For months now, we have been living under very strange circumstances, a life that isn’t really living. No one knows how long this period of uncertainty and anticipation will last and this is harmful for both our mental health and our societies. People are swamped by a sea of disparate (dis)information, amped up media sensationalism, paranoias, conspiracy theories, as well as increasing government repression, torn between their rights and freedoms as guaranteed by the constitution, on the one hand, and fears of losing their jobs/poverty and/(or) death, on the other. The disjointed state that we are powerless to change ourselves, while it keeps changing around us, evokes in us a mixture of apathy, helplessness and anger. At one and the same time, the situation brings up fundamental questions of the value of life, the principles of freedom, human dignity and equality, solidarity and responsibility, and deepens the emerging crisis of “people’s self-understanding”.
A coronavirus epidemic spreading the contagious disease technically known as COVID-19 broke out in early January 2020 in Wuhan, China. By March it had become a pandemic, affecting hundreds of thousands of people each day in all parts of the world and killing tens of thousands a week, it endangered the functioning of human civilisation globally. It is, or course, difficult to judge something that is still going on, and still harder to draw conclusions. Perhaps the most suitable “genre” for thinking and writing about the virus would be a chronicle of waiting, worrying and caution.
Although we still do not know whether COVID-19 is the unexpected end of civilisation and life as we know it, the start of first stage of a new (r)evolution, or just a harrowing viral pandemic that will be swept away once we have a vaccine, for now at least, it is one of the better diagnosticians of our age. It has removed our rosy or black-and-white spectacles that we had been blindly wearing and let us, still timidly, take a peek at and see all the political, social and economic structures that govern our lives and relations between people. It has directed our gazes at a very convoluted, far-reaching and branched out network of roots of injustice and inequity, uncovering them and at least making them visible.
The disease has also diagnosed the social diseases we live in.
Democracy postponed
COVID-19 has managed to “infect” various areas: the world economy, inter-personal relations, the system of values, the movement of people and goods, global trends, local customs, daily habits and routines. Democratic processes have, unfortunately, not remained immune. According to the International Institute for Democracy, at least 70 countries and territories have postponed elections since mid-February. The New Zealand prime minister said that due to the increase in the number of cases, she would be postponing the parliamentary elections from September to October. The decision was welcomed both by her party and the opposition. The US president, at a time when his prospects for re-election in November were assessed as slim, floated the idea of postponing the US presidential elections, but encountered vehement opposition both from the Democrats and his own Republicans in Congress.
The fact that even a disease can be put in the service of party or individual interests was also made plain in the Balkans. After introducing some of the most stringent measures, including a police curfew and lockdown, the authorities in Serbia, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Croatia lifted the bans at least partly to facilitate the holding of elections at a time when it suited the ruling parties. The decision to open borders in some countries led to an increase in the number of cases, while in others we were left to take the data presented on faith (the BIRN investigative network found that Belgrade was not reporting the actual numbers of covid-19 cases and deaths at the time when it needed to ensure the holding of elections). The postponing of elections, on the other hand, was more often the result of fear of defeat than of concern over the spread of the virus. In other words, the virus served as a good excuse to either hold elections or postpone them, the will of the citizens has been placed in the waiting room, and the right to vote is made possible only when it suits the ruling elites. With a few notable exceptions!
Human rights and responsibility
In Serbia, reporter Ana Lalić was arrested for publishing an article about the lack of adequate protective equipment for medical workers at the Vojvodina Clinical Centre, which denied these claims and filed charges against her for “spreading panic”. Lalić was let go the next day. Artist Jovana Popović from Kikinda, who became known to the public as the author of the anti-government song “Bagra”, was arrested ten days after returning from Montenegro, and one day before the state of emergency was declared, for allegedly breaching her home isolation requirement.
The arrest of Ana Lalić was an example of curtailing or even trying to abolish the right to information and the right to criticism, while the arrest of Jovana Popović reflects the curtailment of rights to civil disobedience and protest. These are just two of many examples where human rights were violated under the guise of protection from COVID-19. The Council of Europe has called on all countries to preserve these rights as very important in this period, saying that governments should do everything in their power to protect the democratic values of pluralism, tolerance and freedom of thought.
Though time seems to have slowed down or even come to a standstill, the speed at which political decisions are made and implemented during the pandemic has increased exponentially. Parliaments are put in a position where they can only confirm hasty decisions made by governments, or more likely single leaders, without consultations or time for broader debate. Using safety and protecting the lives of all citizens as an excuse, it is a slippery slope to autocracy. Avoiding accountability, but taking matters into one’s own hands have been the most popular COVID-19 disciplines, though they had been pursued earlier as well. Accountability is what makes a difference, the difference between freedom and autocracy. And though we are told from countless billboards, TV channels, newspapers and posters on almost every corner to “Be Responsible”, those whose job it is to be responsible show the least responsibility. In fact, responsibility has been one of the first victims of the virus, having no immunity and receiving no timely treatment. Where there is responsibility, there is a chance for democracy and upholding human rights.
The xenophobia pandemic
Proverbially, bad things never come alone, as demonstrated by one of the many “side-effects” of the virus: the xenophobia pandemic. It all started quite unremarkably with the preventive border closures to Chinese nationals who were banned from entering Japan, Singapore, Mongolia, the US, Australia and other countries, only to escalate with “No Chinese” signs put up in cafes in Italy and France, and the avoidance and disdain for people of Asian background on public transport, in the streets and shops. Many people of Asian descent in Europe and America faced prejudice and discrimination based solely on the fact that COVID-19 started in China. The small states of the Balkans were not, of course, spared this side-effect, being characteristically and irrationally susceptible to treating everyone who does not look like “us” as Chinese, i.e. those “spreading the disease among the people”.
At the same time, we are often quick to gloss over the fact that “Stay home!” does not mean much for many who have nowhere to stay or go (the homeless), while for others, living in overcrowded camps, “social distancing” is impossible (migrants, refugees, the Roma). Due to states of emergency being declared in more-or-less all countries and the accompanying border closures, members of different peoples have come “under fire” of extreme right politicians and media looking for cheap thrills, simply because they are different. With the lockdown freezing a large part of the economy and the population generally staying in isolation, the homeless are further exposed to hunger, disease and police repression.
Emergency situations, be they political, economic or medical, often require “quick fixes” that need not necessarily be misguided. However, solutions that result in discrimination, segregation and brutality towards groups of people based on their national, religious or other belonging are motivated solely by hatred and xenophobia. Mechanisms characteristic of the Middle Ages have reared their ugly heads in our times as well. Hatred and xenophobia have been around for a long time, but they become visible and more pronounced in times of crisis. COVID-19 is just a “good excuse” to stir up xenophobia.
An x-ray scan of halthcare
One of the most memorable and most sobering images that will remain imprinted in the minds of many are the scenes we saw coming from Italy and Spain. Soldiers loading black body bags onto lorries to take them to surrounding towns because the graveyards in Bergamo had become overcrowded. In Spain, the national guard was called in to collect corpses and take them to overflowing morgues. Increasingly, burials have been replaced with cremation. “Hospitals” are cropping up everywhere: at conference halls, in parks, at fairgrounds, even in libraries. It seems that the European healthcare system, or at least in countries where it was thought of as a model system (Italy, Spain, France), is falling apart. The reason, it turned out, was in the fact that for years governments have been destroying public healthcare for the benefit of the private sector. In some countries, such as the US, class differences are even more prominent, because poor people do not have the money to pay for treatment when they contract the virus, especially not if they have already lost their jobs or if they never had healthcare to begin with.
Of course, the situation in our countries is not much different and also harks back years. Tens of thousands of doctors and medical staff have left the countries of the former Yugoslavia over the past 20 years. After the pandemic worsened again in Serbia, more than 2,700 doctors signed the initiative “United against Covid” and demanded the replacement of the Crisis Staff that had been appointed to fight the virus. They also demanded that responsibility for, as they put it, the “public health catastrophe in our country” be clearly assigned. It turned out to be true that the degree of repressive measures undertaken during the pandemic was inversely proportional to the capacity of the healthcare system and that COVID-19 was the best way to x-ray the state of our healthcare systems.
On the front lines of defence
COVID-19 did not just expose the vulnerability of public healthcare to a pandemic, it also brought to light the growing social stratification and caused far-reaching social problems. Those who are the weakest and most vulnerable in large systems were the hardest-hit by the pandemic, as well as those who are neglected and marginalised under even the best of circumstances and who are numerous in our societies. They include, to borrow from the quotidian political jargon, all those who stand “at the front lines of our fatherland” (meaning our struggling economy), risking their lives, starting from doctors and other health workers, including pharmacists, and down to the poorest workers in production and services. Most if not all of them are generally underpaid and taking care of their families, and they have now been put in a position where they do not have much choice over whether to continue going to work. While much of the middle class could stay safe by working from home, shelves at supermarkets and pharmacies cannot be restocked by remote control, and the same is true of many other occupations, such as factory workers, cleaning and maintenance staff, public transport workers, bank tellers, farmers, reporters, postal workers, delivery workers, etc.
People are increasingly losing their jobs because their companies cannot stay afloat under the present circumstances. And the government is slow and almost indifferent when it comes to assistance plans for the economy. And right at the start, we were informed that the assistance plans were intended for those who were already privileged and strong, those who could bear the burden of keeping on workers, covering losses and even donating funds for ventilators and other healthcare equipment. Small businesses were once again left to their own devices and most often forced to reduce the number of workers and let people go.
The closing down of schools and daycares during the pandemic affected men and women differently. When the crisis started, many couples were forced to decide who would stay at home to care for the children. Studies have shown that if both partners were employed and one had to stay home and care for the children, it was mostly women who took on the task of childcare. Many others were also affected by the pandemic: farmers, tourism and catering workers, artists, cultural workers, single parents, persons with migration backgrounds… the list is long, too long…
We have to ask ourselves whether all the workers in the field, those who are “on the front lines of defence”, are equal citizens or whether their rights (and their lives) are worth less than ours? At the end of the “war”, will they receive medals for services to their homeland and the global economy, or maybe just a 100 euro bonus? How many of them will survive all this, and how many will further spread the disease by daily travel and being at work where they come into contact with countless other “foot soldiers of the economy”? As the French economist Thomas Piketty warned, inequality is “ideological”, not natural or just, and this state of affairs has now become quite apparent and magnified. Do we know that we can and must do things differently?
A life worth living
We are at the start of an experience we are unlikely to ever forget, and we are only just starting to come to terms with “living with it”. Learning to live life with social and physical distancing, isolation, without travel and with human interaction reduced to the smallest possible degree is exhausting and unsettling. On top of this, in many cultures closeness, solidarity, empathy and care for others are usually expressed through handshakes, hugs, physical contact, kisses or inviting someone to your home, or out for coffee, to the theatre or cinema, by having friends over for dinner. All of that has now been turned on its head and rather painfully.
This experience also shows us that for a long time, especially in this region, we have been constricted by borders in our heads, but also by increasingly impermeable state borders, suffering from loneliness, being asocial and isolated. COVID-19 has simply intensified those feelings and that reality, making them more apparent. However, in parallel and paradoxically, this experience has also made us depend more on each other. We have become more amenable to understanding, more ready to talk, more open to those coming from the other side. We have missed each other in more ways than one. It turns out that people are truly social beings, that we need each other and depend on each other. That there cannot be any I without You.
How far have we come as a civilisation in terms of being more appreciative and valuing mere survival, “bare life”, more than anything else? One of the biggest costs of the pandemic is the toll on our social lives broadly conceived to include family, friends and business relations. Does this also mean that for the sake of the majority having a decent life we can decide to sacrifice the preservation of “bare life” for some? Though the principle of preserving every single individual life must take precedence over the utilitarianism of the market, economic benefit or loss, keeping the economy going, etc. it must not come into conflict with the principles of human dignity and a good or social life. Preserving the “bare” life of every individual must be an integral part of a decent life for all of us, not its theoretical or political opposite.