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Date of Publication: February 25, 2020
Author(s): Steven Erlanger
Newspaper: The New York Times
As the coronavirus hits Europe, questions arise about dependency on China, the risks of air travel, climate change and a new racism in populist politics.
BRUSSELS — Globalization, that awkward catchall for our interconnectedness, was already under assault from populists, terrorists, trade warriors and climate activists, having become an easy target for much that ails us.
Now comes the coronavirus. Its spread, analysts and experts say, may be a decisive moment in the fervid debates over how much the world integrates or separates.
Even before the virus arrived in Europe, climate change, security concerns and complaints about unfair trade had intensified anxieties about global air travel and globalized industrial supply chains, as well as reinforcing doubts about the reliability of China as a partner.
The virus already has dealt another blow to slowing economies, and emboldened populists to revive calls, tinged with racism and xenophobia, for tougher controls over migrants, tourists and even multinational corporations.
Among all the challenges to globalization, many of them political or ideological, this virus may be different.
“We always forget that we’re at the mercy of nature, and when episodes pass we forget and carry on,” said Ivan Vejvoda, a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. “But this virus has put forward all these questions about the interconnectedness of the world as we’ve built it. Air travel, global supply chains — it’s all linked.”
As the virus spreads to Europe and beyond, Mr. Vejvoda said, “it makes China seem a bit more fragile and dependence on China as ‘the factory of the world’ more iffy.”
The rapid spread of the virus from Asia is “another straw on the camel’s back of globalization,” said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, the London research institution.
The political tensions between the United States and China over trade, as well as concerns about climate change, already had raised questions about the sense and cost of shipping parts country to country and the potential for carbon taxes at borders, he noted.
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