The Coronavirus and the Future of Liberalism

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 has significantly reshaped debates on the global
order, democratic politics and the liberal mode of governing societies. Some
have compared the virus to the “ultimate empty signifier”, which allowed
difficult ideological groups to fill it with their own securitizations, creating in
an instant a plethora of political otherings. For IR realists, the sudden
collapse of cross-border movement and other privileges of the globalized
liberal elite came as a vindication of their long-cherished argument: the
nation state remains the key actor in international politics, and the post-national world had largely been a utopian liberal illusion. Right-wing
nationalist populists have been saying the same thing but in a different
language and were apt to make COVID-19 instrumental to their purposes.
Thus, Viktor Orbán quickly linked it to the agenda of migration and used the
state of exception as a pretext to further limit the democratic process in
Hungary. However, as students of populism have also stressed, the populist
response to the pandemic has been far from uniform. In a yet broader
perspective, while some democratic governments enacted draconian
measures in response to the pandemic, suspending basic individual
freedoms, some dictatorships like Belarus experienced a sudden “flow of
liberalism“, refusing to cut down on both economic activity and cross-border movement. This special issue focuses on comparing the liberal and
illiberal reactions (both domestic and international) to the pandemic,
looking into how it has affected the democratic and non-democratic forms
of governance; examining where the responses have been similar or
overlapping, i.e. where COVID-19 has practically blurred or erased the
border between liberal and illiberal politics; looking into how different types
of regimes and political groupings have borrowed new elements and styles
of politics, e.g. in which circumstances populist or autocratic politicians
suddenly seemed more liberal than their liberal and democratic
counterparts; and investigating the ramifications of these changes for the
liberal components of the globalized international order.