Toxic euphemism

To name just a few exemplary headlines: While people with well-payed jobs can work from home, the vast majority of workers in Mexico City “can´t stop” working in the public, as they face the question: Will I die from Covid-19 or hunger? In heavily Corona-hit Chicago, a recent report found that 70% of people who died from Covid-19 are black – even though black people make only 30% of the city’s population. And the latest hotspots in Germany, slaughterhouses in three small German cities, bring to light not only the health risks for slaughterhouse workers, but also the social grievances migrant workers from the Balkans are exposed to.

Reflecting upon these incidents from a global and comparative perspective, we must not forget that developing and emerging states do not have the same capacities to provide tests, which in part explains why their numbers do not hit headlines. It would be both fatal and wrong to only focus on the numbers of confirmed cases, recovered patients, and death tolls, for the simple reason that the number of deaths from Covid-19 is not the gist of the matter, “des Pudels Kern”. It is the inequalities brought to light, within and amongst states, which show their global, entangled, and interdependently ugly faces.

This dramatic depiction does not serve as a mere stylistic device. To back up this claim, we just need to go back some weeks before the coronavirus became an urgent health issue, yet its consequences already heavily affected poor regions simply due to their integration into global markets and financial processes. Even in the absence of stunning numbers of corona infections, the economic and social impacts are extreme – and these are asymmetrical in that the consequences in “weak states” without any, or with only volatile social welfare institutions, let millions of people slip through the cracks.

We must have joined-up thinking – for which a cluster is predestined, isn´t it? – in order to understand and to take into account the tragedy of the ones that suffer the most. Undoubtedly, these are beyond national and European borders and we would be best advised to turn our attention towards them. Why? Because otherwise the core principle of the liberal order, based on individual self-determination, would pervert into national selfishness and navel-gazing, and the liberal world order would dig its own grave.

Corona in the most unequal region in the world: Latin America and the Caribbean

The most unequal region in the world continues to be Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) – and its situation is becoming worse. After only three months, unprecedented capital outflows of 60 billion $ put all states under enormous pressure: this is four times the amount as during the entire global financial crisis of 2008/2009 (Jens Arnold, OECD Senior Economist, 23.04.2020). And while export-oriented countries suffer enormously from the crashed prices of raw materials like oil and copper, others have to either shoulder the drop in international tourism or the decline of remittances.

As if that was not enough, the fiscal policies of LAC-states were already equipped with limited resources: The tax-to-GDP ratio of 22.8% as of 2019 is more than 11 percentage points below the OECD average of 34.2%. It’s not news that the consequences of low and insufficient progressive taxation lead to skyrocketing of economic inequality rates. In a bid to understand the current impact on the lower end of the economic pyramid: following the newest forecasts of ECLAC, the Corona crisis is about to create 29 million more victims that will become impoverished, reaching a total of 215 million people.

Poverty manifests itself in the informal sector that dooms most to live hand to mouth and to work in public spaces. In Brazil and Mexico, this is the case for every second person, while in Peru and Bolivia this statement holds true for four out of every five. Since on average more than half of the population is left without any wealth, the consequences in the event of the loss of income pose a stark existential threat. Favelas simply face another reality.

Thus, lock-down-scenarios are not an option for the greater part of the population and within just a short time, weak health systems collapse completely. With only 3% of GDP invested in the public health system in LAC, it is not even half as high as the OECD average. And the number of intensive care beds is triggering a sense of urgency: Mexico has around 7291 to serve a population of 125 million people, Peru 685 for 31 million, and Bolivia 323 for 11.3 million. However, developing and emerging countries not only have fewer intensive care beds, but also more people with underlying medical conditions.

Rates of death not only increase with age, but also with weight. According to a new study by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), obesity is one of the biggest risk factors for death from Covid-19 for people under 50. Against this backdrop, the coronavirus hits the Latin-American countries particularly hard because, as counterintuitive as it may sound, obesity is a disease that disproportionally affects the poor. The most obese country in the world is Mexico, where obesity affects 34% of the people and has become the country's number one killer, being directly linked with type 2 diabetes, costing roughly 100,000 lives per year.

Yet the truly weakest in society stay far in the background. Upon closer inspection, we recognize that children and women are the ones who draw the shortest straw. Argentina´s anti-violence hotlines have received up to 40% more calls for help since the quarantine began, while in Colombia the number grew to 90% and in Mexico it has surged to over 100%.

By the same token, the youngest suffer, as closed kindergartens and schools reduce equal opportunities, increasing the risk of permanent dropouts - and are also the first in line in reports on suspected child abuse. These adductions speak for themselves and it does not take much imagination to understand that the situation for children and women deteriorates dramatically.

The plot of our liberal (world?) order

What these numbers all together cannot show is what is at risk if the Coronavirus continues to spread without support for those who are in most need. What we are talking about is, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, not only “the economy, stupid” – it is the liberal world order that is about to look into the abyss.

We are “a world in turmoil”. Even before the Corona crisis, extreme inequalities, trade wars and mushrooming populist authoritarian governments and political leaders contested the foundations of the liberal world order. Panicked export restrictions and border closings in the wake of the crisis provided a glimpse of a scene that is threatening to solidify. If we allow these excesses to grow, it is only a matter of time before the achievements of decades will be deprived of their appeal.

We must not forget: The liberal order just became a liberal world order. Our status quo was not in the nature of things. Rather, as Judy Dempsey states, it turned out to be attractive. But what if others, neither liberal states nor their actors, offer support to the ones in greatest despair? Do we have answers to questions regarding their loss of legitimacy? "The future and the most distant be for [us] the cause of [our] today" – Nietzsche. We therefore have to ask two questions:

Where do we want to go? – Our obvious goal is to regain our former strength. And how can we achieve our goal? – Solidarity is what we need to pass the test imposed by the coronavirus. By the end of the day, we will be judged on how we deal with the ones that share our core principle – the weakest included. Indeed, more than before, as Former Director-General of the WTO Pascal Lamy recently expressed (FNE, 21.04.2020), "the biggest development disaster of our times", we need to take solidarity-based actions. It is as simple as it is obvious for three reasons:

First, from a sociological perspective, a liberal order without solidarity is a hollow rhetorical flourish. A society that, on an individual level, is based on individual self-determination, develops on a societal level interdependencies and complementarities, bonding individuals together. Following Émile Durkheim, the common sense for this cohesion expresses itself in the term of solidarity: we value the ones that intrinsically enable our model of society, because only in this common endeavor are we able to become creators of our own fortune. It follows that solidarity is what we need to restore blood flow to the heart of our liberal order.

Second, if we want the political (liberal) plot to be based on our core principle, we must not allow legal actors to lose their legitimacy by and pass control to those actors who aspire to overwrite the narrative: we cannot leave acts of solidarity to mafia and gangsters. It would be a Faustian bargain – tragic, yet irresistible. Latin American States are increasingly in a state-making competition with well-organized criminals, like with “El Chapo” in Mexico or Brazil gangs that impose strict curfews to slow the coronavirus spread. This is not only a problem in the Americas, but also in Italy: the Mafia offers support where the state´s arm doesn´t reach.

And third, it is an act of economic reason. Germany serves as a good example: the state owes its strong growth performance to products from traditional industry sectors, which in recent years have enjoyed brisk global demand – whereby the greatest concentration of buyerslies in the emerging economies. And on top of that, being an export champion, we rely on well-functioning and global supply chains, both up and down the products´ value chains.

For a Global Green Solidarity Fund

What does this mean in concrete terms? We should call a spade a spade: monetary transfers and sustainable behavior. Recent debates about how to overcome the crisis gave the impression that we not only face the question of missing money, but one of a missing cohesion of various ideas. We take the opportunity to defend an idea that helped Europe recover from its biggest historical catastrophe: In an opinion piece for the New York Times, three professors at the London School of Economics break a lance for a Global Marshall Plan. Following their plan, we would bring $ 2.5 trillion needed within reach.

We echo their call, now, in the genesis of the next worldwide catastrophe.Beyond Marshall, we must not forget about the climate crisis, which has recently moved into the background. The challenges of Covid-19, the climate crisis and inequalities are transnationally entangled and must be considered and challenged as such. Is such an endeavor not utopian? On the contrary: It is both historical and forward-looking. Nobody can deny that the Marshall plan has proved its worth for both expansion and stabilization. Only a minority questions the international community’s signature of the Paris Climate Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals, a future-oriented and measurable agreement that keeps us focused and committed to common goals.

In their fifth global strike (this time on the world wide web) on April 22, Fridays For Future drew attention to what Wolfgang Schäuble, President of the German Bundestag, recently underlined: The climate crisis is still the greatest challenge of the entire Anthropocene. Thus, any financial aid for the economy must also serve to protect the climate. In order to create macroeconomic resilience in economic and industrial policies, we need an effective climate policy. It is vital to achieve synergies from the fight against the Corona and the climate crisis.

As has been emphasized, the topic of inequalities is crosscutting all the challenges of our time, always having the same result: it hits the most vulnerable. The virus began to spread in China and the western world. But now it will also hit populations in slums and favelas in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and regions that are already in crisis. Even before the Corona crisis, inequalities had an enormous explosive force, jeopardizing our social cohesion. Allowing the cleavage to erode is tantamount to a cardiac arrest of the liberal order.

Our conclusion: If we can’t bring together individual self-determination and solidarity, if we will not follow the call for a globalgreen solidarity fund, we will run the very real risk of observing an apathetic navel-gazing in which millions of people will die needlessly, and where the liberal world not only loses its leading appeal, but its entire vitality. If the basic principle of individual self-determination perverts into individual/national selfishness, the liberal order will play nothing but a secondary role.

Martyna B. Linartas is a doctoral researcher with the SCRIPTS Program at Freie Universität Berlin, and Marianne Braig is a principal investigator at SCRIPTS as well as a professor of political science at Freie Universität Berlin.