Post-corona world order: What was, is not what will be

The coronavirus is likely to be remembered as just such an event, changing our lives in a myriad ways

By HERB KEINON
Passengers, including Russian citizens, who are evacuated by train to Russia after Ukrainian authorities shut the country's borders amid the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), queue outside the Central Railway Station in Kiev, Ukraine March 27, 2020 (photo credit: REUTERS/GLEB GARANICH)
Passengers, including Russian citizens, who are evacuated by train to Russia after Ukrainian authorities shut the country's borders amid the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), queue outside the Central Railway Station in Kiev, Ukraine March 27, 2020
(photo credit: REUTERS/GLEB GARANICH)
There have been a handful of key events over the last century that fundamentally altered the world order: World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Fall of the Iron Curtain, September 11.
Each of those events triggered changes that altered the world, creating new situations whereby the world everyone returned to after the formative event was not like the world they knew before it.
The coronavirus is likely to be remembered as just such an event, changing our lives in a myriad of ways: from how we teach and learn to how we get medical help and work. It will also shape the world order. On the world stage, China is likely to emerge stronger, the US weaker. Rampant globalization likely will be dialed back, and the individual state will regain ascendancy.
“Everything will be different,” Amos Yadlin, head of Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), said during an online panel on the world order after corona his think tank hosted Monday. “How different, and in what directions, we don’t exactly know. But what was is not what will be. We will return to a different world, where the corona impact will be on everything.”
The pandemic likely will fortify people behind positions they held before its outbreak, he said, adding: “On an ideological level, I think people will take what has happened from the corona and justify [their previous positions], whether it be for more for globalization or for isolation; whether for a free-market economic policy or for a more-centralized, government-controlled economy.”
In trying to judge how the world order will change, it is worth noting, as political philosophy professor and former education minister Yuli Tamir pointed out, that in the face of the crisis, states around the world did the most instinctive thing possible: They closed their borders and said they needed to deal with their own problems.
“The national instinct overcame all other instincts,” she said, adding that this is happening at a time when nationalism is already on the rise.
Former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro said in America there is no sense that the US is trying to lead the world in an effort to fight the virus or that it is interested in helping other, poorer countries. Rather, he said, US President Donald Trump’s policies on the matter are guided by his “America first” attitude, even at the expense of close European allies.
But former Israeli ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor said the “me first” attitude toward the crisis was not unique to Trump or the US.
“All countries are turning inward and saying, ‘I am going to do what is good for me.’ It is not only ‘America first,’ it is also ‘Turkey first’ and ‘Britain first,’” he said.
Prosor noted the ineffectiveness and overall impotence of international organizations and frameworks in dealing with the crisis, including the EU, ASEAN, the Arab League and the UN. “The UN is not a player here.” he said.
The international framework likely to be hit the worst from this pandemic is the European Union, which has proven unable to provide the type of assistance to member states reeling under the weight of the plague.
Adi Kantor, a research fellow at INSS’s Europe Research Program, said the pandemic is chipping away at driving principles behind the EU’s formation: European solidarity, cooperation and open borders.
In Italy and Spain, the two EU countries hardest hit by the virus, there is much criticism of the EU. “There is a lack of solidarity, it has disintegrated,” she said, adding that Italy is getting assistance not from the EU, but rather from China and Cuba.
Rather than open borders and cooperation, Kantor said, the EU states have closed their frontiers, and each state is focused inward and dealing with their own citizens, without much cooperation between the EU members.
“The borders are closed; there is very little solidarity,” she said. “And this raises major questions about all the ideas behind the EU.”