Though a broad segment of political and media opinion continues to proclaim that the pandemic demands a strengthening of international cooperation and multilateral institutions, the facts on the ground are demonstrating that the tide of events is moving in precisely the opposite direction.
The emerging reality is that individual nation-states are increasingly in the driver's seat and being strongly supported by their own populations, while multilateral institutions from the United Nations to the European Union (EU) are falling victim to their own internal contradictions—and a consequent inability to act decisively or quickly in the face of the global crisis.
As the virus spread rapidly in March, the EU stumbled badly as individual countries unilaterally shut borders, hoarded critical medical gear, and disrupted food supply chains.
Key EU leaders did recognize the existential nature of the threat. France's Emmanuel Macron declared that the stakes were nothing less than "survival of the European Project". Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez agreed, saying "Europe is at risk".
Despite this consensus, EU leaders were unable to deliver any meaningful and timely plan for common action. Repeatedly the long running disputes between the EU's affluent North and the poorer South were exacerbated by conflicting statements and strategies offered by national leaders.
Nowhere was the EU's crisis more starkly displayed than in Italy, the hardest hit country in the entire bloc. As reported by the Financial Times of London ("Is Europe Losing Italy", April 6, 2020) the country's President Sergio Mattarella lamented that too many people fail to see the "seriousness of the threat to Europe"
Long staunchly pro-European Carlo Callendra, Italy's permanent representative to the EU, plaintively asked, "Why do we want to stay in the EU? It is useless". An opinion survey showed 67% of Italians believing that being part of the EU was a disadvantage to their country—up from 47% in November.
Meanwhile the United Nations—long targeted by critics for inefficiency and corruption—was being engulfed by the burgeoning scandal over the World Health Organization's (WHO) blatantly political response to the Coronavirus crisis.
The Director of WHO Tedeos Ghrebreyeso—not a doctor but an Ethiopian politician of dubious reputation—has been publicly exposed as a willing tool of China's coverup of the genesis of the virus and called out for his efforts to prevent any declarations of an international emergency.
This egregious foot-dragging is particularly damning in light of the recent Southampton University report stating that 95% of worldwide coronavirus cases could have been prevented if China had moved to contain the Wuhan virus just three weeks earlier.
The potential for acute dysfunction and other dangers inherent in globalization has long been central to the work of renowned Harvard economist Dani Rodrik. His 1997 book, Has Globalization Gone Too Far?, and a later work, The Globalization Paradox (2011), have won acclaim as prophetic analyses of present world dilemmas, particularly the expanding conflict between globalization and nationalism.
Rodrik's most telling criticism of globalization is its zeal for deregulation and de-emphasis of national sovereignty—that is, borders—which effectively shields its proponents and beneficiaries from any democratic accountability to any identifiable electorate.
In his viewn the most tragic legacy of this Internet-fueled world of high technology and international finance is that it has gravely damaged poorer peoples and poorer nations, who with growing resentment and some justification see themselves as victims of distant and uncaring elites.
Interestingly the BRIC group (Brazil, Russia, India and China), an alignment of giant size nation states, are all ardently nationalistic, while the world's greatest economic and military power—the United States—is currently renewing the strong commitment to the principle of national sovereignty that had characterized its entire history until recent times.
Rodrik's long view is that while the forces driving globalization are not going away, they must be reconciled with the interests of nation-states and kept from becoming an instrument of a growing world inequity.
Nation-states, to be sure, have their own singular defects as much painful history demonstrates— but they will continue to be the principal actors in these troubled and rapidly changing times. The Coronavirus has shown that multilateral organizations riven by their own national rivalries are no substitute.
In the end the realities attending nationalism and globalization cannot be reduced to an "either-or" question, rather they call upon us to summon up the wisdom for devising a reasoned equilibrium between the two.
William Moloney, Ph.D., studied at Oxford and the University of London. He covers national and international politics for the America Blog. A former Colorado Commissioner of Education, he is now a Fellow in Conservative Thought at Colorado Christian University 's Centennial Institute.