Will Coronavirus Kill Globalization? 1918 Flu Epidemic & Collapse Of 1st Wave Modern Globalization
'Will the Coronavirus Kill Globalization?' The Spanish flu helped herald the collapse of the first wave of modern globalization. A century later, could the coronavirus do the same? By John Feffer, Foreign Policy In Focus, March 4, 2020. Excerpts:
...The global spread of a new pathogen has exposed the fragility of modern life. As it moves around the world, the coronavirus has compromised the circulatory system of globalization, dramatically reducing the international flow of money, goods, and people. The disease has done so rather economically, by infecting fewer than 100,000 people so far. Extrapolation and fear have done most of the work for it. In the world of things, the coronavirus has infected the global supply chains that connect manufacturers and consumers...
People, too, are not moving around as much. Airline service in and out of emerging hot spots — South Korea, Italy — has been cancelled..The cruise industry, after outbreaks on a couple big ships, has taken a major hit. After blithely ignoring the coronavirus outbreak in China for most of February, markets took a major dive in the final week of the month. The stock market lost $6 trillion in value last week, its worst showing since the financial crisis of a decade ago...
But the coronavirus outbreak coincides with attacks on economic globalization from many different quarters. Environmentalists, for instance, have long been skeptical of unrestrained global economic growth. The threat of climate change has sharpened that critique and placed it squarely in the middle of mainstream debate. Meanwhile, worsening economic inequality has called into question the capacity of economic globalization to lift all boats in a rising tide. Even the IMF has acknowledged the pernicious impact of this inequality (but without engaging in the necessary institutional overhaul to address the problem). Finally, a slowing of global economic integration over the last decade suggests that the world may already have passed peak globalization. On top of these systemic challenges, a rising political populism has targeted the global economic elite as the enemy of “the people.”
Donald Trump challenged this elite and their orthodoxy of free trade by imposing tariffs on allies and adversaries alike and by withdrawing U.S. participation in big trade pacts, like the Trans Pacific Partnership...The recent agreement between Beijing and Washington notwithstanding, most of the tariffs remain in place. Meanwhile, the UK finally pulled out of the European Union this year, which was a victory for economic nationalists. Populists elsewhere have railed against what Steve Bannon calls the “Davos class.” Neoliberal orthodoxy has given way to pronouncements of America First, Brazil First, and the like...
Globalization has been challenged before by financial crises, pandemics like the Hong Kong Flu, even the specter of Y2K. This time around, however, the failure of the global community to establish new rules of the road for the economy, the environment, and health care is creating a perfect storm of international disfunction. If something with a relatively low mortality rate like the coronavirus — between one percent and four percent, compared to 50 percent for Ebola — can do such a number on the global economy, perhaps the patient was already suffering from some pretty dire underlying conditions.
- Pandemic: When people travel, they bring all sorts of luggage, including pathogens...Explorers to the New World brought a panoply of diseases like smallpox and measles that were new to the indigenous communities..As many as 56 million people, or 10 percent of the world population at the time, died by the beginning of the 1600s. The mortality rate for the indigenous communities was an astonishing 90 percent...Pandemics are closely associated with the movement of traders and soldiers. Roman soldiers returning from Mesopotamia were responsible for the plague that ravaged the empire in the second century AD, one of several pandemics that helped end Rome’s global dominance. The bubonic plague of the fourteenth century began in China and reached Europe via merchant ships carrying flea-infested rats.
In the modern era, soldiers returning home from fighting in World War I spread the Spanish flu, killing up to 50 million people. This last pandemic was one of the factors behind the collapse of the first wave of modern globalization. Prior to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the world had never been more tightly connected with steamships, trains, and the telegraph serving as the connective tissue. Trade as a proportion of GDP stood at 14 percent on the eve of the war. The devastation of World War I followed by the flu epidemic dealt a heavy blow to world trade and economic integration.
The global economic depression of the 1920s, the rise of various types of nationalism, and a second world war ensured that, by 1945, trade as a proportion of GDP had dropped to a mere 5 percent.
Modern globalization is made possible by modern medicine. A couple of pandemics have broken out since 1945, but they haven’t disrupted the global circulatory system. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, a third wave of globalization removed more barriers to the movement of goods and money. Even China, a nominally Communist country, joined the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001. It has since offered its own version of globalization through the Belt and Road initiative that places China at the center of a burgeoning network of trade and finance...
Read More, https://fpif.org/will-the-coronavirus-kill-globalization/
- President Trump looks on next to Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during a meeting at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, March 3, 2020.