Is It Tomorrow Yet? by Ivan Krastev.

Title: Is It Tomorrow Yet? Paradoxes of the Pandemic.
Author: Ivan Krastev.
Genre: Non-fiction, social criticism.
Country: Bulgaria.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2020.
Summary: Beneath the panic and bluster, beneath the confusing speeches and the conflicting advice, the Coronavirus pandemic acted, changing our world in the most profound ways. The tragic human cost and the economic devastation will be assessed and calculated for decades to come. But the pandemic also changed things in ways that are less easily expressed and understood. It has made bare the frayed contradictions of modern life. It has distorted things that seemed simple and settled. It has affirmed plain, uncomfortable truths. In this essay, the author explores the pandemic's immediate consequences and conceives of its long-term legacy. Will things be different for the communities most harmed, and for those who escaped the worst? Where are we now with the US and China, with the UK and Europe? And how do we think our way through the unthinkable?

My rating: 7/10
My review:


♥ Saramago doesn't believe that epidemics transform society; in his view, they help us to see the truth about our societies. If he is right, the COVID-19 pandemic should have opened our eyes to the world we have been living in. It should have helped us to make sense of it.

"The first thing that plague brought to our town was exile," notes the narrator in Camus's The Plague, and these days we have a decent sense of what he meant. A society in quarantine is literally a "closed society". Many people cease working, they stop meeting their friends and relatives, they quit driving their cars, and they put their lives on hold.

..As Camus observed, the plague erased the "uniqueness of each man's life" as it heightened our awareness of our vulnerability and powerlessness to plan for the future. After an epidemic, all those still living are survivors.

But for how long will the memory of this unprecedented social experiment last? Could it be that in just a few years we'll remember it as a kind of mass hallucination caused by "a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time," as the poet Joseph Brodsky once described a prisoner's existence?

♥ The COVID-19 pandemic has turned out to be a classic "grey swan event" – highly probable and capable of turning our world upside down, but nonetheless a huge shock when it arrives. ..But it's no accident that there are no grey swans in Swan Lake; "grey swans are an example of something predictable yet unthinkable.

♥ In her marvellous book Pale Rider, the science writer Laura Spinney shows that the Spanish flu was the most tragic even in the twentieth century but is now mostly forgotten. A century ago, the pandemic infected a third of the world's population, a staggering 500 million people. Between the first recorded case on 4 March 1918 and the last in March 1920, the pandemic wiped out between 50 and 100 million people. In terms of loss of life from a single event, it surpassed both the First World War (17 million dead) and may have killed as many people as both wars put together. Yet, as Spinney notes, "When asked what was the biggest disaster of the twentieth century, almost nobody answers the Spanish flu." More surprisingly, even historians seem to have forgotten the epidemic. In 2017, WorldCat, the world's largest library catalogue, listed roughly 80,000 books on the First World War (in more than forty languages) but barely 400 on the Spanish flu (in five languages). How can it be that an epidemic that killed at least five times more people than died in the First World War has resulted in 200 times fewer books? Why do we remember wars and revolutions but forget pandemics, even though the latter change our economies, politics, societies and urban architecture just as fundamentally?

Spinney believes that one key reason is that it's easier to count those killed by bullets than those who die from a virus, and the present controversy regarding the mortality rate of COVID-19 seems to suggest that she is right. The other, more fundamental, reason is that it's difficult to turn a pandemic into a good story. It is impossible to retell it as a clash of good and evil.

..The relationship between the epidemic and war resembles the relationship between some modernist literature and the classical novel. The strangeness of the pandemic experience is that everything changes but nothing happens. We are asked to save humanity by staying home and washing our hands. As in modernist novel, all the action is in the mind of the narrator.

..War comes with the promise of heroic victory. In the patriotic narrative, soldiers don't just die – they sacrifice their lives for others. The story of wars is one of ordinary people demonstrating extraordinary courage by sacrificing their lives in order to save others. William James called war "the gory nurse that trained societies in cohesiveness". In a plague, however, there's nothing heroic. So, unsurprisingly, when societies try to remember a plague, they memorialize it as a kind of war. There is a type of monument in the history of art called a "plague column", such as the one on the Graben in Vienna. Tellingly, they are often described as "monuments to celebrate victory over the plague".

♥ Unlike wars, pandemics don't pit nations against each other. Unlike great migrations, they don't cause violent nationalism. And, unlike earthquakes or tsunamis, pandemics are global. A pandemic is a crisis that allows humanity to experience its interdependence and its togetherness. It places humanity's hope in science and rationality. Is it the pandemic itself, or is it the failure of the world's political leaders to mobilize a collective response to the crisis, that makes us pessimistic about the future?

♥ How did my early conjectures fare? I began by articulating seven early lessons; one quarantine later, these lessons have been reconceptualized into seven paradoxes.

1. COVID-19 exposes the dark side of globalization – but also acts as an agent of globalization. The virus is most vicious in places that are, according to historian Frank Snowden, "densely populated and linked by rapid air travel, by movements of tourists, of refugees, all kinds of businesspeople, all kinds of interlocking networks". At the same time, it has synchronized the world and brought us together in a way no previous crisis could. For some time we have lived in a common world.

2. The pandemic has accelerated the trend towards de-globalization that was triggered by the Great Recession of 2008–9, while at the same time exposing the limits of re-nationalization. In a post-COVID-19 word, Gideon Rachman surmises that "It is hard to believe that large developed countries will continue to accept a situation in which they have to import most of their vital medical supplies". If the high point of globalization in the 1990s was represented (at least in the public imagination) by the efficiencies of just-in-time global supply chains, then today the public is seduced by the image of a strong state that can stockpile all the resources society needs in a crisis.

3. Fear of the virus in the early stages of the pandemic insured a state of national unity that many societies have not experienced in years, but in the longer term it will deepen existing social and political divides. The pandemic will not only intensify the political, economic and social divisions that were once manifest throughout all societies – it will also establish the pandemic as a line in the sand. And the more the fear of COVID-19 recedes, the less we will acknowledge that the threat was ever real. The paradox is that the countries that were either most effective in containing the virus or were most lucky to be less affected by it will be the places where public opinion will be most eager to criticize the government for its lockdown policies.

4. COVID-19 has put democracy on hold, at least in Europe, with many countries enacting a state of emergency; but by doing so, it limited people's desire for more authoritarian government. One consequence of civil rights and liberties being frozen will be a rejection rather than an embrace of authoritarianism. In the early stages of the crisis, people willingly granted extraordinary powers to their governments, but they will become increasingly uncharitable as economic concerns begin to supplant public health ones. This is the changing nature of the COVID-19 calamity: a health disaster that turns into an economic one makes the political consequences of the crisis incredibly difficult to predict.

5. The pandemic initially restored trust in expertise and science, while at the same time it produced some of the most shocking conspiracy theories. The outcome is that, while governments and experts view the arrival of a vaccine as the only real end of the crisis, only 49 per cent of Americans declare readiness to vaccinate themselves.

6. While the EU was notably absent in the early stages of the crisis, the pandemic has become more critical for the future of the Union than anything in its history. The EU is not just risking territorial disintegration, as in Brexit, but a slide into irrelevance. But at the same time, it is COVID-19 that has brought Europe's "Hamiltonian moment" and has pushed the process of European integration.

7. While the EU views itself as the "last man standing" in defence of openness and interdependence, it could be the pressure of de-globalization rather than commitment to liberal values that pushes Europeans to adopt more common policies and even to hand over some emergency powers to Brussels.

Contemplating the possible changes that COVID-19 might inspire, I was reminded of a line from Stephen Leacock's Nonsense Novels: "Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions."

♥ ..European governments are tending to portray COVID-19 as the simultaneous second coming of the three previous crises that shattered the old continent in the last decade – terrorism, the financial crisis and the refugee crisis.

By declaring that the virus is the "invisible enemy" and by applying the sorts of surveillance technology previously used for detecting terrorists to track the spread of the disease, governments have made people feel that coronavirus is a new sort of terrorism. In a similar way, the closing of the borders between EU member states in response to the pandemic recalls the refugee crisis of 2015 and the fear of the spread of ethnic nationalism.

Finally, the debate in Europe about "coronabonds" suggests that what we're witnessing today is a financial crisis similar to the Great Recession. But while the economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis in many ways resemble the Great Recession, economists agree that the current economic crisis is not just deeper than but fundamentally different from the previous one. The pandemic has disrupted global supply chains and caused a simultaneous crisis of demand and supply that will lead to high unemployment. As the economic historian Adam Tooze has pointed out, "There has never been a crash landing like this before. There is something new under the sun. And it is horrifying. In a similar way, the reactions of citizens to governments' restrictions of their rights differ significantly in the context of the corona crisis in comparison with the "war on terror". And the nationalism triggered by COVID-19 is profoundly different from the ethnic nationalism triggered by the refugee crisis. But driven by the instinct to deal with uncertainty by making the unfamiliar look familiar, politicians committed a grave mistake, because COVID-19 went much deeper under the public's skin than any of the previous crises.

♥ The European Union emerged from the violent crucible of European nationalism, which explains why many pro-Europeans have a strong aversion to any idea that carries even a slight whiff of nationalism. The fears of liberals that the coronavirus pandemic will cause an outbreak of flag-waving are not hard to understand, especially if we bear in mind that xenophobia has historically accompanied epidemics. And, just like clockwork, such outbursts have been common in the current pandemic. In Italy, the immigrant Chinese population was blamed for what became labelled as the "Wuhan virus". However, inn historical terms, the early stages of this pandemic may be remembered less for the rise of xenophobia than for the absence of any eruption of the politics of ethnic hate. It is not the rise of nationalism but rather the exposure of the limits of economic nationalism this crisis will be remembered for.

♥ Most of us have never experienced a war or a military coup first-hand, but we all instinctively know that a citizen's impulse at a moment of profound danger is to embrace the closing of national borders. By taking such action, politicians declare their readiness to take responsibility for what is happening in their own states. And just as people seek shelter in their country, they also look for shelter in their native language. Psychologists have shown that people often revert to speaking in their mother tongue in moments of great imperilment. During my own childhood in Bulgaria, I learned a valuable lesson from watching scores of Soviet films about the Second World War. One of the most dangerous moment for Soviet female spies in Hitler's Reich was childbirth, because they would involuntarily cry out in their native Russian.

♥ Home is the place where we most want to be during a time of grave danger. It took me by surprise that, as it became clear that the coronavirus was a pandemic and we were probably facing a prolonged period of social distancing, my family decided to go back to Bulgaria before the lockdown. In many respects this was not a rational decision. We have lived and worked in Vienna for a decade and love the city; the Austrian public health system is far more reliable than the system in Bulgaria, and we could depend on our friends in the city. Yet what brought us back to Bulgaria was the understanding that we should "stay at home", and Bulgaria is home for us. In a time of crisis, we wanted to be closer to the people and places that we have known all our lives. We weren't alone: 200,000 Bulgarians living abroad did the same thing.

♥ Closing borders is not just historical instinct; it's also the most traditional way of fighting epidemics. It's the way in which states practise social distancing. In 1710, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I decided to block the spread of disease from the Balkans by creating a cordon sanitaire along the Habsburg Empire's southern frontier with the Ottoman Empire. His actions were largely successful, though they failed to save his own life; he died of smallpox in 1711. Nonetheless, the empire's restrictions on movement lasted until the mid-nineteenth century. And the authorities strictly imposed it.

♥ The foreigner is no longer the person who was not born here, but the one who is not here now – it's your residence rather than your passport that matters. Portugal is a great example of this turn. On the day the Portuguese government locked down the country, it declared that all foreigners with pending applications woulds be treated as permanent residents until at least 1 July. During the refugee crisis, public debates in many countries were stirred by imagining those who have not yet come – but could. In this crisis, the only migrants who matter are those already in the country.

♥ In this sense, the early stages of the coronavirus crisis were marked not by criticism of foreigners by "natives", but the anger of those living in the countryside at the invasion of the "second-homers". The media regularly reported on affluent city dwellers decamping from the epicenters of the crisis to their second homes, where proximity to the coast or the mountains would lessen the discomfort of confinement – and a decent internet link would permit remote work. Yet their arrival enraged local residents, because of a fear that they would spread the virus to areas with fewer hospitals that could not withstand a surge of sick, older locals with limited incomes. France, with its 3.4 million second homes, is a vivid illustration of a place where the decision of the affluent middle class to escape the country's major urban centers has been viewed as one more indication of the arrogance and selfishness of those with money.

The uncomfortable irony is that second homes in Europe are themselves a legacy of plague. After the first few outbreaks of the fourteenth-century Black Death, many inhabitants of cities in Renaissance Italy began to invest in country estates, partly to secure reliable food supplies in times of crisis. They spent increasing amounts of time in the countryside, especially during the summer months when the plague was at its worst, and villa life became popular for wealthier families. In the current pandemic, second homes have once again become safe havens, and this time the locals aren't at all pleased.

♥ Although the coronavirus might fail to treat everyone equally, it does reinforce the notion, if not the reality, that we all live in the same world. Unlike in the last recession, this time the rich and powerful cannot take their money and leave. With airports shuttered, the elites have no emergency exit; in the time of the plague, there are no distinctions between what David Goodhart described as "people from anywhere" and "people from somewhere". The coronavirus has placed everyone on a common ground, and this time "people from anywhere" are desperately looking for their somewhere. But living in the same world is not the same as living in a shared world or a fair world. In normal times, the elites can afford to travel. In the time of COVID-19, they can afford to stay at home.

♥ Although COVID-19 is far more dangerous when old people get infected, it's the younger generation that will be most affected by the economic effects of the pandemic. An astonishing recent report form the US found that 52 per cent of people under the age of forty-five have either lost a job, been put on leave or had their hours reduced because of the outbreak. And it was only a decade ago that the younger generation in the West was battered by the Great Recession. Millennials in Southern Europe will now have suffered two huge crises by their mid-thirties. Forty per cent of young Italians and half of young Spanish workers did not have a job in the middle of the last decade. Researchers in the United States are beginning to talk about "Generation C", the "C" standing for coronavirus. This is the generation that will be shaped by this pandemic, whether they are currently newborn babies, children, students or those holding down their first job. This generation may grow up in a catastrophic recession.

♥ "Fear exceeds all other disorders in intensity," remarked Michel de Montaigne. And fear is what brings populists to power. We should therefore not be surprised that many people believe that right-wing populists will be the biggest beneficiaries of the COVID-19 crisis. But is the rise of populism during the last decade better explained by fear or anxiety?

While psychologists suggest that fear and anxiety are close relatives – both contain the idea of danger – they also stress that fear is a reaction to a specific and observable danger, such as the fear of being infected with a deadly disease. By contrast, anxiety is a diffuse, unfocused, objectless belief about one's future. People are anxious that their children will have a life worse than their own. That migrants will replace then. They're anxious about the oncoming climate apocalypse, or about the prospect of alien invasion. Anxious people are also angry, while fearful people do not have the luxury of anger, because they are too busy working to survive.

Populists have been able to skillfully exploit the anger of the anxious. Anxious people do not behave in the same way as fearful people. A large and growing literature in social psychology argues that, under conditions of fear, "people develop a heightened mindfulness and self-awareness about the constraints on free action, and take, as a central goal, the desire to restore a higher degree of coherence and certainty." In his memoir, the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki gives us a powerful insight into the one-dimensional nature of the fearful mind: he confessed that in his months in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War, although he spent all his time reading, he did not once pick up a novel, because he feared that if he started one he would die before he had finished it.

When the most acute stage of the current crisis is over and people cease fearing for their lives, anger will return, and populist politicians like Marine Le Pen or Matteo Salvini are likely to flourish once again. In the early days of the crisis, however, it is the intensity of the fear caused by COVID-19 that explains why it is government rather than populist rhetoric that has won the day. As the approval ratings of Merkel and Conte grow, the support for their populist challengers declines. Rather than looking for someone to express their frustration, fearful people look for somebody to protect them and turn to those with knowledge. As a result, COVID-19 has changed the public's attitude towards expertise. It has made explicit the social benefits of a competent government, in contrast with the mistrust of experts and technocracy that followed the financial crisis.

♥ Political theorists are right that authoritarian leaders thrive on crises and that they are fluent in the politics of fear. Yet not all crises are amenable to authoritarian solutions. Nor does every form of public fear accrue to the benefit of political power. The crises that authoritarians most enjoy are those that they have manufactured themselves, or that at least permit them to showcase their imagined strengths. Carl Schmitt said that dictators aspire to wield the power of God to work miracles. But the Almighty is never asked to solve problems thrust upon Him by an unpredictably changing world that He has not created and over which He exercises minimal control.

The last-minute cancellation of presidential elections in Poland, previously scheduled for 10 May 2020, is a good example of how COVID-19 can thwart populist power-grabs rather than helping populists take control. The government was determined to organize elections in the midst of the pandemic against the will of the majority of the population, assured by the opinion polls that their candidate would easily win then but might not fare so well later when the public had had a chance to evaluate the ruling party's response to the crisis. As one opposition candidate remarked, commenting on the decision to postpone the elections: "It turns out that reality is not as flexible as Jarosław Kaczyński's mind."

♥ Our current moment is somewhat akin to the crisis of the 1970s, when Soviet communism and Western democracies were both driven by internal turmoil during what the political philosopher Pirre Hassner called a period of "competitive decadence". Instead of answering the question of whether liberal democracy or Chinese-style authoritarianism is the type of regime best suited to the demands of the twenty-first century, COVID-19 achieved something else: it ended the possibility of Chinese-American cooperation in managing the problems of globalization and further eroded trust in multilateral institutions like the World Health Organization. The trend of global fragmentation and regionalization has only been strengthened. Wang Jisi, a professor at Peking University, correctly claims that the fallout from the virus has left China—US relations at their worst point since formal ties were established in the 1970s, with bilateral economic and technological decoupling "already irreversible".

♥ Elections resemble death, since they force you to look backwards and forwards, to both evaluate your life and to imagine another. It is in the Hospital for the Incurables that Ormea appreciates democracy's genius to turn madness into reason and passions into interests.

♥ In the last decade, those whom Thomas Friedman calls "the square people" have been a constant presence in global politics. More than ninety countries around the world have witnessed major mass protests. Millions of people have turned out to mount sizeable and sustained actions that bypass political parties, distrust the mainstream media, have few specific leaders and most leave formal organization aside. The gilets jaunes in France and Extinction Rebellion are two faces of this diverse phenomenon. Online activism is often unable to inject the sense of meaning and belonging that is the distinctive feature of street politics, and instead often resorts to cheap "clicktivism".

COVID-19 threatens this essential element of democratic politics; democracy cannot function if people have to stay indoors. As the technology analyst Benedict Evans recently observed, "We are ll online now, and, just as importantly, we're all willing to use this for any part of our lives, if you can work out the right experience and business model. Today, anyone will do anything online." He may be right, but it is my conviction that democracy cannot survive in the absence of "square people" and, no less important, that the disappearance of these people may in the eyes of many indicate the end of democracy. It is impossible for me to imagine that democracies will be able to survive if we cannot gather in groups of more than fifty people. The loss of angry crowds who can freely express their discontent and demands on the streets of Western capitals blurs the distinction between liberal democracy and its poisonous doubles. In an age in which many authoritarian regimes use managed elections as a way of justifying their power, it is the freedom of citizens to go on the streets and protest and after that safely return home that is the most visible difference between free and unfree societies.

♥ In the late eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham designed an institutional form that he called "the panopticon". The concept behind it was to allow a watchman to observe all the inmates in an institution – whether a prison, school or spiritual – without them knowing whether they were being watched. The design soon became a symbol of our modern understanding of the use of power to control dangerous individuals or groups. The nineteenth-century politician and anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously declared that "to be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored and ordered about." Many will agree that little has changed since Proudhon's days, other than technology.

♥ On 26 February 2020, when the scale of the pandemic in his country was still unclear, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote a controversial op-ed claiming that the emergency measures introduced by the Italian government were entirely disproportionate. "What is once again manifested is the tendency," Agamben asserted, "to use a state of exception as a normal paradigm of government." He shared a view that the government's response to COVID-19 was a manifestation of "the tyrannical instinct" of liberal governments and an opportunity to bring back emergency measures that were reminiscent of those used during the "war on terror". Just as those people who were troubled by the shutting of European borders tended to perceive COVID-19 as the return of the refugee crisis, many human rights practitioners fear that, when the virus is defeated, the surveillance practices will live on. To them, a "state of exception" is nothing less than a nail in the coffin of democracy.

♥ What, in Katznelson's view, distinguishes democracy from dictatorship is not that democracy opposes the imposition of "the state of exception", but that it does it in order to protect itself rather than because it can get away with it. However, in order for democracy to take exceptional measures while remaining true to its liberal nature, it must distinguish between temporary actions and permanent policy. Democratic actors should require that key legislative acts be temporary and subject to formal renewal. It is this principle that Viktor Orbán has decided to violate in a blunt, ham-fisted way.

Secondly, neither individual leaders nor institutions should be exempt from criticism, and policies of exception must not result in invisibility or isolation from democratic practices. To the contrary, each branch of government – the judiciary, the legislature and the executive itself – must have opportunities to share information and pass judgements in real time. Governments may bypass parliament where they have to, but they should never retire it.

Finally, opportunities for retrospective appraisal should be preserved. A process of evaluation, tied to sanctions when liberal norms have been violated, is particularly valuable for political regimes that are committed to democratic deliberation and collective choice.

♥ While some autocracies, such as China and Singapore, have initially performed well, others like Iran have done very poorly. Similarly, some democracies, for example Italy and the United State, have stumbled, while others, including South Korea, Germany and Taiwan, have performed admirably. In Kleinfeld's analysis, the main factors that determine a nation's success at containing the COVID-19 pandemic are governments' previous experiences of dealing with similar crises, the level of social trust in a society, and the capacity of the state. In her view, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore, though politically diverse, learned the right lessons from the SARS epidemic in 2002-3 and developed speedy tests soon after the coronavirus began spreading, in order to try to get ahead of the virus. All of them had emergency laws that permitted the extraordinary right to track where infected individuals had been, and they relaxed privacy regulations to spread that information widely and alert people that they had been exposed to the virus and should be tested. Finally, they relied on heavily enforced quarantines to slow the spread of the outbreak.

All the countries that effectively beat back COVID-19 have high levels of public trust in their institutions; the success of governmental social control depends more on voluntary compliance than on enforcement. Although China, Singapore and South Korea have quite different political regimes, all three are in the top ten countries in the world when it comes to public trust in government. And only governments that are trusted by their citizens can effectively maintain an onerous lockdown.

Conversely, in authoritarian Iran and democratic Italy, the public's low trust in their institutions has made the introduction of social distancing more problematic. Political polarization and low trust, according to Kleinfeld, also at least partially explain the difficulties the United States has had in dealing with the crisis.

♥ Sometimes in March 2020, during the second week of my COVID-19 confinement, a friend emailed me an amusing Venn diagram. It depicted twelve overlapping circles, each representing a popular dystopia. All the famous ones were there: 1984, Brave New World, The handmaid's Tale, A Clockwork Orange and Lord of the Flies. And then, it said, "You are here", in that small area where they all intersected. Are we there indeed – living through all these nightmares simultaneously?

♥ The COVID-19 pandemic promises to put an end to globalization as we know it. We can only speculate about whether it will occasion what is normally accomplished by wars, but, irrespective of what happens next, we can be confident that, when the virus is defeated, the world will be swept by a "pandemic of nostalgia".

In the seventeenth century, nostalgia was thought to be a curable but contagious malady. Its primary symptom was melancholia, which was thought to derive from a yearning either to return to one's land or for a different time. Those afflicted often complained of hearing voices and seeing ghosts. Sufferers acquired "a lifeless and haggard countenance" and an "indifference towards everything", confusing past and present, real and imaginary events". When the pandemic is over, people will be nostalgic for that bygone era when we could easily fly to almost anywhere in the world; when restaurants were packed; and when death was so unnatural that, on an elderly person's passing away, we wondered whether their death had been caused by a doctor's mistake. But while we will be eager to return to normality, we will discover that it will be impossible to do so. There is also something disturbing about the world of yesterday. We can never know the future of the present, but we have already lived the future of the past.

♥ In the days of the quarantine, the old continent experienced its hundred days of solitude. Many in Europe have turned against China. The illusion of US—China cooperation in defence of multilateralism was over, while the image of the United States simply collapsed. This time it was not only about President Trump and his destructive policies. The majority of Europeans probably for the first time saw the US not as a global hegemon but as a broken society nobody can rely on.

♥ It is one of the great optical illusions of twenty-first-century globalization that only mobile people are truly cosmopolitan and that only those who feel at home in different places can maintain a universalist perspective. And yet the ultimate cosmopolitan, Immanuel Kant, never left his hometown of Königsberg. His town at various times belonged to different empires, but he always preferred to remain there. Today's paradoxes of globalization (or de-globalization) perhaps began with him. Covid-19 has infected the world with cosmopolitanism, while turning states against globalization.