The COVID State of Emergency

MAR 11 2020 · 12:00

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at the Munich Security Conference, February 2020, three weeks before declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic. Place: Geneva (WHO declaration); within two weeks, most Western capitals Figures: Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General · Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President · the world's interior ministers, suddenly relevant again The Border Reactivated On 11 March 2020 the WHO Director-General Tedros uses a word the organization has avoided for weeks. Pandemic. Within fourteen days most Western states close borders that had functioned, since the 1990s, mainly as architectural ornament. Schengen, the 1995 agreement that abolished internal frontiers among twenty-six European states, suspends in panels: Austria closes to Italy on 10 March; Germany to France, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark and Luxembourg on 16 March; the European Commission proposes a thirty-day ban on non-essential travel into the Union on 17 March. The United States closes to most of Europe on 13 March. Australia and New Zealand close to everyone on 19 and 20 March. Within the borders, the state reaches into private life at a depth not seen since the Second World War: stay-at-home orders, business closures by ministerial decree, mass economic transfers by emergency legislation. The Westphalian state, on this evidence, has not been hollowed out by globalization. It has been resting. What the Reactivation Reveals The reactivation is uneven, and that unevenness is the point. East Asian states (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore) execute pandemic protocols with a granularity Western publics tolerate only briefly. The European Union, designed around the four freedoms, discovers that public health is a national competence and reconstructs its internal frontier overnight. The United States devolves the response to the fifty governors and produces fifty different pandemics. China seals Wuhan with a thoroughness no liberal state can match, then enforces a zero-COVID policy for almost three years. By the time vaccines roll out in late 2020, a vocabulary has reentered ordinary politics that had been dormant for a generation: state of emergency, border control, essential travel, national stockpile. The post-1991 reading, that the sovereign nation state was a fading instrument in a globalized world, dies in those fourteen days. The Westphalian state, when summoned, still answers. Video: WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declares COVID-19 a pandemic at the daily media briefing in Geneva, 11 March 2020. Within fourteen days most Western states reactivated borders that had functioned as ornament for a generation.