This analysis critiques the early response of the economic troika – the EU, China and US – to a threat. The RAND Corporation’s Center for Global Risk and Security in the early 2000s ranked threats as existential, serious and nuisance. Terrorism was in the nuisance category – killing fewer Americans than lightning – and the only threat in the existential category was pandemics. The National Intelligence Council (NIC), warned in the 2004 version of Global Trends, looking out two decades to 2020, “… it is only a matter of time before a new pandemic appears …”1 Services are crucial to the EU economy – they account for around 70% of all economic activity in the EU and a similar proportion of its employment. In the US consumer spending comprises 70% of GDP. Historically, China was one of the world’s foremost economic powers for most of the two millennia from the 1st until the 19th century. COVID-19 threatens EU solidarity, to halt China economic expansion, and to plunge the US into unemployment at Depression levels.
The initial response of the troika to the coronavirus has been far from spectacular. China is the world’s largest manufacturing economy and exporter of goods, and the world’s fastest-growing consumer market and second-largest importer of goods – initially put secrecy and order ahead of confronting the virus. The EU, 22% of world economy, consists of an internal market of mixed economies based on free market and advanced social models. For instance, it includes an internal single market with free movement of goods, services, capital, and labor. Italy, whose leaders spent considerable time debating whether social isolation was a western value, while considering the restriction of movement of people as discrimination, became the epicenter of infection in Europe. The Trump administration’s response was slow and muddled. The US stock market has never before responded so dramatically to an outbreak of disease and the public-health policy response, together with the interconnectedness of the modern global economy.
Europe had been immolated, but the ashes left by war created the space to imagine a new world: Sartre and Camus gave voice to the mood of the day. Readers looked to Sartre and Camus to articulate what that new world might look like. It came in the form of existentialism. Sartre, Camus and their intellectual companions rejected religion, staged new and unnerving plays, challenged readers to live authentically, and wrote about the absurdity of the world – a world without purpose and without value. ‘[There are] only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch,’ Camus wrote. We must choose to live in this world and to project our own meaning and value onto it in order to make sense of it. This means that people are free and burdened by it, since with freedom there is a terrible, even debilitating, responsibility to live and act authentically.
Jean-Paul Sartre believed that human beings live in constant anguish, not solely because life is miserable, but because we are ‘condemned to be free’. While the circumstances of our birth and upbringing are beyond our control, he reasons that once we become self-aware (and we all do eventually), we have to make choices – choices that define our very ‘essence’. Sartre’s theory of existentialism states that “existence precedes essence”, that is, only by existing and acting a certain way do we give meaning to our lives. According to Sartre, each choice we make defines us while at the same time revealing to us what we think a human being should be. Sartre decried the idea of living without pursuing freedom. The phenomenon of people accepting that things have to be a certain way, and subsequently refusing to acknowledge or pursue alternate options, was what he termed as “living in bad faith”.
Albert Camus argued that the only way out is to embrace the absurdity of the situation and to rise above it, even if it is only within the context of your own life. In other words, if you are going to be a person in this world, then you need to make a choice to make meaning in your own life, whatever form that takes. Camus also argued that the ability to have passion for what could otherwise be considered a meaningless life reflects an appreciation for life itself. If you can stop trying to live for the end, or the “goal,” and start living for the act of “being” itself, then your life becomes about living it fully, choosing integrity, and being passionate. According to Camus, the absurd is produced via conflict, a conflict between our expectation of a rational, just universe and the actual universe that it is quite indifferent to all of our expectations.2
COVID-19 poses an existential challenge to the European project – in the face of a pandemic that disproportionately affects some countries more than others threatens to undermine the quest for shared long-term prosperity and the future of European integration, unity, and economic cohesion. The virus has stirred memories of the financial crisis from a decade ago, that left deep social inequalities and animosities between EU states over the imposition of austerity policies – such animosities that lead to populist and nationalist gain in momentum and political strength. From a sluggish political response to the crisis to bitter internal rows about how to mitigate the economic effects of the coronavirus, member states have turned against one another, and in on themselves. This crisis presents Europe with a particular stark set of choices about its future direction.
China’s government sees human rights as an existential threat. Its reaction could pose an existential threat to the rights of people worldwide. At home, the Chinese Communist Party, worried that permitting political freedom would jeopardize its grasp on power, has constructed an Orwellian high-tech surveillance state and a sophisticated internet censorship system to monitor and suppress public criticism. The Chinese Communist Party has shown that economic growth can reinforce central power by giving it the means to enforce its rule – to spend what it takes to remain in power, from legions of security officials it employs to the censorship regime it retains and the pervasive surveillance state it constructs. Unprecedented level of surveillance was put in place in addressing the coronavirus outbreak – the political implications for China could be long-lasting. The question now is what will China do with its new forms of power and control once the threat is overcome?
When facing coronavirus, poverty is a preexisting condition hitting American poor the hardest, in part because these workers simply can’t afford to adhere to social distancing restrictions if it means going without a paycheck. Also, they are more likely to have jobs that can’t be done on a laptop, and require public contact. In addition, poor people are more likely to have preexisting health risks such as diabetes, asthma or obesity. Income inequality in the US has exacerbated the healthcare crisis, will contribute to the eventual economic and financial crises, and has resulted in a situation where society is now counting on many of the poorest people to continue to risk their health in order to ensure supply lines continue to function, all while being more likely to be hurt by the pandemic. Now only does this increase the risk of social unrest, it makes handling the pandemic more difficult. Income inequality is now an existential threat to national security.
An existential crisis occurs when one recognizes that even the decision to either refrain from action or withhold assent to a particular choice is, in itself, a choice. An existential threat, put simply, is a threat to society – a veritable threat to existence does not have to be present for someone to experience a sense of existential threat. Right-wing misinformation is a direct and immediate threat to the American public. In US there is a dramatic increase in hate crimes (up by 15%), polarized viewpoints, and a rise in violent extremist propaganda for recruitment purposes. Given the current state, vulnerable youth, young adults, and adults are at risk of moving toward polarized ideological positions that can put them on the pathway toward radicalization and violent extremism. With most polarized societies, as the truth fades away, many are losing faith in political institutions and turning to the absurd.
The ongoing threats: In a recovery from an epidemic like COVID-19, restarting activities in private consumption is much slower than restarting investment and manufacturing. This is the first time since 1992 that the official GDP of China has contracted – threatening long-term goals for growth. Capital Economics says the disease could result in a record-breaking 15 percent quarterly drop of eurozone gross domestic product in the second quarter. The coronavirus could tear the EU apart – the biggest rifts have opened over the economic rescue package, which pitches rich countries against poorer ones. COVID-19 has refocused the U.S. election campaign – Trump and his populist supporters are attached at the hip to the GDP which has taken a hit, along with the Trump administration’s credibility on how to handle a crisis. There is an excellent chance the next US federal election will result in the removal of Trump and along with his enablers in the Senate.
1 COVID-19: We had the warning but we lacked the leadership. (5 April 2020) https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/490404-covid-19-we-had-the-warning-but-we-lacked-the-leadership
2 Sam Dresser. How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free. https://aeon.co/ideas/how-camus-and-sartre-split-up-over-the-question-of-how-to-be-free