1. The Coronavirus Crisis: Origins and the Way Forward
- Author:
- Hanan Shai
- Publication Date:
- 04-2020
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies (BESA)
- Abstract:
- EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Amid the debate on the coronavirus crisis, there is broad agreement on three issues: The nation-state has failed to check the spread of the virus, quickly and with few people being infected, by using its autonomous capabilities, which turned out to be meager. Trans-state bodies that derived their economic capabilities from the state have failed in their role of assisting it. The idea of globalism is fundamentally true, and the problems that have emerged in the crisis must be remedied by strengthening the states and, at the same time, as concluded by French President Emmanuel Macron, the trans-state bodies. This study contends that globalism in its current form has failed and collapsed, just as communism and other social frameworks failed and collapsed before it. The reason for their collapse was that all of them were based on delusory utopian ideas. These utopian ideas are grounded in a dominant European liberal discipline whose founders abandoned the scientific revolution at the beginning of its path, abjured rational thought, and continued, like the church, to adhere to faith-based thought, feelings of the heart, and delusions of the imagination. Another liberal discipline, less well-known, is the rational one. Committed to truth and to the absolute laws of nature, it was adopted by the Anglo-Saxon democracies, which, thanks to its values, experienced long periods of growth and prosperity. On three occasions this discipline could be mobilized to help rescue Europe from calamities that its utopian conceptions had caused.
- Topic:
- Health, Global Focus, State, and COVID-19
- Political Geography:
- Europe and Global Focus