Michael Bröning is incoming director of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in New York, a think tank affiliated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
Faced with a rising death count and a suspension of normal life, leaders across the world have declared themselves “at war” with the virus.
In the United States, Donald Trump conferred on himself the title of “wartime president.” In France, President Emmanuel Macron compared the fight to a military struggle and called on people’s sense of civic duty. At last month’s G20 summit, even the United Nations’ secretary-general likened the global response to a war.
At first, the label seems fitting. In Italy, the military has been charged with disposing of coffins, and in the U.S., overwhelmed health facilities are setting up battlefield triage stations to determine which patients will receive treatment. There are echoes of the darkest hours of the Vietnam War in the media’s live updates on the global body count.
The political rationale behind the combative rhetoric is obvious. Faced with an unprecedented challenge, governments are attempting to both mobilize resources and retain public support for far-reaching interruptions to daily life and unparalleled economic impositions. To many, tapping into the nationalist fervor of wartime mobilization seems like a plausible strategy.
Once criticism is labeled as defeatism, it’s a slippery slope toward authoritarianism.
But is the belligerent rhetoric really appropriate — or effective?
In times of social distancing and prolonged quarantines, forming battalions is the last thing governments want their citizens to do. Confronted with the invisible threat of a virus, the wartime motto “united we stand; divided we fall” has been reversed, with people called on to self-isolate.
The war analogy also wears thin when it comes to the economy. Certainly, governments across the globe have rushed to facilitate the production of sanitary equipment and protect their national output. But this is a far cry from historical wartime economies with their all-encompassing determination to maximize production. In fact, in the age of coronavirus, industrial activity has been brought close to a standstill.
In some ways, the rhetoric seems to be working — for leaders, at least. Nearly every major democracy is currently enjoying gains in public support. In the U.S., Trump’s approval ratings are near an all-time high, as are those of his counterparts in Germany, France, Australia, and Canada. In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s poll rating has increased by 25 percentage points since the onset of the crisis.
This gather-around-the-flag phenomenon is unlikely to last past the current crisis. The danger is that the emergency decisions taken with “wartime” rationale very well could.
Military-style mobilization tends to render public opposition to governments almost impossible. In a state of war, the perception of an immediate outside threat transforms the civic virtue of skepticism into untimely dissidence. Precisely at the time when critics are needed most, tolerance for their questioning of authority is diminished. Once criticism is labeled as defeatism, it’s a slippery slope toward authoritarianism.
This is especially dangerous considering the fact that emergency powers green-lighted in times of war tend to outlast the circumstances of their establishment.
A case in point is the state of emergency declared at the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, which never formally ended. The anti-terrorism measures taken in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks are also a stark reminder that emergency rules routinely outlive the emergencies that brought them about.
The notion of a “war against the virus” also harms international cooperation. The very idea of national mobilization associated with a state of war jeopardizes the values of multilateralism, transparency and solidarity across borders. Yet, it is precisely these principles that will be essential in overcoming the current global challenge.
Multilateral institutions such as the G20, the European Union or the United Nations have so far failed to play a decisive role in confronting the crisis. In the EU, structural differences between north and south have hampered a unified response to the epidemic, while the G20 forum has failed to yield a comprehensive joint plan of action. The U.N. Security Council for months failed to even discuss the pandemic. Framing the struggle against the virus as the sum of national war efforts will only aggravate this deficiency.
If nothing else, unchecked rhetorical belligerence should be seen against the backdrop of an egregious — and deeply entrenched — enthusiasm for war. Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini infamously declared in “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism” that “war alone imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it.” World War II is a stark reminder that the exact opposite is true — and yet, the idea lingers.
Confronted with the unprecedented challenges of the coronavirus epidemic, true courage will not express itself in “waging war” but in protecting our democratic principles of cooperation, solidarity and civility. If we try to defeat the virus in the spirit of war, we may well defeat ourselves in the process.