the poorer nations which are even more desperately unprepared. As of the start of April, Somalia’s Health Ministry did not have a single ventilator, the Central African Republic had three, South Sudan had four and Liberia had five. As the virus takes hold in places like these, we can expect devastation on a scale that many of us had dared to believe was now behind us. The head of the World Food Programme has warned of the risk of “a famine of biblical proportions”.
Financial transparency and accountability, fair trade and overseas aid are fundamental to reducing and ending the poverty that claims so many lives. But in the world right now, in the time of coronavirus, tax havens continue to facilitate the flight of capital from the world’s poorest places, trade barriers block the emergence of economic self-reliance and most aid donors are falling short of the long-standing target of spending 0.7% of gross national income on development assistance.
The crisis has also highlighted the world’s failure to get a grip on armed violence. The world is currently reeling from more conflicts than at any time since 1946, contributing to the displacement of a record 70 million people. Some of these conflicts are fuelled or abetted by major powers – for example, as people in Yemen scramble to contain the threat of coronavirus, including with UK aid money, British nationals are servicing jets that are being used to perpetuate a senseless conflict that is making the task of containing coronavirus more or less insurmountable. In a crowded camp in Idlib, Syria, a fourteen-year-old boy recently told one of my colleagues, ‘We’re used to the war now. Even when it hits nearby, we hide in caves. But with this virus, we can’t hide.’ In places like these, it will simply not be possible to contain the virus, posing a threat to all of us as well as to those who have already suffered so much.
The picture, however, is not entirely gloomy, not least as nation states and formal multilateral institutions are far from being the sum total of what we mean when we talk about internationalism.
As the pandemic has taken hold, we have seen an extraordinary increase in global health and scientific cooperation. For example, scientists from Oxford University are working with researchers in Kenya on a possible vaccine trial there. Such collaboration is vital for scientific breakthroughs – the Ebola vaccine, for instance, was discovered in Canada, developed in the USA and manufactured in Germany. Powerful semi-formal and informal connections such as these are precious – indeed they may save our lives.
Similarly, our social media feeds are filled with analysis, stories, memes and jokes from other countries, as we learn from each other’s experiences in this tough and unusual time. The Global Citizen ‘One World: Together At Home’ concert on 20th April was a vibrant example of what global cultural experiences can look like – at the time of writing, the worldwide viewing figures were over 270 million and still counting.
Who has paid a heavier price and how do we repay them?
As was acknowledged during that concert, the people around the world to whom we owe the greatest debts of gratitude are the health workers, the scientists, the policymakers, the carers and the ‘key workers’ in every country whose efforts are saving lives and livelihoods right now. Among these, we are indebted to the people who have kept the spirit of international cooperation alive – people who have offered their resources, time and expertise to those in other countries in order to support them in preparing for and responding to the virus and its effects.
The people around the world who are owed the profoundest apologies, meanwhile, are those who have suffered or who will suffer as a consequence of the flaws in the international response to coronavirus. This long list includes people in every country – indeed, to some extent it includes all 7.8 billion of us – but it will be people in the poorest countries or in places marred by violence who will have paid the highest price.
To spell it out, for many people in poor countries, social distancing is simply not possible, either because their living conditions do not allow it or because the imperative to work to sustain a living trumps any other consideration. Moreover, people who have grown up poor are more likely to be malnourished or to have underlying health conditions, and they will rely more heavily on the very same health systems that are being so stretched by the pandemic. Estimates published in The Lancet on the indirect effects of the pandemic on maternal and child mortality in poor countries are stark: they project a worst-case scenario of more than 1 million additional children and more than 50,000 more mothers dying in the next six months alone.
The UN has calculated that 84-132 million people worldwide could be pushed into extreme poverty by the effects of the pandemic, among them 42-66 million children. There is now a real and present danger that the 2020s will become a ‘lost decade’ of unprecedented reversals in development. The phenomenal progress that the world has seen in recent decades, and the hope that is encapsulated in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, is in serious jeopardy.
Given that the formal multilateral system is so stuck, and that political and economic realities pose such powerful countervailing forces against greater international cooperation, those of us who are championing this cause will need to think and act creatively and broadly:
While traditional multilateral action is stymied by conflict between some of the heavyweight nations (in particular, the US and China, and, in a different way, Russia), we can devise workarounds. The world needs a cohort of national leaders who commit themselves to multilateral action to tackle global problems independent of whether other powerful states join. The UK Government should not only be part of this effort but should help lead it.
Development cooperation is more critical than ever. The UK’s commitment to spending 0.7% of gross national income on official development assistance makes a profound difference to millions of lives, signals sincere commitment to tackling the most fundamental global challenges and gives the UK significant legitimacy and support on the world stage. It needs to be defended.
The persistence of conflict is one of the biggest drivers of vulnerability around the world with devastating impacts (including, but certainly not limited to, controlling the spread of disease). The UK has the potential to play a hugely constructive role here, modelling best practice in its own approaches and driving up higher standards from others. It should develop and publish a cross-Government ‘Protection of Civilians’ strategy, lead the way on improving the tracking and recording of civilian harm in conflict, support international efforts to constrain the worst forms of violence such as the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, invest in peace processes and peacebuilding, and take much more seriously its role in holding perpetrators of violations to account – including among its own allies.
How can we revive the internationalism that the world so desperately needs?
Some of the barriers to success here are attitudinal – a vague sentiment that says overseas problems are not our problems. As we know from Save the Children’s own work on defending aid and development, public attitudes like these are generally soft and become more positive after empathetic engagement. The bigger barrier is ideological, as touched on in Imran Ahmed’s essay. We are up against some powerful political forces and their digital outriders who want to erode the bastions of international cooperation in order to strengthen the autonomy of nation states. Proponents of this view will need to be either marginalised or defeated.
By far the greatest barrier, however, is economic. As we look forward to a future of vastly constrained public finances and an economy that is likely to require some form of life support for months or years to come, the case for forms of international cooperation that incur any financial cost will be far harder to make than in the past.
In some ways, the coronavirus is a test-run for more serious trials ahead. Worse pandemics are easily imaginable and some of the challenges we were already confronting as a species – including climate change, massive environmental destruction, nuclear proliferation, armed violence, poverty and weakening respect for human rights – are even more complex and ultimately far more harmful.
This observation can be read in two ways. Glass half empty, one could conclude that if we’re finding this one tough, we haven’t got a chance against anything more severe; glass half full, one could conclude that coronavirus has shown that humanity is demonstrably capable of taking serious measures when it absolutely needs to. Either way, the pandemic clearly reinforces the imperative to get much better at collective action across borders. This is a basis to work from.
We need to encourage our leaders to be boldly international in their politics and practice, and we need to be tactical in trying to defeat those voices who argue the opposite. The UK Government, and all of us as citizens, should be looking to strengthen networks everywhere – between government agencies, universities, religious bodies, civil society and culture. In doing so we need to avoid frames that emphasise the differences between us as humans and instead play up the connections between us. Neither the science that has driven so much historical progress nor the art or culture that sustain us is exclusively national – we should be confident in saying so.
It may be that we need to find heroes – genuinely global figures who can inspire millions with their vision or actions. Gandhi, King and Mandela all began as national figures, but they transcended that status and eventually became touchstones for ideas and causes that continue to inspire people in every country of the world today. But heroes are not always easy to come by, so we will also need to find ways to do their work ourselves. Wherever we come from and whatever our circumstances, we all share a common humanity. This is the idea that guided the heroes of the past and must sustain us now in the work we do, the networks we create and the stories we tell.