Editor’s Note: American philosopher Francis Fukuyama participated on April 26 in an online discussion “Zero Corruption Talk: Lessons of Chornobyl in Times of Pandemic.” It was organized by the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv and moderated by Ukrainian journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk.
Read the Kyiv Post’s account of the online discussion here
The current situation with the COVID-19 pandemic is not unprecedented, but it is unprecedented in our lifetimes that we have a crisis that is global, has occurred so quickly and it is likely to have deep economic consequences for almost everybody everywhere in the world.
However, I think it is appropriate, in a way, to make a correlation with Chornobyl, because there are a lot of similarities between these two crises. They are in certain ways products of modern technology. Obviously, the virus is not modern. But transmission through a globalized system of international travel and trade, it is something that’s been brought about by the technological conditions of our age.
The national threat that it suddenly presents is extremely similar and the responses of the different kinds of governments to it are also very similar. One of the biggest differences is that it is emerging among the national responses to the crisis are those governments that have tried to cover up what has been happening, that has suppressed information and basically look to their short-term interest versus those governments which are transparent and open and took advice from the appropriate experts and then designed public policy responses around that. In that respect we are seeing the replay of Chornobyl, we are discovering which governments are capable and which are not.
In the context of the role of the democracy, I actually don’t think that there is a strong correlation between the effective response and whether a country is a democracy or an authoritarian government, because now we see good and bad examples on both sides.
For example, among democracies, South Korea, Germany, Taiwan are pretty effective compared to their neighbors in controlling the epidemic and they all are good democracies.
On the other hand, Britain, United States, Brazil, Spain, or Italy have had very poor records and much worse have their authoritarian counterparts.
What really matters – democracies are important, because if you don’t have basic freedom of speech and an independent press, you are not going to know what is going on in your society. But there are two important things that really make the difference:
1) State capacity: South Korea had a response already in January – they had testing, an adequate system of tracing contacts and they were prepared a long time before most other countries;
2) there is a need to have a leadership that knows what it is doing and is able to make the right choices and, unfortunately in the United States, we have probably the worst possible president to be the person in charge in a national emergency. Donald J. Trump spent two months denying that the crisis was even a crisis. So, it is that great combination of the capacity plus leadership that is willing to listen to expert advice, and the trust that citizens have in this leadership that allows them to comply with very difficult requests like staying at home or stopping traveling and meetings. This is why some countries did better and some countries did worse.
It is very important to get some transparency after the pandemic to know what has actually happened and there is a lot of evidence that China was covering up the information. The most useful focus is to make China be more open right in the present. It can give us information that can help other countries understand the pandemic and its sources and come up with a better response.
There is a separate political issue because it is not just the lack of capacity, there are also many people that actually benefit from the weaknesses of the state and lack of transparency. Usually, these actors are very powerful. They are in ministries. They are politicians. They are in parliaments. They are in authoritarian systems and run the country itself. Unless we have a way of generating adequate political power to get them out of power, we are fundamentally not going to be able to deal with corruption. That is why in very many places the long-term solution to this set of issues requires basic political skills of mobilization of people who don’t want this to happen. Civil society groups are needed to activate people. There is a need for political parties, a coalition of political forces that ultimately will bring political revolution, which is the only long-term solution to this.
Watch the April 26, 2020, online discussion “Zero Corruption Conference: Lessons of Chornobyl in Times of Pandemics”
There is another important problem: climate change.
In the long run, it will be even a bigger killer of people and disrupter of politics than this pandemic, but the political problem is that during the pandemic, the situation changes very rapidly and it is easy to mobilize people to stay indoors and to spend trillions of dollars in aid.
The whole problem with climate change is that it is such a slow-moving crisis that it is very hard to get people to realize that their children’s generation is going to suffer just like they were in the middle of the pandemic.
People adjust to these slight changes we see from year to year and begin to discount the threat. If we are going to get to the point where people start taking it seriously, we somehow have to transfer that sense of urgency to the issue of climate change. Possibly this crisis now will indicate to people what has been the impact of human economic activity on the environment. In some cities, people can see sky for the first time. It may broaden people’s imagination a little bit and show them what actually might be possible.
Francis Fukuyama is an American philosopher, senior fellow at Standford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Mosbacher director of the institute’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.
