John Micklethwait - The Wake-Up Call

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Contents

I n 1651, a gentleman-scholar who readily admitted that fear and I were born twins, published one of the great books on government. Thomas Hobbes had survived the notoriously bloody English Civil War by fleeing to Franceand his great philosophical concern was personal safety. Life in a state of nature was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short because people were always fighting each other. So, he argued, citizens should form a contract to give up their freedoms to a ruler who could offer them protection. The idea that the states legitimacy depended on keeping its citizens safe was revolutionary. Back then, kings claimed their position came by divine right, not contract. Hobbes, who also managed to survive the Great Plague in 166566 and died in his bed aged ninety-one, chose for the books frontispiece a picture of a single great ruler composed of the bodies of hundreds of tiny little subjects. He called it Leviathan.

If Hobbes were resurrected today, he would feel vindicated. The Covid-19 pandemic has unleashed fear into the world on a scale not seen since the Second World War. By the end of June 2020, ten million people had been infected worldwide and more than five hundred thousand had died, a quarter of them in the United States. Every day brought horrific images: New York City paying prisoners in hazmat suits to help dig makeshift graves for piles of wooden coffins; Britains prime minister fighting for his life in intensive care; Mdecins Sans Frontires setting up camp in the center of Brussels; the president of the United States suggesting people inject themselves with disinfectant. Fear of death has been accompanied by fear of economic ruin. With the total cost to the world economy running into trillions of dollars, whole industries have closed down. Millions of people who thought that their livelihoods were secure now rely on government checks.

Indeed, everywhere you look, people who once did not care much about the state have been turning to Leviathan to protect themand, as Hobbes predicted, giving up their most cherished liberties, even the freedom to leave their own homes. We have allowed the state to regulate our every move. And when the state has let us down, we have broken into furymost obviously on the streets of America, after the killing of George Floyd.

The Coronavirus has made government important again. Not just powerful again (look at those once-mighty companies begging for help), but also vital again. It matters enormously whether your country has a good health service and competent bureaucrats. The arrival of the virus was like an examination of state capacity. A handful of Western countries passed. Germany was an outstanding performer in Europe, while Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, and, surprisingly, Greece did well. New Zealand and Australia were champions on the Pacific rim. But most Western countries, particularly America and Britain, failed the test, humiliatingly so when compared with countries in Asia.

The numbers underline this. By midyear, the death rate in Belgium was 850 per every million people; in Britain it was above 650; Italy and Spain were both around 550, while the United States, where the virus was once again surging in Arizona, Texas, and Florida, was closing in on 400. The figure for Germany was around 100. In South Korea and Japan the death rate was just seven and five respectively. Mainland China claims a figure of three. That final number comes with a lot of caveats, but even if the Chinese death toll was in fact ten times the official total, the regime would still be ten times better at protecting its people than Donald Trump was. Even relatively poor parts of Asia, such as Vietnam and Kerala state in India, outperformed both the United States and Britain by dramatic margins.

Looking at individual cities, the comparison between the West and Asia is even starker. London and New York City are both a little smaller than Seoul. But by the end of June 2020, when New York City had seen twenty-one thousand Covid-related deaths and London six thousand, the Korean capital had lost just six people. Seouls politicians united quickly and put testing booths in many streets, while in New York the politicians feuded with each other and Trump, and people joked that the only way for a poor New Yorker to get a Covid test was to cough near a rich one. In Seouls hospitals, doctors had all the necessary equipment; in New York doctors wore ski masks that they bought for themselves, nurses dressed in garbage bags, and infected and noninfected patients were mixed up together, helping to spread the disease. By early June, Seoul had ended its lockdown and was going back to work, while New York was thronged with mask-wearing protesters, brought on the streets by Floyds killing.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective, George Packer lamented in The Atlantic. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belaruslike a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. Americas failures at home coincided with a failure to mobilize the Western alliance. Since the Second World War, the United States has led the West. Not so during this pandemic. Trump sidelined global organizations and squabbled with his allies, failing to inform them that he was banning flights from Europe. Not that the European Union covered itself with glory: it failed to help Italy and Spain in their darkest hours, and then started bickering about a stimulus plan.

A REVERSAL OF FORTUNE

Squabbling in the West gave China an opportunity. Medical equipment was dispatched to Italy in boxes printed with the lyrics of Italian operas and to Hungary printed with its leader Viktor Orbans favorite slogan, Go Hungary. The situation I see can be described as this, Orban declared in an interview relayed on Chinese state television, In the West, there is a shortage of basically everything. The help we are able to get is from the East. On the last day of June, with American officials confessing that the virus was going in the wrong direction, Boris Johnson having to re-lockdown the city of Leicester, and Emmanuel Macron preparing to sack his entire government in Paris, China felt confident enough to impose a harsh new security law on Hong Kong. By then, a virus that in January had looked as if it might be Chinas Chernobyl looked more like the Wests Waterloo.

When Hobbes wrote Leviathan, China was the center of administrative excellence. It was the worlds most powerful country with the worlds biggest city (Beijing had more than a million inhabitants), the worlds mightiest navy, and the worlds most sophisticated civil service, run by scholar-mandarins chosen from across a vast empire by rigorous examinations. Europe was a bloodstained battlefield ruled by rival feudal families, where government jobs were either allotted by birth or bought and sold like furniture. Gradually, Europes new nation-states overtook the Middle Kingdom because they underwent three revolutions unleashed by national rivalries and political ideas.

The first revolution, which Hobbes helped inspire, was the creation of the competitive nation-state. Europes monarchies simultaneously imposed order on barons at home while vying with each other for supremacy abroad. When the Chinese invented gunpowder they used it for fireworks; Europeans used it to blow one another (and then the Chinese) out of the water. The second leap forward was the leaner liberal state that emerged after the American and French Revolutions. Thinkers such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill argued that corrupt monarchical privilege should give way to meritocratic efficiency. In Victorian Britain, liberals built the schools, hospitals, and sewers that we still use and paid for them by cutting wasteful spending on sinecures and aristocratic fops (staggeringly, the nations tax bill fell from just under 80 million in 1816 to well under 60 million in 1846). The third big change was the arrival of the welfare state just over a century ago. The theme of the welfare state was security once againbut this time it meant health, education, and pensions, not just protecting you from your brutish neighbors, and the definition has kept expanding ever since. William Beveridge, the architect of Britains New Jerusalem in 1945, wanted his Leviathan to slay the five giants of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness.