Imagined Communities Battle Real Virus: A losing Game

As we know from Benedict Anderston's influential, clever metaphor, nationhood is imagined community. It is, in other words, fiction. There is no tangible, "bodily" reality to it, except of course the reality of collective imagination. It is also very strongly tied to the most recent two to three centuries of history, the history of the capitalist-colonial-racist-imperialist world-system. Meanwhile, one of its most powerful claims is an insistence that it is eternal. As such, it can be used for just about any purpose: from wars for geopolitical territory-gain and destruction of the collective capacities of other nations to driving the colonizers out or defeating Nazi Germany, destroying geopolitical nazism for a couple of generations.

The imagined community of the nation provides emotional shelter to the iconic subject in market-dominated society, those vast masses of people who are living their lives in low-abstraction pseudo-reality. It offers an opportunity to release pent-up class, 'race', gender, ethnic, etc., ressentiment in a realm that has, essentially, nothing to do with any of those. The anger comes from real social relations; the release is in the simulated realm of imagined community. The release is a simulacrum of tragic--always unsatisfactory, often violent--consequences on a massive scale. Enlightened, cosmopolitan, pro-capital(ist), pro-"market" (often mis-labeled as *liberal*) intellectual elites tend to find the nation patently abhorrent; the less educated, the more world-averse and those toiling under the burden of "making it," if only barely, in a capitalist life-machine tend to embrace it with a quasi-religious fervor.

In the middle of this, awful jumble of exploitation, oppression and venal misrepresentation, we get a global environmental hazard. You can't "take care of it" by throwing money at it. Nor by napalm or by nuking it. Nor by calling it inferior and excommunicating it. It is a truly global, collective challenge to humankind. (If the pandemic of 2020 does not move the social sciences massively into global analysis, nothing will.)

Of course the 220 countries of the world are, as I am writing this, implementing 220 barely coordinated measures to tackle the virus--even though it is, as any 10 year old can tell you, by its very nature, by definition, global. The COVID2019 virus is in fact a beautiful demonstration of the essential unity of humankind, so often denied.

So, based on what we can see today, we (humankind) are trying to stave off the global pan-human threat--nationally. Reality calls for rational collective action. We give it our best (national) simulacrum. We, humans, have basically put all we have on a gamble involving a procession, "the divine irreference of [national-salvation] images," Baudrillard would say.

The picture becomes truly horrific when we look at the European Union. I am not referring here to the shocking images of the overstretched emergency rooms or the sobering interviews with doctors on how they make decisions of life/death in the face of unimaginable shortages of equipment or the insanely high numbers of deaths, in Italy or Spain. I am referring to the structural conditions underlying, and producing, those tragedies.

The European Union has promoted itself, for about three generations now, as a supranational meta-state that is an effective, efficient mechanism to "share and pool" the considerable sovereignties of its member states. Margot Wallstrom, the Commissioner for Communications in a Barroso Commission explicitly proposed, in response to the question of just what the EU is, that it is, "simply, solutions united" (she speaks at around 5:10 in the video.)

For what purpose? For the purpose--the EU-glorifying argument goes--of a globally superior, unique kind of collective "goodness." Having mapped upon each other the divine idea of 'Europe' and its supposed earthly manifestation, the EU with great, concerted--although, from the moral critical "angle," sadly futile, pretty much all wasted--effort by generations of 'European' public intellectuals and self-proclaimed educated politicians. The EU has claimed to be no less than the repository of all the goodness in the world. It has beaten its self-asserted moral superiority into the minds of all societies living in geographical Europe, including the couple hundred million former-state-socialist, albeit "insufficiently 'European'" east Europeans, telling them to shut up and accept a position of eternal inferiority. I have called this practice the rule of European difference. There have been very profound, and conceptually important, historically catastrophic consequences for politics in general, and especially 'race', gender and class politics inherent in this form of symbolic violence--but that is not my main point here.

Since the EU has consistently claimed this eternal, pan-human moral superiority to itself, it behooves us, all humans, in the EU as well as outside of it, to ask, how has it fared in the face of the COVID2019 virus.

At the precise moment where concerted, centralized, rational, and pan-human public health action would have really begun to matter in the lives of the hundreds of millions of Europeans who live in the Petri dish otherwise known as geographical Europe, not to mention the billions of humans world-wide who have learnt to look to the EU, the institutional manifestation of the gloriously transcendental, indeed divine, idea of 'Europe', for effective leadership and great solutions, the EU has disappeared. "Brussels" offices are shut down. Bureaucrats, politicians and experts were all sent on a pandemic leave. The EU is, basically missing in inaction. The only effective mechanism one can detect, on the level of "the EU" is the continued genocide perpetrated on the southern perimeter of continental Europe. And of course the wars in which the EU's NATO-members continue to serve, as if by a fit of imperial absent-mindedness.

That's where we are at the moment. We are stuck with "our" national "governments"--the entire world. From Creep1 to the Genocidal Beast of Gujarat, from the Great Builder of All Hungarian Soccer Stadiums to The Janus Faced Manipulator of All West Asian Wars. And beyond.

As for the erstwhile-state-socialist national governments of eastern Europe, they used to have globally well-respected preparedness for epidemic preparedness. An infrastructure that was designed to prevent / mitigate disasters like the one that has just struck. With the resources of the state and the intellectual commitment that went together with a task that was "system-neutral". Anybody in their right mind, even if they were deeply committed in their anticommunist fervor, could agree quite matter of factly that, sure, public health, that's important.

The societies of the erstwhile state socialist world used to have them--until they let them go obsolete. Or dismantled them in their anxious fits and eager starts of EU-liberal structural adjustment. Lacking the resources, the institutional setup, the laws and the wherewithal, they are all scrambling now, under the ruins of the system they destroyed in favor of 'Europe', The Dream. Today, national politicians label the global disease agent "the foreign virus," hoping against hope that it will disappear once it realizes it is not wanted. The more athletically minded youths of the university towns go out hunting for foreign students, to be beaten up for "bringing the plague to us." We are one step from witch burning.

Meanwhile, societies, medical professionals and families struggle to scrape together some kind of a response. They concentrate resources in the larger population centers, closest to the seat of power, of course.

The governments? Oh, they are busy. They are scratching their heads trying to devise ways to assure that they are distributing basic resources--food, shelter, anti-viral protection, let alone treatment opportunities--in the most class-, 'race'- and gender-unequal, discriminatory ways possible. They continue doing what they have understood to be their ontological task: Ensuring the operation of a truly harsh, antihuman, semiperipheral-neoliberal capitalism against "their own" people. They don't even understand the possible criticism that "your actions are against your own people." Of course they are. That's their job, see?

The fact that some will concentrate executive power in the hands of their would-be, aspiring dictator through legal forms and to levels unseen since Adolf Hitler's Enabling Act of 1933, the legislation that granted most legislative power to the freshly elected Nazi government, until the end of World War II, is not a "bug." It is very much a feature. Bavarian Big Capital, producing as it is around half of the domestic value added, will applaud, if ever so discreetly. No need to call attention to the obvious, is there.

If / When humankind comes through the pandemic, there will have to be a process of assessing what we have learnt from this ordeal. My guess, as best as I can see it in the morning of March 24, 2020, is that the steadfast, automatic, and un-reflected, genocidal refusal of the political elites of the world to relinquish their particularistic, simulated ("national") powers for a collective participatory process will be featured prominently among the conclusions.

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