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Illustration: Craig Stephens
Opinion
Opinion
by Nicholas Ross Smith and Nicolas Pirsoul
Opinion
by Nicholas Ross Smith and Nicolas Pirsoul

Beginning of the end? Reject the politics of fear and embrace hope and cooperation instead

  • Buying into the doomsday narratives on Covid-19, climate change, civil wars or humanitarian crises only breeds fatalism and authoritarianism, when what the world needs is creative solutions and global cooperation
The year 2020 appears to have started badly and grown progressively worse. There have been record bush fires in Australia, swarms of locusts in Africa and Asia, the threat of war between the United States and Iran and, most recently, the emergence of a coronavirus pandemic.
This is not to mention ongoing issues such as the Syrian and Libyan civil wars, the humanitarian crises in South Sudan and Yemen, the slide into authoritarianism in Turkey, Russia and China, and the weakening of democracy globally, to name but a few.

Yes, 2020 has not been particularly pleasant and the aforementioned problems are individually and collectively difficult to solve. But we should also not lose perspective. There is a human tendency to exaggerate the pertinence of the here and now. And, to an extent, that is what has occurred with the increasingly popular sentiment that 2020 is the beginning of the end of the world.

Take, for example, arguably the most pressing problem (of course, climate change is a greater long-term challenge) for the international community: the Covid-19 outbreak. This emerging pandemic is undeniably a massive challenge both locally and globally.

The contagiousness of the virus is seemingly greater than the quarantining capabilities of states – even ones such as China, which can effectively shut down whole cities – and it seems a certainty that it will end up spreading right across the globe.

Covid-19 is not a minor threat. People are dying and millions are affected (directly or indirectly) while the economic costs are going to be meteoric. Furthermore, the fatality rate for Covid-19 appears similar to the 2.5 per cent for the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

The Spanish flu is increasingly used as a potential analogue for Covid-19, but there are important differences between the two viruses. Covid-19 appears to mostly affect the frail but Spanish flu deaths were far less skewed towards the elderly (and also included the very young, who have been affected very little by Covid-19).

Covid-19 could turn out to be a nasty pandemic with massive costs. Taking precautionary measures is important. At the same time, it remains an extreme long shot that it will have the same impact as the Spanish flu, which killed as many as 50 million people.

It was also significant that the Spanish flu pandemic started in 1918, at the end of the first world war. The war was arguably one of the costliest conflicts in human history, killing as many as 22 million people and sowing the seeds for an even more devastating conflict a mere 21 years later: the second world war.
The threat of global interstate conflict has returned in 2020, after the US took the brazen step of executing Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. Yet, while the extrajudicial killing of Soleimani undoubtedly further destabilises the Middle East, and while we have probably yet to see the full brunt of Iran’s retaliation, the prospect of a third world war seems incredibly remote.
Nuclear deterrence, trade and financial interdependence (although diminishing somewhat), and a lack of popular support all seriously increase the costs of global conflict. While we should not get caught up in believing the hype of a “long peace” – that is, the absence of great-power conflict since the second world war – we also need to avoid hyperboles such as the potential of a third world war.

China’s continued rise to becoming a challenger to the US position of global dominance will undeniably raise tensions and paranoia both regionally and globally. But the idea that this will automatically lead to war is far too deterministic and is mostly based on shoddy historical analogising.

Climate change is one problem we should be less confident about solving. As the fires in Australia demonstrate, governments are criminally behind in taking this threat seriously, and a lack of contingency planning makes events such as fires, floods, and tropical storms more devastating, especially for those most crippled by inequality.
Add to this the lack of clarity about what kind of meteorological, demographic, economic and social changes global warming will produce, and policymaking becomes particularly challenging.

However, climate change policies touted by many environmental groups are noticeably pessimistic and often entail a kind of primitivist logic – that we should go backwards rather than forwards. Infinite growth on a finite planet is obviously impossible and, certainly, human development and ingenuity has accelerated climate change.

But there is no reason human creativity cannot, at least, mitigate it. Take, for example, the recent idea of damming the North Sea to protect European countries from rising sea levels. Such an idea may appear outlandish but it shows an “out of the box” solution to an immediate problem.

Blind optimism is not the answer and we should look at the terrible events of 2020 and worry. But our worry has to be contextualised and put in perspective. Buying the doomsday narratives that the mainstream media (and, increasingly, our governments) are trying to sell us, has serious negative implications for the international community.

The world needs China to cut its coal emissions, or all hope may be lost

To this end, it is the response to the threats, rather than the threats themselves, that is most concerning right now.

This sense of fatalism not only breeds apathy, which reduces the potential for cooperation towards aspirational goals (such as those to mitigate climate change), but also helps justify the reversal of globalisation, the closing of borders and the vilification of others. Most insidious of all, it justifies a slide towards more authoritarianism by governments, which use nightmares like those above to justify more power and control.

The overarching narrative risks pushing citizens worldwide into a politics of fear when what is required to tackle the pressing issues is a politics of hope, supplemented by increased political cooperation and creativity.

Nicholas Ross Smith is an assistant professor of international studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Nicolas Pirsoul is a recent PhD graduate from the University of Auckland

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