- Position1 of 5›
- Coronavirus will impact global politics
Our coordinated political response to the crisis, as well as our borderless scientific cooperation, and the recognition that COVID-19 touched the whole world, will prove the benefits and sense of globalisation.
The argument
Despite coronavirus' quick onset, the global scientific community was quick in its response. While there have been varying national efforts to combat the virus, globalisation has made it far easier, from centralised online tracking tools to preliminary sequencing data being available online leading to a reliable test being created quickly. The sequence is the thing to notice: data generated in one country was published where anyone could use it, and laboratories elsewhere built on it without waiting to repeat the work themselves. This demonstrates just how beneficial globalisation is. While previously scientific teams would have been working entirely alone or only with sporadic communication, with globalisation there can be international cooperation to ensure that scientific breakthroughs are reached far quicker than they otherwise would be. The gain is not simply that more people are working on the problem but that they are not each solving the same part of it. Shared tracking tools mean one picture of where the virus is rather than many partial ones, and shared sequence data means every subsequent step starts from the same foundation. That matters particularly for a pathogen, because a virus circulating anywhere is a threat everywhere, and a national response bounded at the border is answering only part of its own problem. The case for cooperation here is not solidarity but self-interest. This reinforces that globalisation should not be combated, but improved. It should be even easier for scientific teams to work together. Evidence-based global action should be the norm. The answer is to change, not dismantle, globalisation — the failures visible during the pandemic were failures of coordination, and dismantling the arrangements that allowed a test to be produced quickly would address them by removing what worked. In this way coronavirus will impact global politics by proving the benefits of globalisation.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Globalisation is the cause of the ferocity of the coronavirus outbreak. We should not be celebrating it, but seriously reassessing the way that we interact and moving towards more protectionist policies.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Coronavirus has demonstrated the pitfalls, rather than benefits, of globalisation.