From global risk to global threat: State capabilities and modernity in times of coronavirus

Abstract

This article tries to understand the manifold impact the coronavirus crisis has had on social life. Beck’s ‘risk society’ is discussed, especially in the pandemic’s transition from a risk to a concrete threat. Moreover, the article shows that the World Health Organization was already framing its discourse in connection with risk, though the nation-state model that dominates global politics prevented it from taking more decisive action, not because nation-states are weak, but because they simply did not ascribe importance to looming pandemics. This is bound to change: politically-steered and policy-oriented state capabilities – taxation, managing, moulding, surveillance, coercion, materialization, along with a legal meta-capability, which never waned, return to the forefront. At least partly in the West and Latin America the security of populations has taken centre-stage. Keynesianism and some sort of state welfarism are making a comeback. Changes in ‘global health governance’ are happening, too. While the precise direction of change is unclear, the article presents some future possibilities.