Once corona virus (COVID)-19 became a pandemic (a disease disseminating across community boundaries), Bangladesh and the world rallied quickly to control it. What they did not or could not know was how a cocktail of non-health developments also took pandemic forms. If we compare this pandemic with the previous (the 1918-20 Spanish Flu), as the table below does, enormous secular changes will stand out, demanding urgent attention. None was received then; we paid the price. Can we supply them now, so our children do not have to pay later?
At least five of them accompany COVID-19: (a) war triggering an unending inflation, this century's second 'great recession', and a 1930s-type 'great depression'; (b) an unprecedented global heat wave, compounded by climbing fuel prices; (c) supply-chain disruptions from even before the pandemic; (d) political persecution displacing more humans than ever before; and (e) increasing both poverty and prosperity.
Secular changes accompanying the Spanish Flu reconfigured Europe and North Atlantic: (a) while tractors converted traditional farming into commercial from 1890, inventing the assembly line in 1913 endangered low-waged/low-skilled (RMG-type) workers; (b) women won the right to vote from 1918; (c) imperialism died at the Paris Peace Conferences, as did capitalism in both St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1917, and New York's Wall Street with the Stock Market crash in October 1929; (d) human flows altered landscapes, as European Jews did from 1898 to produce 'Israel' and Russians did to escape the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution; and (e) institutionalizing a 'global atmosphere' between the 1899 Hague Peace Conference and the League of Nations from 1919, which ended Europe's dominance, U.S. isolation, and African, Asian, and Latin subservience.
Politically, populism (fascism and Nazism) bailed Europeans out of the 1918-20 pandemic, but produced World War II. Economically, invoking public funding rescued Europeans, U.S. citizens, and other countries out of the 1930s depression. Locally, women voting and populist jingoism scarred communities. Similarly, globally: the League of Nations, which killed imperialism in the Paris Peace Conferences (1919-24), also crumbled.
That was then. But what lessons can we learn for today? Five lessons beg attention urgently: (a) since populism is back with a vengeance threatening the best governmental form we have (imperfect democracy), women empowerment worldwide could be pushed as an antidote; (b) economically, the public sector is also back with a vengeance, exposing, as on Wall Street in 1929, the perils of private sector dominance: public finance meshes better with sustainable development goals (SDGs), upon which humankind suddenly hangs by a thread, and the implied embedded inclusiveness better fits the culture of the new continent behind the global steering-wheel: Asia- (c) locally both democratisation and SDG fulfillment must prevail over nationalistic outbursts, not just to tackle growing climatic, ecological, health, and sociological challenges, but to also thwart authoritarianism; (d) globally a string of governance institutions must be rescued from the brink, given the outcomes of several SDG-type mandates; (e) though today's migrants depict the depravity of dictatorships, they also sow the seeds of tectonic future changes, for example, they invite and inflate populism, and populism energises machismo.
Turning to the inflation bug first, according to the United Nations Development Programme, 71 million people could be pushed into poverty with higher fuel prices, especially gas, of more than 150 per cent, and food, of between 50 and 75 per cent. Adding 'learning poverty' (children foregoing education because of COVID-19 and inflationary burdens upon family purses), particularly in developing and undeveloped countries, exposes the dismal fate of the next generations: UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) predicts that with three-quarters of the 10-year-olds in developing and less developing countries today slipping, 21 trillion USD of expected income (17 per cent of today's global economy), will be lost.
Today's heat-wave is here to stay, imposing rising costs and raising questions. The 'thousand-death threshold' was reached in many unexpected places, like across Europe and the United States, and for the first time both North and South poles faced heat simultaneously (with heat of a higher degree than ever before too). As even Siberia recorded forest-fires, inflated energy prices reduced relief measures as needs erupted in new arenas (Pakistan against floods).
Supply-chain disruptions, the third bug, involve a 'beginning-to-end' journey of products. Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, the United States began placing barriers upon exports from China, while its corporations began exiting China. The COVID-19 pandemic fed this nationalistic pandemic, forcing other countries to also promote domestic production over imports and rekindling the same import-substitution industrialisation answer of Central Europe and Latin America to the 1930s Depression.
Symbiosis between the two remaining secular changes today (persecution-driven migration and climbing poverty), alerts us to how all of these crises inter-related with COVID-19 completely bypassed our reckoning. Rohingyas in Bangladesh, Syrians across the Middle East and Europe, Ukranians in West Europe, and African groups across Africa expose why the relief industry on the ground keeps growing, but also how, through a silent pandemic cocktail, could boomerang upon relief-supplying stable countries (through populist and financial reactions).
Whether in the 1920s or 2020s, we see trans-boundary human flows triggering nationalism and populism, in turn converting scuffles into conflicts, and taxing the economy excessively. Without dictators, this persecution supply-chain network breaks down; but until that happens, human flows will bring both incremental expenses and more unknown diseases.
How does Bangladesh correct these? The simple answer is to nip the sources of antagonism and anger, if the country wants to continue being among the global growth-rate leaders. One could be about refugees. Let's face it squarely: Rohingyas are not going anywhere from their camps in the foreseeable future. Absorbing them can only defuse increasing political heat. Another would be to recreate the same enormous public spending package that tamed COVID-19, this time to institutionalise behavioural changes in everyone's lives using public money: every Bangladesh citizen deserves that given the country's impressive growth record. A third would divert public welfare to fulfill SDG requirements, especially when it is getting harder for other countries to do so, leaving SDG leadership as a vacant spot. We must claim it, and with a fourth, push and cultivate foreign partnerships. In the final analysis, these partnerships modify human movements, the resultant populism, and such offshoots as conflict, leaving us far stronger against SDG challenges
Professor Imtiaz A Hussain, Department of Global Studies & Governance (GSG). Independent University, Bangladesh.
