The Coronavirus and the Future of Liberalism

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 has significantly reshaped debates on the globalorder, democratic politics and the liberal mode of governing societies. Somehave compared the virus to the “ultimate empty signifier”, which alloweddifficult ideological groups to fill it with their own securitizations, creating inan instant a plethora of political otherings. For IR realists, the suddencollapse of cross-border movement and other privileges of the globalizedliberal elite came as a vindication of their long-cherished argument: thenation state remains the key actor in international politics, and the post-national world had largely been a utopian liberal illusion. Right-wingnationalist populists have been saying the same thing but in a differentlanguage and were apt to make COVID-19 instrumental to their purposes.Thus, Viktor Orbán quickly linked it to the agenda of migration and used thestate of exception as a pretext to further limit the democratic process inHungary. However, as students of populism have also stressed, the populistresponse to the pandemic has been far from uniform. In a yet broaderperspective, while some democratic governments enacted draconianmeasures in response to the pandemic, suspending basic individualfreedoms, some dictatorships like Belarus experienced a sudden “flow ofliberalism“, refusing to cut down on both economic activity and cross-border movement. This special issue focuses on comparing the liberal andilliberal reactions (both domestic and international) to the pandemic,looking into how it has affected the democratic and non-democratic formsof governance; examining where the responses have been similar oroverlapping, i.e. where COVID-19 has practically blurred or erased theborder between liberal and illiberal politics; looking into how different typesof regimes and political groupings have borrowed new elements and stylesof politics, e.g. in which circumstances populist or autocratic politicianssuddenly seemed more liberal than their liberal and democraticcounterparts; and investigating the ramifications of these changes for theliberal components of the globalized international order.