- Good afternoon, my name's David Cameron.
I'm the director of the program
on European Union Studies
at the MacMillan Center of
Yale, and it's my pleasure
to moderate a conversation this afternoon
with a number of people who are affiliated
with the MacMillan Center and with Yale.
We are focused on the impact on democracy
of the COVID-19 pandemic,
and in particular the question
of whether this is, in some way,
creating a basis for a move
to authoritarianism in some states,
either greater authoritarianism
than now exists,
or democratic states that are moving
under the pressures of the pandemic
toward something less than full democracy.
We're delighted to have
a number of experts
on various parts of the world today,
and I want to introduce them to you,
and then we'll proceed with a discussion
in which each of them will speak
for a few minutes on the topic,
and then we'll have a
conversation back and forth
among the panel members.
It's a pleasure for me first to introduce
Ana De La O, who is a colleague of mine
in the Department of Political
Science here at Yale.
Ana has worked on political
economy in Latin American,
has written a number of works
including "Crafting
Policies to End Poverty
"in Latin America", and she's well versed
to be able to speak both
about democratic politics
and less-than-full democratic
politics in Latin America.
Tais Gasparian is an associate
research scholar at Yale,
at the Yale Law School.
She's a lawyer and practices
civil law in Brazil.
She has served in the
past as the chief of staff
in the Ministry of Justice in Brazil,
and she's involved in
a number of commissions
dealing with legal issues in Brazil,
so she's someone who is very knowledgeable
about the law and civil law,
and challenges that might be created
to civil law
under the pressures of the pandemic.
Vish Sakthivel is a postdoctoral associate
with the Council on Middle East Studies
in the MacMillan Center.
She's an expert, an
authority on political Islam,
contentious politics and authoritarianism,
in particular in North Africa,
and she is currently writing a book
about Islam in modern Algeria.
She's also written
extensively in various media,
The Washington Post, National Interest,
Foreign Affairs, and other publications.
Nahid Siamdoust, Siamdoust,
is a member of the Anthropology
Department at Yale,
and the postdoctoral
associate in the program
in Iranian studies
as part of the Council
on Middle East Studies
in the MacMillan Center here at Yale,
and she's also a lecturer
in the Department
of Middle Eastern Languages
and Civilizations.
She works on the intersection
between politics and culture.
She published a book entitled,
"Soundtrack of the Revolution:
"The Politics of Music in Iran",
so we have with Nahid,
someone who is knowledgeable,
obviously deeply knowledgeable,
about that complex polity.
Aniko Szucs is a postdoctoral associate
in MacMillan also, and
a lecturer on Russian,
East European and Eurasian studies.
She is now working on
a manuscript entitled
"Contagious Files: The Cultural Memory
"of State Surveillance in Hungary",
and is someone who will
be able to fill us in
a bit on what Mr. Orban just did in regard
to his decree powers.
Taisu Zhang is a professor of
law at the Yale Law School,
and is a specialist on Chinese
law and Chinese politics.
He's written about kingship and property,
and preindustrial China and England,
and he's now writing a book
on the ideological foundations
of the fiscal state in China.
He's a global faculty member
of Duquesne University Law School,
and also the current president
of the International Society
for Chinese Law and History.
So we have a wonderful
group of panel members,
and cover the world quite broadly,
and so I think we'll start.
And if you don't mind leading
off, Ana, with some comments,
and then we'll go to Tais,
and go on from there.
- Right, thank you David,
and thank you to the MacMillan Center
for organizing this webinar,
and good afternoon everyone.
So I will focus, for the most part,
on Mexico and Central America,
but I would like to start
by giving a quick overview
of how things are looking
right now in Latin America
as a whole.
So as you may know,
the region is facing a
very tough situation.
As of yesterday, there are
122,500 confirmed cases.
10,500 of those cases are in Mexico,
and about 7,000 of those
cases are in Central America.
Brazil has been hit the hardest in terms
of number of cases, with 47,000.
But if we consider the number of cases
per million inhabitants,
the country that has been
hit the hardest is Panama,
followed by Ecuador, Peru, Chile,
and the Dominican Republic.
On these numbers, however,
as in many, all the regions,
testing has been limited,
so the total cases are
likely many times higher
than the confirmed cases.
And there are two reasons why I'm afraid
that X's mortality will be
very high in some places
in the region.
And to start with, as
is perhaps no surprise,
healthcare systems are
not prepared in the region
to deal with this pandemic,
and they're about to get a
very difficult stress test.
Latin American is one of
the most unequal regions
in the world.
And for many people staying
home for an extended period
really doesn't seem possible,
because that would
threaten their livelihood,
and it's very hard to estimate exactly
the number of people who
are vulnerable to this,
but just to give you a sense,
154 million people, or 56%
of workers in the region,
operate in the informal sector,
which means that they do
not have job security.
And to make matter worse,
for many people frequent
hand washing is challenging,
so my concern
is that it's gonna be very
hard to flatten the curve
in some of these areas.
Now, the second reason why I think
this is gonna be difficult
is because in Latin America,
and I'm gonna focus particularly
in the challenging context in Mexico,
migrants and refugees are a
very vulnerable population.
They lack access to healthcare,
and social distancing
is basically impossible,
especially for those
people who are stranded
in the camps in the
southern U.S.-Mexico border,
so as the New York Times says,
I think this could really
become a humanitarian disaster.
Now, some governments have
responded early to the pandemic.
Some have dragged their feet,
and some like in Nicaragua
have not even responded yet.
Notoriously, presidents
in Mexico and Brazil
downplay the threat.
Tais will speak about the case of Brazil,
but in Mexico, Lopez Obrador's
administration delay,
most of the quarantine measures
that other Latin American countries
had already implemented.
And on the other extreme,
we have in El Salvador, Bukele
who quarantined the country
even before it had confirmed cases.
And the response of
governments has also varied
in terms of its stringency.
In Mexico, the government is
urging people to stay home,
they have closed the schools,
and in the end of March
the government shut down
all non-essential activities.
And in Central America,
except for Nicaragua,
all countries have quarantined,
have ordered curfews and closed borders.
El Salvador has taken the
most stringent of the measures
with even some constitutional
rights temporarily restricted
as early as mid-March.
So I think that it's early to tell exactly
what the effects of the pandemia
will be on the political
systems of these countries,
but in terms of democratic backsliding,
I see four red flags.
In Mexico, I think that
checks and balances
to the executive power
were already weakening
before COVID-19, and I see no reason
for this trend to reverse.
Lopez Obrador party controls a majority
in the lower House of Congress,
and it's very close to
controlling 2/3 of the Senate.
In his few years in office,
he has appointed four out
of 11 Supreme Court judges.
He has attacked autonomous agencies,
including the National Institute
for Access to Information,
and the Electoral Institute,
and he recently revamped
his attack on free media.
And perhaps equally worrisome
for the current circumstances,
he is dismantling the state capacity.
And so far, he has refused
to change his economic
and social policy plans,
and considering both the health
and the economic crisis that are coming,
I think both will fall very short,
and they will definitely
not help him achieve
his goal of ending corruption
and putting poor people
first as he'd like to say.
And just to give you an example,
his social policies target people
who are about to enter the labor market
or who are retired,
and they do not reach the millions
of people that work, who
work in the informal sector,
and those who work in the formal sector
who will very likely lose their jobs
and livelihoods in the next few months.
So I think that we should keep an eye
on what Lopez Obrador makes
and the decisions he takes
once the economy unravels,
and perhaps his popularity starts to fall.
In particular, we should
pay attention to the midterm
and local elections next year.
The second red flag that
I see is in El Salvador,
and maybe you already
sort of perceived this,
given the measures that they have taken.
So Ana is really worried
that Bukele is using COVID-19
as an excuse to continue
militarizing the country,
and as I mentioned, constitutional rights
have been temporarily suspended,
so that is particularly worrisome.
The third red flag I see
is the continued presence
of non-state actors with
immense economic power
in many of these countries.
And it's early too tell,
but I think we should keep
an eye on how organized crime
and drug cartels would
react to the pandemic.
In particular, I worry that
they will use this crisis
as an opportunity to expand
their grip on communities,
and use their excess cash
liquidity, or wealth liquidity,
to buy elections.
And finally, the last red
flag that I want to mention
is that many countries in Latin America,
so massive protests with
very legitimate demands
before COVID-19, and these
protests went from Guatemala,
Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico,
and many other countries
in the Southern Cone.
I think that the right to
protest must be fully guaranteed
once the head emergency passes,
and I think it's going
to be very challenging
for governments to deal
with social unrest,
particularly because they
will be cashless drought,
so we should really pay
attention on how governments
are gonna deal with social
unrest once the pandemia
allows people to go back to the streets.
And so just in sum,
I don't see COVID-19 is
unveiling new autocrats
in the region, but I do see
that perhaps this is filling up
some of the backsliding
that had already begun
before COVID-19, thank you.
- Great, thanks, thanks very much Ana.
Tais, would you like
to take the microphone?
- Yes (laughing).
Can you hear me, it's okay?
- Fine.
- Okay, so thank you for
inviting me to be with you today.
I'm very honored with this invitation.
And thank you David for your presentation,
and also Ana for your Latin
America view point of view,
because it's much what I'm
going to tell you today
is you have already pointed out.
So last Sunday, our president, Bolsonaro,
he participated in demonstrations
in Brasilia, our capital,
where protestors called
for military intervention.
They also shouted against the Congress
and the Supreme Court.
They wanted the Supreme
Court and the Congress
to be closed, and they
make pressure for an end
of this social isolation recommended
by the health authorities.
That's more or less similar
what's happening in U.S.,
but the difference is that the
president joined the crowd,
he coughed in front of groups of people
without wearing a mask,
obviously risking not only
his own health but of others,
and he defamed the violation
of democratic order,
shouting, "I am the Constitution."
It's unknown why are the
president is an idiot,
or whether he is an, there
is an authoritarian logic
behind his speech.
Since the impeachment
of President Dilma Rousseff two years ago,
the country has been divided
by polarized political opinions.
On the right, which Bolsonaro comes from,
an antidemocratic and bigoted mentality
has been gained force.
As if there were not enough,
an anti-scientific wave has also risen.
The president's mentor
says that nothing disproves
the conjecture that the Earth is flat.
That's what we are living here.
So unlike many government officials,
who would have taken advantage
of the pandemic situation
to take severe measures
and gain political support,
Bolsonaro opted for denialism.
He stands as one of the
rare case of head of state,
who despite being authoritarian,
doesn't recognize the
seriousness of the crisis,
and does not use it for his own end.
But the president has been
attempting initiatives
that limit liberties and freedom.
Recently, he added provisions in a bill
that exempted the government
from providing information
for the population.
The bill was not approved
thanks to the mobilization
of the society, but one wonders
for how long this can last.
And because of the coherent speech
the president addressed to people,
he lost in popularity and
he's isolated politically.
Some voiced the opinion that
Bolsonaro's connected message
would serve as a political armor
to prevent the inevitable
economic and social effect
of the pandemic from being
used against him in the race
for the elections in 2022.
About his popularity,
although he remains at 30% approval rates,
the present's populate has dropped a lot
since his election.
Many politicians who
supported him a year ago
are now his opponents.
I want to put in a slide here.
I'm just going to share my screen.
I don't know if it's going to work.
But here, you can see
Bolsonaro's popularity
before and after the pandemia.
So in the left side, my left side,
you can see the red trace is horrible.
It stand for horrible,
very bad popularity.
And the two quads, I did light blue.
It stands for very, very good.
And the dark green stands for regular.
So you can see that after the pandemia,
the red trace is very, is much higher,
and his approval of very
good and regular has dropped,
it has been dropped.
So that's a graph that
I wanted to show you.
Today, there are 35 million Brazilians
without access to running water.
Instructions on washing hands
and buying hand sanitizer
seems completely ironic,
and nearly useless.
The situation in the poor communities,
as the favelas, slums,
offers no conditions for social distance
as Ana has just told.
Large families live in
houses just one room,
without any privacy.
In 2018, long before
the coronavirus crisis,
the number of Brazilians living
in under the extreme poverty
line, reached 13 million,
with people living on less than $1 a day.
It's not difficult to understand that,
for a huge number of Brazilians,
the president's speech
against social isolation
makes more sense than the recommendation
of doctors dressed in
white, who they see on TV.
Brazil is the sixth worst
country in the world,
in terms of social inequality.
In such a diverse country,
with such different social conditions,
the poorest will certainly be
the population most affected
by the pandemic.
Also, not much attention has
been paid to the situation
in the Brazilian prisons,
which are completely overcrowd,
and with extremely poor hygiene.
Brazil has one of the
largest prison populations
in the world, and when the
pandemic arrives in prisons,
the perfect correlation of
pandemic and social inequality
will be made very, very clear.
Does the situation with
the pandemic in Brazil
tends to be more calamitous
than anything ever witnessed before?
We are frightened that
people will then agree
to exchange their liberties for security.
The urgency that will be necessary
to face the crisis will
certainly facilitate adoption,
or future measures of
exception, that limit freedoms.
Just to give you an example,
in early April, the
minister of economy stated
that democracy gets in the way.
We all know that adoption
of democratic routines
and method is very slow.
Democracy's not efficient
when we are in a hurry.
This point of view might
explain the common sense
of the population, who take to the streets
asking for military intervention.
In short, what we see in the
country is an official scenario
for chaos that will be
shared by a goofball,
a madman, with a team totally insensitive
to social issues and human rights.
It's not yet clear how
the president will benefit
from this situation, or what
political use he will make
from it, but at least, at least we have,
it's clear that with each verbal assault
against the democratic order,
the Congress and the judiciary
are strongly positioned
in the defense of
constitutional principles.
It's true that the authoritarian wave
is accelerating world wide.
Some health policies,
such as confinement or cellphone tracking,
may be implemented, and
will bring a great deal
of intrusion into people's lives.
The question is to what extent people
will be willing to exchange liberties
for safe and economic stability?
With regard to the
presidency of the republic,
Brazil is completely, seems
to be completely adrift.
A few weeks ago, a journalist
asked to the vice-president,
Antonio Hamilton Mourao,
who used to be a general
in Brazilian army,
if the situation, so the
journalist asked him,
if the situation was under
control in the country,
to which the general replied,
"The situation is under control.
"We just do not know by who."
That's the view from Brazil.
That's the problem here
in Brazil, thank you.
You have to unmute, yes.
- Yeah, at times I
thought you were talking
about this country in
terms of the presidency.
Very interesting, and a nice comparison
also with what Ana said earlier.
Vish, would you like to tell
us how you see the problem
from your vantage point?
- So thank you Tais and Ana
for sort of breaking down
the South American and
Latin American scenario.
My remarks will shift,
just ever so slightly,
to focus on how the COVID-19 crisis
is affecting social
movements and public life
under authoritarian regimes.
And I focus on the case of North Africa,
and for the sake of time and scope,
I'll focus on Algeria specifically today,
but I'll be happy to sort
of compare and engage
the Moroccan situation
maybe in the Q&A discussion.
So, obviously, it's been
sort of widely commented
upon that in times of crisis,
the coronavirus of today,
the 9/11 of yesterday,
and the subsequent global
war on terror that regimes,
especially Arab authoritarian regimes,
will sort of instrumentalize these periods
to consolidate power, limit
freedoms and control the nature
and flow of information.
But the Algerian, my research in Algeria
and the Algerian scenario,
broadly sort of shows a bit
more of a complicated picture,
and so I'm gonna talk a little
bit today, very briefly,
about Algeria's recent
antigovernment protest movement
called Hirak, which though
it has sort of, definitely,
been reshaped by COVID-19,
it has not been ultimately put down
or sidelined by the current health crisis,
or by the sort of unhinged
authoritarian oppression
that many assume would ensue.
And in fact,
the Algerian regime is
perhaps a bit more hamstrung
than many similar governments
in confronting the crisis,
precisely because they're
sort of sweeping unilateral,
top-down technocratic
response would invite,
the very accusations of
authoritarian power grabbing
that has created the
current crisis of legitimacy
to begin with.
And so in turn, the sort
of tentative response
of the Algerian government
has been compelled to take,
has ironically fed their
protests' movement narrative
of state ineptitude.
So just a little bit of
background about the movement,
it was formed in 2019, in protest
against President Abdelaziz
Bouteflika's announcement
that he would run for a fifth term.
And in April of last year,
it brought to an end his 20 year rule.
And over the year, Hirak has morphed
into sort of this massive,
nation-wide movement,
that is sort of unanimously
calling for a complete overhaul
of the Algerian political system.
And I would say, and I
think others would agree,
that it's probably among
the most significant,
unformalized, non-state
sort of entity to arrive
against the sitting government
in modern Algerian memory.
Up until Hirak's formation,
sort of anti-system sentiment
in Algeria had been kind of hush-hush,
something that you sort of say
behind closed doors in private
among people that you trust.
But the mass support
that Hirak has been able to mobilize
over the last year has sort of exposed
these anti-state sentiments
as much more widespread,
therefore kind of normalizing
and making more legible
these very public expressions of dissent,
and kind of outwardly revealing
people's actual preferences,
as well as the state's
utter lack of legitimacy
in public trust.
And over the course of Hirak, therefore,
streets and public squares
became these sights
of the renegotiation of
imagined Algerian future,
sites of unity where diverse
and even opposing camps,
religious groups, secularists, Islamists,
sort of came together
to redefine belonging
in the Algerian body politic
through rejection of the status
quo arrangements of power.
And where public space
has sort of been
implicitly state surveilled
for decades, occupying
space in this way, together,
gave many citizens a renewed
sense of civic ownership,
and also this type of patriotism
that could be de-linked
from performances of loyalty
to the state, but now
instead through loyalty
to the fellow Algerian,
which we see now is being marshaled
in how Hirak is handling the coronavirus.
And so one of the major
ways I see coronavirus
as kind of changing the
nature of contentious politics
and social movements,
which of course we know
is a hallmark of functioning
democratic cultures,
and also an important check
on authoritarian power,
is effectively by
stripping these movements
of their most fundamental
resource, which is space,
physical space, public space.
And its occupation is
sort of a critical sight
and mode of clay-making for
social movements everywhere,
and so to contend with
this new loss of space,
is back in the hands of authorities
because of the lockdown,
Hirak is sort of changing
its mobilizational tactics
to refocus its grievances
on the state's management
of the health crisis.
It's shifting its mode
of anti-state contention
from weekly protests,
which it can no longer do,
to instead online activism
and new grievances
and demands that sort of
call out the widening caps
in Algeria's health infrastructure,
its governance and its leadership,
as well as towards efforts in forging
a maybe more prominent larger role
in health service provision,
and maybe even policy on health.
So now Hirak has almost entirely changed
its repertoire of activities.
It's galvanizing aid,
food and medical supply,
shipments to vulnerable areas.
It's launching crowd funding campaigns
to distribute PPE to those in need,
and it's effectively morphing
into this massive charitable network.
And it has also leveraged
the medical expertise
within the movement's own ranks
to form educational groups in localities
all over the country, to sort
of create credible awareness
in public messaging campaigns,
to disinfect public areas
and things like this.
And framing these changes
and mode of action
as filling the gaps of
the state in this way,
sort of works to confirm
public distrust on this,
and also it works also to
more symbolically trespass
on the state's mantle
as this benevolent providential figure,
which is a concept that a
lot of authoritarian regimes
rely on for legitimacy.
And so this issue of
public trust, in turn,
has sort of presented
a paradox, of course,
to the regime's management of the crisis,
not only because it was unable
to more swiftly elicit
popular behavior change,
like staying home and
maintaining distance,
but also because it just made
it much more politically costly
to take on the sort of strident measures
that its neighbors, like say Morocco,
was able to take in the early
stages to curb transmission.
For instance, the state could
only really implement curfew,
lockdowns, and some harder hit localities,
mandatory confinement,
after the seriousness of the pandemic
became more inescapably
clear to the public.
And the government still has not been
sort of able to declare a
nationwide state of emergency
as neighboring countries have done.
And when it did ban gatherings in early,
to the protestors or not.
And so this very sort of tentativeness
has in turn dampened public confidence,
and confirmed the narrative of a slow
and unprepared government
that the public needs to fill in for.
And finally, even though
President Abdelmadjid Tebboune,
who was elected during the
Hirak movement this past year,
and has sort of near-zero
popular legitimacy,
he promised sufficient ICU
beds, respirators, and test kits
a few weeks back.
Hirak's medical professionals
came out warning
that soon these will soon reach capacity,
and insufficient testing and detection,
medical supply rationing,
is soon gonna expose even more layers
of state corruption and mismanagement,
all of which is probably going to serve
as even more fodder for dissent
on the part of the Algerian public.
And so, to conclude really quickly,
crises like COVID-19 can be
great for authoritarian regimes.
And Algeria's neighbor, Morocco,
may actually better, may be
a better example of this,
where the government's response
has been a bit more popular,
despites people distrust of
the health infrastructure,
and has reinforced the seeming competency
of the technocratic state
that is sort of headed up by the monarchy.
When we contrast this to
the Algerian scenario,
what it shown is that COVID-19
can kind of help
authoritarian consultation
only if certain requirements are met,
and that's mainly the issues I mentioned
of public trust and legitimacy.
(Vish coughing)
And I'll stop there, my comments.
- Okay, thanks very much Vish.
And I think we turn to Nahid.
- Great, so I'll be speaking about Iran,
though I'm happy to answer questions
about the wider Middle
East in the Q&A section.
But similarly to Vish,
I think in order to explain
what's been happening in Iran,
I need to provide a context
as to where Iran was,
and where the Iranian state was,
in terms of state-society
relations leading
into the pandemic.
And as you all know, Iran has
been under severe sanctions
by the U.S.m and by extension the rest
of the sort of Western
world since really 1979,
but these sanctions got a whole lot worse
with the Trump administration
with its maximum pressure campaign,
which openly seeks to bring
down the Islamic republic.
And so as part of the
sanctions in May 2019,
the U.S. also put a ban on
the sale of Iranian oil,
which led to the economy
to contract even further,
now down sort of by 15%,
and its currency to devalue by 70%.
And in November,
the government decided
to cut fuel subsides,
which led to widespread national protests
that became very violent,
in which the state forces
killed up to 1000 people.
The state actually, itself,
has never published any numbers
as to how many people were
killed in those protests,
but people think up to
1000 people were killed,
which was unprecedented
in the history of violence
vis-a-vis protest in
post-revolutionary Iran.
And so the population was
really in a state of shock,
and the state's legitimacy
at an absolute low
toward the end of 2019.
And then in early January, on January 3rd,
U.S. forces, in a targeted strike,
killed General Qassem Suleimani,
a generally well-liked general in Iran,
even across political lines.
And this, for a few days,
brought together a lot
of different Iranian,
people of different political
backgrounds and factions,
and created a sort of unity
that was widely televised
on state media, and
really created a sort of,
gave the state a reprieve
from what had happened
in November with the protests.
But this sort of honeymoon
period didn't actually last long,
because then a few days
later on January 8th,
Iran shut down the Ukrainian
airliner leaving Tehran,
which it admitted only a few days later
of killing all of 176 people onboard,
and the fact that the state
took three to four days
to admit to its wrongdoing,
and admit that it had
shutdown the airliner,
really created a legitimacy of,
major legitimacy crisis for the state.
People poured into the streets again.
There were widespread protests again.
And while this was happening, the state,
was really hunkering down
for a worst sort of turnout
for the parliamentary
elections on February 21st,
which materialized a low turnout of 42%,
the lowest ever since the 1979 revolution
for parliamentary elections.
And so it was really against this backdrop
that corona entered the picture in Iran.
The first cases were confirmed
on February 17th in Qom,
the holy city of Qom,
where it has something like 20
million visitors every year,
and is a really big Shiite hub in Iran
with people coming both
from the east and the west,
from Iraq, Lebanon, from
Afghanistan, India and Pakistan,
and so it's a really hub
for people in the region.
And those first cases that appeared,
the government like elsewhere,
not unlike the U.S. and elsewhere,
was really downplaying
the threat of the virus.
And only on February, sort
of about a week or so later,
the state started
admitting that the corona
was appearing to be a problem in Iran,
and shut down universities and schools.
But even so, it really dragged its feet
on shutting down shrines and mosques,
and even though it was
appearing as an epicenter
of the virus in the region,
it really dragged its
feet on shutting down
those religious centers,
and eventually, by the end
of February, this happened.
In fact, considering the
strong response to protestors
back in November,
it was really surprising
how little enforcement
the state was taking in public spaces.
By March, the messaging
from national media
was clear, stay home.
There were banners and posters
all around the country,
but it still hadn't implemented
any kind of quarantine,
or lockdown, so people were advised,
and recommended to stay
home and to not travel,
but even ahead of the
New Year celebration,
which happens on the
21st of March in Iran,
there were images of packed bazaars
and Tehran people shopping, and so on,
so it wasn't being
enforced on the streets.
Eventually, on the cultural level,
in trying to really get
people to understand
the severity of the disease,
state television stepped in
and was running programs,
including a film about Avicenna
from back in the 11th century,
introducing, narrating the
story of him introducing
the method of quarantine as an
Iranian medical intervention,
and this really found
resonance with Iranians,
because they now, we're
claiming that quarantine
is actually an Iranian concept,
and so this was adopted
across not just Iran
but also the Persian-speaking
region, Tajikistan, Afghanistan.
The film was also broadcast.
The point is that, in order,
sort of enforcement of the public,
was really happening on a cultural level,
and a sort of suggestive level,
but as far as the streets and
public spaces were concerned,
sure, universities and
schools were shut down,
mosques a bit later.
But it really took a while for,
and then the state sent in these trucks
with huge sprays to
disinfect public spaces
as a show of corona
being a security threat.
And by the end of March,
death numbers had already
surpassed three thousand,
so all this was happening
while Iran was clearly
being seen across the world
as an epicenter of the virus.
But all in all,
when we look at Iran as
an authoritarian state,
it didn't carryout the kinds of measures
that we saw in China or
the United Arab Emirates,
or even now Turkey.
Indeed, coming out of a
really contentious period
following the November protests,
and then the downing of
the Ukrainian airliner,
it appeared the government
wanted to take a spot approach,
and perhaps avoid any
kind of confrontation
in the streets.
It was the hardliners in
the Revolutionary Guard
that kept advocating
for stronger measures,
something that was in fact
then welcomed by the public,
so the moderate government was taking
a sort of soft approach, and
not really enforcing too much,
meanwhile the hardliners
in the Revolutionary Guard,
which had been the body
that had suppressed the
demonstrators in November
and killed up to 1000 people.
They were the ones who were now advocating
for stronger measures,
and that was actually being
welcomed by the public.
I'll speak to what that sort
of tells us in a little bit.
Amidst what appeared
to be a power struggle
between the moderate
government and the hardliners
and the Revolutionary Guards,
it was really Iran's healthcare system
that I think we must credit
for what is a relatively low death rate,
at about 5,600 today.
Some sources say that those numbers
are not correct, and that
the government's downplaying
the extent of the disaster.
In fact, there was a parliamentary
fact-finding commission
just several days ago that released
a report saying that the number
of those dead is about two times
the number of official,
of the official number,
and the number of those
infected about five times.
The government says it's
about 88,000 people,
so they're saying it must
be five times that number,
considering the death ratio of those dead
and those infected.
So even if we go by about
10,000 dead today that is,
in comparison to other countries,
much better endowed with
better medical systems
such as France, or Italy, or Spain.
That's not such a high number,
and I think it's been sort of a narrative
that has been percolating to the top,
which is that Iran's healthcare system,
which was still slowly built up after 1979
with a vast network of
community health workers
and primary healthcare
centers around the country,
system that the WHO at one point described
as an incredible masterpiece,
has really stepped in to become the hero
of the nation in terms of blocking
the worst outcomes of
this pandemic in Iran.
And since the breakout,
the system has sent out
mobile health stations
that have carried out case finding
and contact tracing all across Iran.
And at about 1.7 hospital
beds per 1,000 people,
Iranian emergency rooms
were never at full capacity.
The state has spent 16% of its budget
to take care of those in greatest need
through foods and loans, and so on,
but there's great discontent across Iran,
because apparently those aids
are not being delivered sufficiently,
and are trickling down very slowly.
And as you might know,
the U.S. is now blocking Iran's request
to the IMF for the $5 billion loan,
the first such request
since the 1979 revolution.
And so I think what this tells is that,
it has been argued that it's
not so much regime type,
authoritarianism or illiberal democracy,
but state capacity to deal with crisis
that can best indicate the path
of the disease in different countries.
But even by this standard,
if we look at sort of state capacity,
Iran is a baffling case.
The government itself has
not been very proactive.
It has not imposed strict
quarantine or lockdown,
and it's not clear that
in this divided system,
between elected and unelected bodies,
it would be able to muster
the kind of state capacity required
to deal with the public health
crisis of this magnitude.
But I think what has been
sort of coming more and more
as a story to the surface is, again,
this underlying healthcare system,
as well as civil society's
engagement early on.
So early on, when there
was a shortage of goods,
of face masks and other kinds of PPE,
personal protection equipment,
people started making masks
in their small factories,
or in their homes, and distributing them.
There were groups of women
going around and disinfecting things
like ATMs and public phones,
and all kinds of
most-touched public surfaces.
And I think another factor that accounts
for the lower death rate
is probably Iran's young population,
compared to other
populations of a similar size
like the countries I mentioned,
like Spain, Italy and France.
And so what we see is that,
coming out of a real crisis
of legitimacy following
the protests in November
and the downing of the Ukrainian airliner,
the government kind of, sort
of, took a backseat approach,
and in taking a backseat
approach what has,
what the society has revealed is that,
is its self-sufficiency, sufficiency,
and its own activism in
really trying to keep
the numbers down and help each other.
There lots and lots of stories
all around social media
of people helping each
other and their neighbors,
and making sure that in
neighborhoods people know
who's sick and who's not, and
coming to each other's aids.
And so I think coming
out of the corona crisis,
what I see is an even
greater strengthening
of sentiments around self-sufficiency
and the civil society,
which had been crushed to a great extent
in the post-2009 securitization
of politics and public space in Iran.
I think I'll end to that.
- Great, thank you very much Nahid.
I think now we go to Aniko, Aniko?
- Yes, thank you.
- [David] Yeah.
- Well, thank you so much.
Nahid, thank you so much for
this amazing presentation.
It's so funny 'cause Orban is definitely
not taking a backseat approach,
so what we're gonna see is
something very different.
Can you all hear me?
'Cause my mic is a little hidden.
And also, thank you Asia,
Christine and Cathleen,
for organizing this event.
And David, we're so honored
that you agreed to host.
So in my talk, I will first
focus on the political events
that took place in Hungary,
during the last month,
as a response to the
COVID-19 crisis virus.
As much as we can draw some parallels
between the Hungarian government
and the other authoritarian regimes
in the central and
eastern European region,
such as the ruling law
and justice in Poland,
or the new Slovenian
government led by Janez Jansa,
I will argue that Prime
Minister Viktor Orban's focus
on his self-image, and his performance
as a commanding leader is distinctive
from the antidemocratic measures
with which other prime minsters
and presidents have attempted to utilize
the epidemics to grant their power.
So I will also focus on Hungary,
and we can discuss the other countries
in the region later.
I will be especially curious to hear
what other scholars have to
say about the other countries.
To take the most advantage
of this short amount of time,
I will first provide a brief summary
of Fidesz government's legal
responses to the crisis,
most importantly of the authorization law,
something that David has already mentioned
that has been widely discussed
in the international media.
Then I will turn
to Orban's lesser-known
populist performative actions,
the ones through which
he makes himself seen
as a paternalistic and
seemingly authoritative,
but not authoritarian, and
that's an interesting distinction
that I want to think along with you.
Leader who is dedicated to
the protection of his people
under any and all circumstances.
This analysis will be informed
by the interdisciplinary
field of performance studies,
my research area,
which allows me to analyze performances
of politics along with
political performances.
So first let me briefly guide you
through Prime Minister
Vitor Orban's coup d'etat
that took place on March 30th, 2020.
At this time, the Hungary
parliament passed a law
in which it suspended its own power,
and authorized Vitor
Orban to rule by decree
for an indefinite period of time.
And I want to emphasize
that this was what's so outrageous,
that there is a state of
emergency in plenty of countries,
we've just heard plenty of examples,
but the further it is for an
indefinite period of time,
that really opens a new door,
and in Hungary the emergency powers
can be lifted only with
the support of the 2/3
of the parliament,
which is exactly a
majority that Orban holds,
so it really is up to all
Orban's people at this point
if this emergency will ever end.
It is also important to clarify that,
even with Orban's
present ruling by decree,
the parliament continues
its legislative work.
Now this is something
that I think was confused
very often in the international media.
The parliament is still working,
and as a result it is
difficult to identify new laws
and rules that were introduced
as governmental decrees,
and bills that the Fidesz
control, that's his party,
Fidesz controlled
parliament chose to propose
and pass during the time of the epidemics.
Again, there has been a real confusion
about this both within the national
and in the international media.
Orban has issued some 70 decrees so far,
according to Gabor Halmai,
constitutional scholar.
Some of the decrees include
obliterating data protection
in Hungary, obliterating
the worker protections
in the labor code,
and permitting government to take charge
of public companies,
just taking all of them.
And so these are the decrees.
There are Orban's decrees,
but simultaneously, the
parliament also established
in some bills that, for
instance, and here I quote,
"The spreading false information
"or true facts distorted in a way
"that could impede or thwart
"the effectiveness of defense measures
"against the coronavirus
"is punishable of one to
five years of imprisonment."
In other words, if you say something
that the government deems as untrue,
you can be in prison now.
The Minister of Human
Resources, Miklos Kasler,
declared that hospitals are required
to evacuate 36,000 beds,
and sent home thousands of chronically ill
and posttraumatic patients who are in need
of longterm rehabilitation,
by evading international
visibility and human rights.
And there are speculations
as to why this was necessary
in a country that, at the moment,
has a total of 2,383 cases,
which I will gladly address in the Q&A,
but for the sake of time for now,
let's just know that
they emptied 36,000 beds
in Hungary hospital beds.
Then there was a legislation bill
that proposed to cut the states
of about 25,000 state employees working
in the cultural sectors
in museums and theaters.
There was another bill
that proposed to classify
all information about a
Chinese railway investment
in the country, of which
we know very little about,
and another one which would
ban transgender people
to legally change their sex
in the birth registry after transitioning.
Simultaneously, they also
tried to anate the power
of the municipal governments,
but there was such a strong pushback
even from their own people
as at this time municipal governments
have a lot of important work to do,
that they actually redrawn their attack.
As Anne Applebaum points out
in her op-ed for The Atlantic,
these issues, most of
these issues at least,
don't have the remotest
relevance to the pandemic,
and that's such an important point.
They are so irrelevant,
like if you think about
transgender rights,
Chinese railways, these
are the kinds of laws
that been proposed.
Instead, I want to
propose that e'lahs Orban
to cynically transform
his illiberal democracy,
a term he has proudly owned
after his 2010 victory
in the dictatorial regime.
The legal explanation that
the parliament provided
for the necessity of these
emergency measurements
was to, and here I quote the law itself,
"To guarantee for Hungary citizens
"the safety of life and health,
"personal safety, the safety of assets,
"the legal certainty as
well as the stability
"of the national economy",
so it's all about our safety
that the government is providing for.
Juxtaposing the words of the law
with Orban's public performances
since the belatedly
established state of emergency,
allows us to demonstrate
how he seizes this moment
to reestablish himself
as a paternalistic
authoritative father figure,
who protects his people
from the gravest dangers
that are lurking to
attack from the outside,
and irony is intended here.
In this way, Orban's performance
is genealogically linked
to the post-Stalinist
communistic dictators
of Eastern Europe,
disguising the
disenfranchisement and oppression
of people under the kinship performances
of excessive power and paternalistic care.
And just as a side note,
something interesting that
I think is happening here,
is that historians have
always connected Orban
to the xenophobic
and nationalistic militant
Hungarian governor
of the 1930's, Miklos Horthy,
who was one of the extreme right figures
who very much wanted to become
allies with Nazi Germany,
but I do think that the way he,
the way Orban performs
himself in this new role
of the, I want to use the
term dictator and control,
is very much, it follows
a different tradition.
If we listen carefully
to the words of the law,
we may better understand
why Orban still enjoys
the majority of the
support of his country.
Through this description we may capture
not only the legal and the ideological,
but also the effective register
through which Orban solidifies
his dictatorial power.
Orban, since the earliest
days of the epidemics,
has regularly attended hospitals,
and demonstrated that he's in full control
of the epidemic.
And I would love to show some pictures,
so let me see if I can just
share my screen with you.
I should be able to do so.
Okay.
So this is just a graffiti,
and as you can see he was there
to welcome the Chinese
shipments at the airport,
to control all the
health epidemic arrives.
He personally was very much in control
of these transactions,
and then he also, sorry
everyone, let's see,
then he also went to
each and every hospital
starting in April.
Every day he attended
a different hospital,
and he made sure that he checked the state
of those hospitals.
And something that you can see
that I think is quite funny,
this is him, this is him,
and then this is one of his
last visits on April 9th,
is that even his gear has
increasingly reflected
on both the severity of the danger
and the readiness of
the Hungarian hospitals
to fight this invisible enemy,
and of course here I'm referencing,
unfortunately, Trump's language.
These images unfold a visual narrative
of an omnipotent, omnipresent leader,
who is personally in charge of the health
and wellbeing of his country.
It is this performance
of the country's leader
that awokes the paternalist protection
of a communist party general secretary,
who regularly over-performed
their fatherly control.
So what you can see
here is that he attended
all the hospitals, and
simultaneously the images
that's starting to circulate
were at the hospitals
that forced thousands
of patients home.
As the doctors of the numerous hospitals
were forced to send
thousands of patients home,
images of empty hospital
rooms perfectly prepared
for the virus were introduced
in the national media,
contrasting the images of horror and death
in Italy, Spain, and the United States.
So these were the images
that the national media
presents in Hungary.
And these images unfold a visual narrative
of an omnipotent, omnipresent leader,
who is personally in charge of the health
and wellbeing of the country.
It is this performance
of the country's leader
that awokes the paternalistic protection
of a communist party general.
And here we have an example
of Janos Kader in 1981,
who regularly over-performed
their fatherly control,
and embraced their people.
It is also here I will argue
that Orban departs from
the other regional,
and I suspect some global leaders.
Since he moved to pass
his early trivialization
of the virus,
he has crated a new visual
narrative for himself
on one which spectacularizes
his protective actions,
while the public law
makers in the background
ensure that his dictatorship
will be total and undefeatable
by the time the epidemic is over.
Through this short presentation,
my intention was to locate the tension
between that which is nationally
and internationally is visible,
and that which is invisible.
While the extensive discussions
of the authorization law
successfully drew the
international political
and legal community's attention
to the dangers of the unprecedented,
unconstitutional act,
the actual effects of the law
is almost invisible to the
Hungary people for now,
at least for now.
Simultaneously, the excessive
performance of power
that manifests itself in
the paternalistic care
and control, is what accessible to locals,
and buying into this populist performance,
is what may solidify Orban's regime
for another decade or more, even more.
- Great, thanks very much Aniko.
And now we turn to Taisu,
who will probably be saying
something about China.
- Yes, so unlike many of the
other countries have been told,
we've been talking about,
there's nothing going on in China
that can be described as a transition
where China was fully
authoritarian before this.
It is fully authoritarian after this.
The interesting things to talk
about are all about, basically,
how the underlying politics
of that authoritarianism
have actually acted upon the pandemic.
So, I think we're almost
a little bit overtime,
so I'll try to go really quick.
The Chinese response can be
relatively cleanly separated
into two different phases
to the coronavirus.
The first, probably, depending
on how early you think
the Chinese government actually was aware
of the coronavirus, I mean,
the most recent estimates right now
are something like late
November, early December.
From that point up until
basically like late January,
the government was in pretty much,
like all of the worst habits
of the Chinese government,
were pretty much on display.
Local bureaucrats fearful of not meeting
their own growth targets,
or fearful of basically being reprimanded
for causing social unrest,
basically tried to cover
up the entire thing.
At some point, the central
government became aware of it.
The central government
also was collaborating
with local governments for quite some time
from mid-December onwards,
and kind of downplaying
the severity of the crisis,
and this all has a certain kind
of obvious authoritarian logic to it.
The government is heavily reliant
upon performance recidivism,
and any kind of major social panic
leading to economic down,
leading to economic problems,
that are triggered by this epidemic,
would be of serious cost to
the state's political standing.
So initially, the urge both
up and down the bureaucracy,
was to downplay, to cover up,
to basically try to maintain a semblance
of peace and normalcy.
I think everyone can agree this
has dramatically backfired,
and led to this massive
explosion of cases at Wuhan
that's basically, even to this day,
we don't know the full
extent of how serious
the epidemic actually was
in Wuhan, Hubei province.
From the end of January onwards,
the government would finally
come, own up to the problem.
The entire Chinese regime,
the Chinese bureaucracy
went into full motion,
but from that point onwards,
it's been relatively,
I think it's very easy to be angry
if you're outside of China,
basically what's been going on
inside the Chinese bureaucracy,
but I think any bit of measurement
would have to acknowledge
that from something like
January 30th onwards,
the Chinese government has
been extremely effective
in managing the overall epidemic,
and managing the shutdown,
and then the opening up process,
basically shut the entire country down
with a rigor that pretty
much cannot be copied
virtually anywhere else outside of China.
The Chinese government
has long had the capacity
for these kinds of massive
social shutdown measures
that just can't be replicated
outside of that specific context.
It did basically killed off the disease
within roughly two months.
And China, and now even now,
regardless of how much you actually trust
the actual numbers,
I think it's quite clear
from what's going on,
the reports coming out, building
up from the ground level,
and also any remotely
possible observations
of hospitalization levels and
economic activity, and so on,
and so forth, that yeah,
the epidemic is under control in China.
And the economy is opening up earlier
than virtually any other major economy,
and so in all likelihood
the overall performance
of the Chinese government
in that second half of the epidemic
has been quite good, I
think by any standard,
whether it's own standards
or whether by any kind of international.
The first half was a series
of seriously botched measures,
and definitely speaking,
you can't forget the first
when you're talking about the second,
but the really interesting talk
about is how the politics have played out
in light of that two stage response.
So I think it's pretty safe to say
that this is virtually unimaginable.
If you were following
the Chinese social media,
in say mid-to-late January,
when everyone was freaking out,
and there was this massive uproar
of anger and frustration
at the governments,
at that point I think me,
and virtually anyone else
who has been watching Chinese politics
over the past decade,
I think we were justified in saying
this was the Chinese
government's most serious threat
to its legitimacy in at
least the past 20 years,
likely longer than that,
if there was genuinely genuine
uncontrollable social anger
and frustration that was
being voiced in late January.
Now, if you have any memory of that,
what's currently going on
as far as anyone can tell
on the Chinese internet
or amongst Chinese society
is virtually unthinkable.
This entire epidemic is becoming massive.
Domestic public relations
went before the government,
and it's become a win basically
across the dimensions.
First, yes, I think managed
to get the thing under control
relatively quickly with
relatively few deaths,
far fewer deaths than
you could've imagined
had you been following
this thing in January.
And yes, the economy's opening up again,
so that eases off a lot of the pressure.
Plus, but the most important thing is,
China now has the virtue of comparisons
with major foreign competitors,
especially with the U.S.,
which I think by any depth of measure
has botched its pandemic response
at least as badly as China,
even if you take China's
first step into consideration,
and I think by the time
this entire thing is over,
we'll likely have just performed worse
across virtually any dimension
as compared to the Chinese response.
So that kind of shattered for the,
matched with genuine nationalistic pride
has given Xi Jinping
a gigantic public relations width.
I think he's really popular
with the Chinese population right now.
So the question then is,
what are the lessons that
the Chinese population
and the government's gonna
come outta this learning?
So here there's a pretty strong likelihood
that they're actually gonna
learn the wrong lessons, right?
So if you're looking back
at the two stage response
by the Chinese government,
it's quite obvious the first,
well, the success in the second half,
and the massive failures
in the second half,
all stem from basically the
set of institutional reasons,
which is that ever since he
entered into power in 2012,
Xi has been engaging
in this massive centralization program
across the Chinese bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy, foreigner
commentators have a tendency
to talk about the Chinese bureaucracy,
it's overly centralized from Mao to now.
But in reality, the Chinese government
went through this massive
re-centralization phase
in the early 80's,
that went all the way until
pretty much like seven,
eight years ago,
and that was responsible for
lots of the economic growth,
and the vibrancy in
China during that phase.
Xi has had the opposite instincts.
He knows he's inheriting a
kind of declining economy,
economy that's slowing down obviously,
and given that he can't rely
on the economy to generate
as much support, popularity
and legitimacy for him as
his predecessors could,
his instincts have been
visibly to ramp up control.
And part of that has
been regaining control
of local governments
and massively centralizing
the Chinese bureaucracy.
The end result of that, basically,
has been to create all kinds
of mismatches of incentives
and price origin problems
that weren't nearly as severe
in the past few decades.
So that has a lot to do
with the delayed response
in the earlier phases,
when local bureaucrats
on the ground in Wuhan,
early had lots of institutional incentives
to try to cover up things,
even via the super governments.
So many of the problems stem
from the centralization.
That said, the effectiveness
of the second half
also stems from the fact
that China literally
now has a pretty well-oiled top
down centralized bureaucracy
that can act as a whole.
It's pretty much like a moment's notice
if there's enough political
oil coming down from the top.
So I think what's gonna happen,
given that right now
central sentiment in China
is so favorably inclined to the state
in its overall handling of the epidemic,
what's likely gonna happen, basically,
is the government's gonna
learn the wrong lesson
and basically think that
it's gonna overemphasize
the second half as
compared to the first half.
It has obvious political
resentment to that as well,
and the lesson that's
gonna come out all this,
is that our centralized,
tightly controlled bureaucracy,
is responsible for our, quote end quote,
success management of the epidemic.
And, of course, that's gonna exacerbate
the problems that led to the first half,
and neither will have severe
economic consequences stream
because it's gonna quite seriously
deflate economic vibrancy
and the economic agency and
policy-making initiatives,
going in at the local provincial level,
where frankly most of the economic action
actually is taking place.
So if the Chinese government
comes out of this entire thing
learning a lesson it has to,
the centralization
actually work this time,
therefore we have to centralize more,
I think over the longterm,
like the next five, 10 to 15 years,
it's likely gonna suffer
some quite serious economic consequences
as a result of learning the wrong lesson,
but I think at the current moment
that's likely what's gonna happen.
In terms of the authoritarianism,
again China was full blown
authoritarianism before this,
especially with Xi Jinping,
who has pretty much engineered
the most serious crackdown of civil rights
in post-Mao PRC history.
That's obviously gonna continue.
There still are large pockets of anger
amongst liberal intellectuals
who remember the first half
and aren't going to say that.
Once this entire thing is over,
the party's not gonna
let up on its crackdown,
suppression of these voices.
Plus, again, the party has
come out of this entire thing,
playing on the nationalism
of the Chinese population,
and gaining quite a bit of popularity.
It's really gonna think,
whatever we did, this kind of worked,
and once it thinks like that,
it's gonna think both the
centralization, the control,
and the oppression, and the
suppression of social media,
that's all gonna seem like it kinda worked
to the party's benefit in the end.
So yeah, China's gonna
get more authoritarian,
but it's gonna get more authoritarian
in its nationalism driven
centralization fashion,
which in some ways is quite troubling
because it's gonna not
only sap the country
of quite a bit of economic energy,
but that combination of
centralization plus nationalism,
is very often the path that
leads to authoritarian societies
down the path towards
total totalitarianism,
or perhaps the emergence of fascism.
I still think that's a route
of the unlikely outcome
for the Chinese government at this point.
The turnout is quite worrying,
at least in those dimensions.
So I'm gonna stop there,
and I'm happy as everyone
else, as I think,
to go into the Q&As.
- Okay, thanks very much Taisu.
You raise a very interesting question
for all of us.
It sounds, to simplify
greatly your analysis,
the authoritarianism of China
caused it to delay, obfuscate, deny, hide,
the crisis at the outset.
On the other hand, once
it was finally recognized,
the authoritarianism of
the system enabled China
to essentially eradicate the virus
as far as we know, if we
believe the data and so forth.
And it raises sort of
a pessimistic message
for all the rest of us, in a sense.
It implies that the best way to deal
with this is authoritarian,
an authoritarian state,
that can do the things that China did
once it accepted the fact that
the virus existed in Wuhan.
And so it raises, it
seems to me for others,
the question of whether
a democratic polity
can respond effectively.
Is it democracy that makes
it difficult to respond?
Are some democracies more
able than others to respond?
Or is it, does it have
more to do with the,
you might say not so much the democracy,
or non-democracy of the regime,
but the authority and
expertise of the bureaucracy
and those who are actually
managing the crisis?
- So can I
(microphone crackling drowns
out speaker) really briefly--
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
- I don't think the
efficiency has much to do
with the authoritarian nature.
South Korea was every
bit just as effective
as China was in managing this crisis.
Germany has been highly effective,
and plenty of other countries
have been relatively effective as well.
The main thing that seems
to determine how effective
you are is basically how centralized
your resource marshaling is, how capable
you are of the decisive
top-down centralized action,
because this kind of crisis
is not the kind of thing
that really can be dealt with effectively
in a decentralized way.
So basically, the more efficient,
the more in control the central government
is, in virtually any system,
the more likely you're gonna
be able to effectively deal
with this kind of thing.
China dealt with it through
flexing its authoritarian muscle
and basically shutting
the entire economy down.
You can also do it like
Germany or South Korea,
just have massive
centrally driven testing,
and you're likely gonna reach
an arc with the same results.
The problem with the
U.S. response, obviously,
has been the complete lack
of federal leadership.
Basically, where everything's
being left to the states.
Some of the states are
actually quite competent,
but that can't solve the national problem.
A good response in
California, or Washington,
or even as we're seeing now a
relatively competent response
in the north east, in the
face of this explosion,
is not gonna save the entire country
basically from basically
having this massive spread.
So China's main virtue, in that case,
was the centralization, not
necessarily authoritarian.
- Yeah, it's an interesting question
because, as you pointed
out, Germany has done well.
On the other hand, it's a federal system.
The U.S. obviously hasn't,
it's a federal system.
So then the question is,
it may not be centralized
versus decentralized, or
federal versus unitary,
but maybe other features of the systems.
- Yeah, those formalistic
differences don't matter
nearly as much as specifically
how centrally coordinated
this particular response was.
Germany is a federal system
with a very coordinated
centralized policy response,
which everyone was acting
pretty much as a whole.
And U.S., everyone had
to fend for themselves,
and the central was non-existent.
But that's the difference, not
the formal federal structure
of the governments, basically.
- Right, so is this more a
question of the, might say
the bureaucratic, the centralization of,
and the authority of, those
in a federal government,
who have responsibility
for this domain of policy?
- Yeah, I would say the critical thing
is just the wholistic marshaling
of national resources,
and you can do that in a federal system
as long as everyone's on the same page.
But of course perhaps it's kind of easier
in kind of a more top-down
centralized system
like you have in China or South Korea,
but certainly you can have coordination.
- Nahid, I'd like to ask
you about following up
on your point about the
health system in Iran,
and the fact that it was seen
as very effective, very capable.
And I think you said it's
now become the national hero
in terms of dealing with the crisis.
How do you, how just from
taking from that case,
how do you fit that into
the kind of analysis
that Taisu has presented in
terms of, and the question,
is it a unitary, federal,
is that the distinction?
Is it something about the bureaucracy
and the organization?
Is it something to do with the respect
for health professionals?
Some countries have, as
we know from this country,
some countries have more
of that collective respect
of where the health
professionals than others.
How would you react to that
analysis that he gave us?
- Right, right, so on Taisu's
point about authoritarianism,
I agree because Iran has been,
the Iranian government has been willing
to wield its authoritarian means
when it comes down to political
matters of state survival,
such as during protests and so on.
And we seen that, but when it came down
to the coronavirus, actually
it hasn't really dealt
in authoritarian means in terms
of the kinds of measures
that China, for example,
took or other countries have taken.
And so it really was this
underlying, existing structure,
of the healthcare system,
which in Iran there's, I
imagine across the world
that is true, but in Iran in particular,
I can tell you there's a lot
of, there's great respect
for the medical profession,
and also this historical identity
with Avicenna having been the
first sort of modern doctor,
inventor of modern medicine,
and so their historical roots as well
that allows Iranians to
sort of identify themselves
as a sort of seat of modern medicine,
and Iran has a very high
output of medical research.
I think it's 16th or so in the world
in terms of medical research,
and it has a very high
ratio of doctors to people,
high ratio of hospital beds,
and so there is that respect.
But also, with the revolution,
what happened even
though the medical system
was great before the revolution,
but the population was half its size now,
actually less than half its size now,
but with the revolution,
the idea of the revolution
was that the downtrodden,
the poor, would be served
by the new government.
And this is something that was implemented
through a social welfare system,
including an efficient healthcare system
that has mobile stations and local units
all the way deep into
rule and provincial areas.
And so I think the healthcare system
was able to step in, but I
think it would be wrong to,
obviously it is a federal
system, and the health,
but the health ministry associated
with the current moderate government
of president Rouhani, and
the government at large,
have been really criticized
for their lack of action
on taking measures and
providing the kinds of equipment
that the healthcare workers have needed.
What we've seen is more of
a, these existing structures,
and then bottom-up support by people,
ordinary people in many cases,
of providing and making
things in their homes
and supplying these places,
but also a self-sufficiency
that has existed
because of the sanctions.
So because of these harsh U.S. sanctions,
for decades Iran creates, produces,
98% of its own medication,
although it's still reliant on imports
for content that goes
into that medication,
so the sanctions are still
having a horrible impact,
even in the medical field,
but it's self-sufficient in
terms of the medical field.
It's become self-sufficient in
producing medical equipment,
medicines, and so on.
And I think that the sanctions
are an important factor
to consider in everything
that's happened with the coronavirus,
including in its relation
with China, for example.
When most countries shut
down their flights to China,
Iran did so formally as well,
but one of its main airlines,
for another three weeks,
had continued to have flights to China,
and this happened after an Iranian minster
met with a Chinese ambassador in Tehran.
And so because of the Western sanctions,
Iran has been relying more
and more on China and Russia,
and so these new patterns of dependency
have also played an important role
in how the virus has played out in Iran.
- Ana and Tais, I wondered
if you could say something
about this issue, or the
analysis that Taisu was talking
about in terms of the
structure of the government
and how that has affected,
either hindered or
enhanced the effectiveness
of the response, I mean, does federalism?
We know that federalism is variable;
Germany did well, the
U.S. hasn't done well.
And then, of course, the
question that Taisu raised
that maybe it's not a bad issue so much,
it's just the centralization of authority,
and then we get into the question
of the professional healthcare
and its ability to
essentially drive the response
as opposed to being subordinated
to political leaders.
Could you say something
about all of those issues
and the countries you know?
And of course, you know several
countries, many countries,
so Ana, would you have
something to say about that?
- Sure, yeah, definitely,
very interesting.
It's a very interesting question.
I think that, to start with,
I don't see in Latin America relationship,
a clear relationship
between political regimes
and how they are responding to the crisis.
So there are authoritarian
regimes in the region
that are doing very badly,
like think about Venezuela.
And then there are democracies
that are doing very badly too,
so think about, for instance, Ecuador,
so I don't see a relationship.
Now in terms of the
federalism and its structure,
I think, for instance in the Mexican case,
Mexico is a federal system.
The government started
with a more lax attitude
to the crisis than what
various governors wanted,
so sub-national governments
have been demanding
more stringent policies,
more testing, more equipment,
a more aggressive response
to the economic crisis, too.
So in that sense, I think
that maybe the centralization
would at some point help Mexico,
as opposed to the drawback.
But the problem is, of course,
that partisanship gets in the way,
so one of the problems is that, I see,
is that coordination between
the central government
and governors is very much moderated
by the partisanship of governors,
and that, of course, might
become a huge problem,
both in terms of how
resources are distributed
to deal with the health crisis,
and then of course what
will happen afterwards
with the economic crisis.
Other countries in the Southern Cone
have also federal systems,
but slightly more centralized
than the Mexican one.
Overall, they all seem to
be doing relatively okay
in the response to the crisis.
I'm just thinking here
about Chili and Argentina,
which of course have seen serious increase
in the number of cases and deaths,
but I don't see reports
of their health system
on the verge of collapse,
like what we have seen
in Ecuador for instance,
which is a really tragic story.
So in that sense, I think that it is true
that coordination is essential,
but I don't think that
necessarily full concentration
of power and presence is,
will help these countries turn the page.
And I think that it is
important to continue
to have some vibrancy in
sub-national governments,
and to a certain degree allow them
to also do their own experimentation
on both how to deal
with their health crisis
and the economic crisis.
And just to say, most
of the health systems
in the region
were not as prepared
as what some other
panelists have mentioned.
Certainly, the Mexican
case, health system,
was underfunded before COVID-19,
continues to be underfunded.
There's lack of equipment,
lack of doctors,
and certainly lack of logistics
in terms of figuring out
how to stretch resources,
so that is a problem.
- Tais, what do you think
from your perspective?
- Yes, I will just comment a
little bit regarding Brazil,
because for us the problem is, as I said,
the president is denial, in a denial mode.
So governors, the state
governors, federalism now,
he has helped Brazil
because they are acting.
So governors, they are together.
They have virtual meeting
as we are having now.
They have virtual meetings,
and they are speaking with themselves,
and trying to deal with the problem,
and they are sharing some
experience, some tests,
and they, for example,
they are experiencing
some test in South Brazil,
Rio Grande do Sul.
There is a state called
Rio do Sul in south,
and they are testing some tests,
and then they are going to
share with other states,
but the central government
is completely ahead.
Not ahead, but apart,
of all that, and so
there's no coordination.
Governors are coordinating themselves,
and so as Ana just said, we
have a lack of everything;
equipments and logistic, and everything,
but they are trying.
Governors are trying to
help themselves, that's it.
- That sounds very American
about the governors helping themselves.
Sitting here in Connecticut,
and part of the new northeastern caucus
of governors that exist, which
actually is doing something.
Aniko, I wondered if I
could ask you something
about something you said
in talking about Hungary,
and in particular ask you,
you eluded very briefly
to Poland and Slovenia,
and to what extent do you
think in the countries
of Central and Eastern Europe
the Hungarian response is seen
as an effective kind of response?
And does it make more people more inclined
to say well,
illiberal democracy is
not such a bad thing,
look what Viktor Orban's doing.
I mean, I can easily imagine
that there were people
worse off in the law
and justice leadership,
who think that what he's
done is exactly right,
but I wonder about other countries,
Slovenia, Slovakia, so forth.
Could you say a bit about
whether his response
is a general one, or is it
just, this is Viktor Orban
and you can't generalize about anything
beyond the borders of Hungary?
- So, of course, my response is based on,
mostly based on primary
research and secondary opinions
through my colleagues.
And while I do think that something
that we can all agree on is
that he is way more influential
than he should be.
Hungary is such a tiny country
in the middle of Europe
and in the middle of the EU,
and yet he definitely set a path
that now multiple leaders want to follow.
Now, as far as illiberal democracy,
and whether is this a path to follow,
I do think that, unfortunately,
the path that he laid down,
especially with his
extreme right ideologies,
and conservative and
anti-migration ideologies,
it's something that many
countries around us speaked up on.
I think that's undoubtable.
There is a really interesting question
also in the Q&A that I might just address,
because we have a Polish student, Hyder,
who was asking me about,
do we think that Poland is,
well why would I think that, I'm sorry,
that Poland is also anti-authoritarian?
And so in order to answer that question,
I went back and I started to think about,
when did I start to
think that Orban's regime
is an anti-authoritarian regime?
What were those points?
And if I look back the past 10 years,
the way he's been attacking and seizing
the judiciary system,
attacking the free press,
taking full control of the
economy through oligarchies,
all of these, all of these
are the different acts
that together has turned his regime
into what I would consider
as an authoritarian regimes.
Now with his most recent actions,
I did make the argument that, to me,
this is when he acts as a
dictator for many reasons.
And something that I've noticed,
but I think my colleagues
should either support
or correct me in this matter,
is that many of the measurements
that he did during five,
six, seven, eight years,
have taken place in an accelerated manner,
in Poland, in Slovenia.
So the gradual transition
that was happening,
and I think we are definitely,
we've been arriving for a while now,
that gradual process have
been accelerated in Poland.
And so to answer your question,
maybe I was would
necessarily make the argument
that it is an authoritarian
regime, Poland at this moment,
but we're looking at the measurements
that are happening in relation
to the judiciary system,
in relation to freedom rights,
in relation to the refugee question.
I think we are following
the very same steps
that Hungary took, at this point,
unfortunately, many years ago, sadly.
- Okay, I'm sorry that
we're going to have to close
our discussion very shortly,
but before we do, I'd like to ask Vish
if you'd like to get
into this conversation,
and in particular
how you look, comparative speaking,
that is at both Algeria and Morocco?
And looking in at the responses
of those two countries,
do you think they look
at all to near-neighbors
to the north, such as France and Spain,
in terms of how those countries,
which have of course suffered immense,
and Italy for that matter,
suffered immense losses of life,
in terms of how to deal with the problem?
Is there any sense of
learning, do you think,
in terms of how everyone would like
to respond the way China did?
But everyone isn't China and
can't do that, obviously.
Are there any lessons to be learned
for Algeria, Morocco, other countries,
and more broadly, in Africa?
I mean, the huge uncertainty, of course,
is where this will go next,
and how what effect it will have
when the virus begins to
spread widely in Africa?
- Yeah, so I think one of the ironies
of North Africa has
kind of been understood
as always kind of looking
to your present model.
The irony of the COVID
scenario is, in many ways,
Europe has become sort of the anti-model
for North Africa, and for
Africa I think in general,
and for the Middle East as well.
I remember there were a
lot of jokes in The Onion
about how Africa is closing
its borders from Europe,
from Europeans coming in,
in order to keep the virus out.
And as you mentioned correctly,
a lot of people are looking to China,
or just the Asian countries in general,
as models in their handling of the crisis.
And I think both Morocco and Algeria
were sort of hopefully relying on the fact
that they are, in fact, authoritarian
much in the way that China is,
in order to be able kind
of quickly sort of manage
the crisis, and sort of act
quickly and unilaterally
without some of the handicaps,
if we can call it that,
that sort of federalist
system and democratic systems
are kind of facing,
in handling the crisis
in a more swift way.
So I think another interesting thing
is if we compare Morocco and Algeria is,
there's one of the
questions in the comments
asks about social trust
and how important that is.
As I mentioned in my talk,
public trust in Algeria is very, very low.
In Morocco, on the other
hand, it's very, very high.
And even though both of these countries
are in many ways similar, in the sense
that they're both what
many political scientists
would call hybrid authoritarian regimes,
they use democratic institutions.
They don't really have
many, in fact, prerogatives,
one is a republic and one is a monarchy.
And I'm still kind of in
the stages of flushing out
to what extent the monarchy
versus the republic model
is relevant to the question of legitimacy
in public trust, especially in COVID.
I think it's still a little
bit tentative and unclear,
but what I can say is that,
over the course of the last several years,
Algeria has sort of struggled
to concentrate authority
in a single, centralized source,
in the way that Morocco has.
In Morocco, the foreign
policy establishment,
its religious institutions,
and even its military,
sort of function in tandem to uphold
the monarchy and the
logic of its legitimacy,
and it's a legitimacy
that is sort of implicitly
and explicitly religious,
while the more internally
fragmented Algeria state
has struggled at various points
to concentrate authority
in a single source.
In fact, some of the slogans
of the Hirak movement
that I mentioned in my talk,
is Algeria has no king and we're
a republic, not a monarchy,
so it's implicitly sort of highlighting
those non-monarchiness in
calling out the illegitimacy
of the Algerian state,
which is quite ironic.
So I'm not sure if that
answers the question,
but there is a question
in the audience about,
that was directed to me
that is a bit related
to what I'm asking about to your question.
The impact to the move
online by the Hirak movement,
and this was posed by Hannah,
and whether I see this as
creating a collective action
or commitment issue, or
strengthening the movement longterm?
I don't know if we have time
for me to answer that question.
- Yeah, you could.
I think we do need to wrap up,
so maybe briefly and
then we'll just wrap up.
- Yeah, yeah, so just to answer
Hannah's question on this,
yeah, I think it's definitely a challenge.
As I mentioned in my comments,
the lack of public space,
the physical coming together,
was very, very important,
in order both to join together groups
that were ideologically diverse,
to allow them to sort of convert
together on a sort of unifying platform,
but also in a way that reveals
to authoritarian regimes their strengths.
The comments I made about revealing
what people's actual preferences were,
the strengthen their numbers.
The Hirak was able to establish
this sort of massive legitimacy
because of its strength in numbers,
something that was made very
obvious by show in the streets.
By mobilizing only online,
it's very difficult to discern
what is the size of the movement?
What is the strength of the movement?
What is the sway and
influence of the movement?
So yes, the shift to online is definitely
going to be a challenge,
but what the Hirak, one of the advantages
that Hirak has is that,
over the last year,
it already sort of established
itself as a major, major
player, in Algerian politics.
And so the shift to
online, as you mentioned,
the question about collective
action and commitment issues,
the free-rider problem is
sort of this endemic problem
to social movements.
A lot of people who sort of,
towards the end of Hirak,
right before COVID started,
people would sort of begin,
Ramadan was coming up,
it was cold in the winter time,
a lot of people were beginning
to sort of sit out the movement.
And there's this question of well,
why should I go out and march
when these other people
are sort of carrying
the mantle for me?
And many people were also beginning to ask
whether protests were enough
to elicit meaningful
concessions from the regime.
So the question you're asking
is actually a question that the movement
itself is sort of wrestling with.
And it's an opened question,
so while I cannot really
predict the future,
I think on the part of many free-riders,
not to use the term pejoratively,
but in speaking to many of them,
there's a sort of widespread fear
that COVID may be sort of
the death nail for Hirak,
and so many are wondering
whether this will sort
of shock the free-riders
out of complacency, and lead them to join
back in the streets
whenever the lockdown lifts.
It remains to be seen,
but I hope that that
answers your question,
at least for now.
- Tais, I think you
wanted to make a comment,
and I think this will be the last word,
so go ahead, go ahead.
- No, that just because
there are some questions
from the audience.
One is from Herberto Castellanos,
to what extent does trust in government,
and social trust in general,
matter to have a more effective response
to the COVID-19 pandemia or crisis?
I think that the
correlation is completely,
the response that we are going to have
from each government depends on the trust
that the people has in the government,
so I think that's completely
correlated, sorry.
- Great, well I want to thank all of you
for participating in this.
We've been going for almost two hours,
and we could go much longer.
But we do have to bring
it to a conclusion,
so I just want to thank each of you,
and of course especially
thank Christina and Cathleen,
who put this together technically,
and to thank especially
also all of the audience
and all of the people who have written in.
And those of us who got questions
we'll try to respond to you,
if not in this format, in another format.
But again, thank you to each of you
for participating and
spending all this time,
and bringing so much enlightenment
to this important issue.
So thank you, and goodbye.
