Individual countries may indeed be toiling against a common foe in the form of the virus, but the picture of an international community working together and offering a co-ordinated response remains very much a work in progress.
When Queen Elizabeth recently broadcast a message of reassurance to the British people in the age of COVID-19, not surprisingly perhaps, she invoked that old wartime spirit many Britons still relate to.
She referenced her own experiences during the Second World War and a broadcast she made from Windsor Castle as a young princess to children separated from their families.
But the Queen also implied that the crisis facing the world today was a little less lonely for nation states.
“While we have faced challenges before, this one is different,” she said. “This time we join with all nations across the globe in a common endeavour.”
It hasn’t often felt like it, though.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” rings loud and clear with, among other things, threats to withhold funding from the World Health Organization.
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The European Union faces an existential crisis as it struggles to agree on acts of solidarity for its most stricken member states.
And all the while the world’s strongmen are seizing upon the chaos to consolidate their power further.
Taking care of their own
Individual countries may indeed be toiling against a common foe in the form of the virus, but the picture of an international community working together and offering a co-ordinated response remains very much a work in progress.
“The pandemic is laying bare a truth about the international global political system that you can never underestimate, which is that this is an order of sovereign states,” said Canadian academic and former federal Liberal opposition leader Michael Ignatieff, who is now the president of Central European University in Budapest.
“And when really bad trouble hits, every national political system draws up the drawbridge, closes frontiers, shuts down and takes care of its own. This is just a hard fact of the world we’re in.”
Igantieff was speaking from a town near Budapest not long after the Hungarian Prime Minister, Victor Orban, had himself awarded the power to rule by decree because of the coronavirus crisis but without a time limit.
The global pandemic has swung wide open the closets where world dictators keep their not-so-secret skeletons.
Amnesty International recently condemned Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, for example, for threatening that those opposing coronavirus directives could be shot dead.
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“People like myself have been writing about [injustices] for years,” said the Indian writer Arundhati Roy in a Skype interview from her home in New Delhi.
“But it was as if it was a chemical experiment in which what is hidden suddenly came to light and you just saw it visually: the shamefulness of the society.”
She was describing the latest round of misery unleashed on India’s