Understanding the Politics of Pandemic Emergencies in the time of COVID-19

An Introduction to Global Politosomatics

Mika Aaltola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000532227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book reviews the political significance of COVID-19 in the context of earlier pandemic encounters and scares to understand the ways in which it challenges the existing individual health, domestic order, international health governance actors, and, more fundamentally, the circulation-based modus operandi of the present world order.

It argues that contagious diseases should be regarded as complex open-ended phenomena with various features and are not reducible merely to biology and epidemiology. They are, as such, fundamentally politosomatic, namely that they disrupt, agitate, and trigger large-scale processes because individual somatic-level anxieties stem from individuals' sensing immediate danger through the networks of their local and global connectedness. The author further argues that pandemics have somatic effects in political expressions that transform the epidemic into national security dramas which should not, for the sake of efficient health governance, be treated as aspects extraneous to the disease itself. The book highlights that when a serious infectious disease spreads, a 'threat' is very often externalized into a culturally meaningful 'foreign' entity. Pandemics tend to be territorialized, nationalized, ethnicized, and racialized.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of global health and governance, pandemic security, epidemics, history of medicine, geopolitics, international relations, and general readers interested in the COVID-19 pandemic.

1
INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9781003169147-1

Diseases desperate grown

By desperate appliances are relieved,

Or not at all.

—Shakespeare, Hamlet

It struck the city of Athens suddenly.

People in the Piraeus caught it first,

and so, since there were not yet any fountains there,

they actually alleged that the Peloponnesians had put poison in the wells.

—Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

As evidenced by COVID-19 (coronavirus disease), deadly contagious diseases have the potential to catalyse societal havoc, heighten enmity between political actors and different levels of governance, and set out unforeseen, cascading negative chains of events. The crucial driver is the pandemic’s ability to disrupt not only complex societal, economic, and political systems but also, most fundamentally, people’s individual lives and to elicit somatic fears and catalyse projections of anxieties to the political situation around them. The pandemic is translated into fear at both political and individual levels, producing combinations of the two. The resulting politosomatic nexus is expressed in streets, in social media, and in geopolitics election booths. By no means trivial and insignificant, this is largely unacknowledged, but extremely consequential politosomatic relationship is the key topic of this work (Aaltola 2012a).

In our modern times, body politics and globalized individual bodies are uniquely exposed to pathogens spreading through the arteries of global interdependence, in particular through modernity’s air-travel vector. Antibiotic resistance is looming on the horizon in a way that accentuates worries about the re-emergence of older pestilences. Pandemics and fears of them embody our global way of life in a regressive way. Instead of economic growth and increasingly efficient value chains, pandemic scenarios introduce dystopian fears of contagious interdependence between differentially exposed individuals. The source of global power, status, and wealth—the globalized world order’s key modes—turns into channels of potential political and somatic regression. The growing dis-ease—the nexus between political order and somatic anxiety—morphs a diversity of characteristics into one scenario where the sentiments of containment, severing connections, and enmity are more pervasive than high reliance and optimism concerning integrated regions or a seamless global sky. Under this regressive scenario, any anticipation of an epidemic becomes newsworthy but also symptomatic of the perceived underlying unsustainability of the global order and the hostile relationship with the mutating natural surroundings. Hyperbole, politicizations, misinformation, and rumours interact with each other and trigger deep anxieties concerning the sustainability of the way of life of a particular hegemonic order and global epoch.

The dreams of the post–Cold War world were crystallized in ideas of integrated mobility infrastructures and a seamless sky standing in sharp contrast to the dividing territorial political borders of the past. The flows of disease agents can illustrate, signify, and embody the regression of the global vision and governance as well as reveal the lack of solidarity and trust if (re)-emerging diseases interact with human polities in waves one after another. They disempower the citizens of the increasingly exposed globality, highlighting the international and intra-communal borders, and reveal the injustices of a differential spread of vulnerability and production of immunity. Pandemic fears can ultimately undermine the trust placed in states as the Hobbesian reality of a life, which is dis-eased, short, nasty, and brutish, becomes acutely felt inside many states. The key is to understand that micro-level contagions go hand in hand with a heightened sense of macro-level enmities, and one pattern of enmity translates into and readily combines with the other. For example, COVID-19 translated almost effortlessly into a catalyst of great power rivalry between the United States of America (the US) and Russia China, and inside states, it fed existing stereotypical patterns of suspicion and prejudice.

As COVID-19 has demonstrated, a pandemic outbreak can show how suddenly, and swiftly, the world can be brought to its knees driven by somatic fear and anxiety. It seems that the major players of the rule-based world order and global governance, ranging from the major political powers to global health institutions, cannot be fully trusted to fulfil their responsibilities. Moreover, the pandemic itself seems like a worrying portent of more governance regressions to come. This can further undermine the trust and legitimacy needed for regional and global order.

In pandemic security emergency situations, the likely global sentiment yearning for leadership is not one of mobilized global empathy, humanitarian solidarity, or desperation for a timely cure for everyone. Instead, we recoil and sever connections. We try to instinctively secure the borders of our immediate communities. This is the antithesis of the humanitarian impulse usually connected with localized human suffering due to natural disasters. The sight of a starving child in places of misgovernance may lead to a sense of compassion and the need to rush in to intervene on behalf of this distant sufferer (e.g. Aaltola 2009). Highly rehearsed donor behaviour and rescue efforts are likely to follow. The international community tries to move fast to ameliorate conditions in places of misery. Yet the sight of the dead and suffering swine flu victims in Mexico in the spring of 2009 led to a sudden global jolt of aversion and fear. Similarly, fear of COVID-19 started to spread soon after the containment failure in Wuhan in late 2019. The immediate global reflex—a reaction similar to the emergence of those infected by other perceived pandemics—was that of distancing and severing contact with the site of the unfamiliar and deadly disease outbreak. The momentum of pandemic emergencies is aimed at disengagement with the suffering distant other and taking care of one’s own community, where one feels more securely embodied. The rush is towards proximate containment rather than the compassionate crossing of distances. In this sense, a pandemic’s affective flows are unlike other global emergencies—they are seemingly non-compassionate rushes towards withdrawal and to contain the disease in a certain place, spot, or ‘zone’. If there is altruism, it is towards the people living close by or towards the ‘general public’, conceived of in terms of national or regional bubbles. As a sentiment, containment sets a scene for paranoid governance whereby rational and conspiratorial content mixes, and any attempt to help is treated with suspicion and is likely to be merely pandemic diplomacy or vaccine statecraft. Legitimate global power tends to disappear, accentuating cold calculations, motivations of self-interest, and sentiments towards decoupling from the global contacts. When the wave of a new variant recedes, connections are restored with hesitation. However, the element of distrust is bound to linger, setting the scene for a political long COVID as the earlier value placed on rule-based or liberal order has lost its momentum.

The acute global relationships of anxious containment shed light on the power-related dynamics of pandemic emergencies. In this work, I will use the term ‘politosomatics’ in reference to how lived-life, individual, somatic-level anxieties couple with the hierarchical interconnectedness of the global polity. Politosomatic relationships interlink the global hierarchy’s differential spread of risk—the inequalities in the disease burden together with the associated imbalances of wealth and power—with individuals’ expectations and fears of bodily harm.¹ The world order translates into a configuration of differentially exposed individual and political bodies, which, in turn, causes anxiety and leads to political reactions, market panics, consumer reactions, a race to develop vaccines, fear of public spaces, wearing of masks, changing social expressions, and other types of disease-related expressive behaviour. Moreover, the containment sentiment also finds its expression in catalysing existing and emerging geopolitical, cultural, moral, ethnic, and sexual cleavages and enmities.

The more encompassing political ‘bodies’, such as states, the world order, and humanity itself, can also be felt as being under pressure and duress. Dis-order and dis-ease at those levels can directly link with somatic-level pains, a sense of being exposed, and individual-level anxiety. It is hardly surprising that after several millennia of this interaction, people often sense their wider surroundings and their world as embodiments with which they identify in varying ways and on behalf of which they worry. They feel and react to the community’s or world’s pains, and, as a result, these wider embodiments may turn into bodies in pain. And, it can be suggested, these political or world-related pains have long cultural histories, memories, and expressive practices that also condition our contemporary sensitivities, for example, when it comes to regressive processes or ‘fatal blows’ delivered by lethal epidemic diseases. These imageries of regressive circulations and flows cannot be anything but intense. Their judders lead to expectations of corresponding pain in other less expansive but far more intimate bodies such as individual bodies. In this way, actual and feared political pain may become somatized and vice versa, with the result that it is possible to speak about politosomatic disorders in much the same way as it is possible to discuss psychosomatic or socio-somatic disorders.²

Politosomatics builds an overview in which people’s bodily fears are contextualized in both narrower and wide political embodiments and the power relations therein. Similar tendencies have prevailed in social sciences for decades ranging from psychosomatic to socio-somatic approaches. Psychosomatics developed based on the need to bridge a dichotomy inherent in the term and to understand how the mind and body are interrelated—how somatic symptoms lead to mental outcomes, disturbances, and vice versa. The field challenged the clear-cut division between thought and the material body’s physical mechanisms. Due to the incommensurable nature of the two elements bridged, mind and body, the field has suffered from conceptual issues (Hitzer and Leon-Sanz 2016: 67). However, despite the inherent complexity, clear tangible interrelations can be seen. Socio-somatics, similarly, contains an attempt towards a more comprehensive understanding of the place of the mind and body in social interactions and communities. A social setting with its norms, practices, and interpretations affects the way in which communities and individuals give meaning to somatic processes such as diseases (e.g. Kleinman 1986). The body does not exist in a vacuum but is psychologically and socially embedded, thus opening up complex yet conventionally bound interrelations.

It is clear that contagious diseases exist, flourish, and die in wider than physical environments, as they adapt to local memories, practices, and cultures, as also to patterns of political order, governance, and power. For example, the communal responses to avian flu were commonly based on the practical logic developed on the basis of existing stereotypes, media representations, government information campaigns, and popular rumours (Padmawati and Nichter 2008: 31). Moreover, diseases are embedded in and readily react with the fabric of political power. In this process of mutual adaptation, the responses to diseases inevitably turn into signifiers of the underlying patterns of power. For example, in the early 1980s, the Soviet authorities insisted that HIV was the outcome of an American military experiment that had gone wrong (Nelkin and Gilman 1991: 39). The purpose could have been to point out that the US was a vicious and underhanded superpower that should not be trusted. Moreover, for the Soviet Union, the HIV and AIDS epidemic offered an opportunity to point out that it was AIDS free because it had no ‘degenerate’ and ‘corrupted’ homosexual elements. However, HIV and AIDS never became a very potent propaganda weapon, partly because it could be externalized into ‘undesirable’ and long stigmatized internal elements such as homosexuals, prostitutes, and recreational drug users. In other words, many people in the West connected the disease with what was back then the ‘unnatural’ gay community, rather than with the general ‘corruptness’ of Western societies. HIV and AIDS were also used effectively by the American neo-conservative movement in the beginning of the 1980s to promote its own message about family values and the need for religious revival in the US (Aaltola 2008: 67). It may be further argued that the public meaning of suffering from HIV and AIDS changed the expressive pain behaviour of those who had the syndrome. Their suffering was stigmatized and used for purposes related to political power. Thus, the syndrome became politosomatized. The fact that the suffering became more silent was in itself a politosomatic phenomenon. HIV and AIDS, like many pandemic diseases before and after, reacted with the prevailing perceptions of power, hostility, and enmity. COVID-19 revealed similar patterns. It became a sign of the worsening great power relations, and it was translated into the language of enmity. In the US, there were discussions that featured the expressive term ‘China virus’, while China declared that the disease had not originated in China but could have had its origins in the US. In the paranoid atmosphere of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Pandemic Dramas: Containment Efforts and ‘Nearest Is Dearest’ Compassions
• 3 Understanding Grand Vortexes: The Classical Model for Politics and Plagues
• 4 Global Mobility-Based Order: The Disruptions of SARS and COVID-19
• 5 The Geopolitics of SARS and COVID-19
• 6 COVID-19 as a Catalyser of Growing Anxiety, Political Distancing, and Global Decoupling
• 7 Dynamics of an Epidemic of International and National Origin: Cases of Haiti Cholera and the Mad Cow Disease
• 8 Beyond Pandemic Security
• References
• Index