3. DO YOU NEED TO BE A DICTATORSHIP TO RESOLVE THE CORONA CRISIS?
There is a point of view that has emerged in the West that the relative success of China & Singapore in resolving the crisis (compared to Italy, for example) suggests that a pandemic is best solved by authoritarian political systems. Watch this documentary and add a post discussing an aspect of it. This can be based on your opinion, linked to the course content, other examples etc. These are some questions as a starting point.
10 Comments
Lucy
9/4/2020 08:07:49 pm
1. Arguments that democracies are not well set up to tackle this kind of crisis?
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JiWon
10/4/2020 08:20:42 am
China's initial response to COVID-19 has been hit hard by the international community. Despite the negative effects of Chinese bureaucracy, external factors such as the hosting of Hunan and the Communist Party of China and economic revitalization measures to revitalize the Lunar New Year's economy have had a major impact. Corona countermeasures have been pushed back by both rounds and the New Year's Day, but the Chinese government has taken more such measures than taking proper measures in the outbreak of coronavirus in the area around Wuhan. He seemed to be pursuing responsibilities by taking care of things, such as clearing up hoaxes and controlling information, and just before the Spring Festival, proper measures were finally taken but lost already late. President Xi Jinping has been trying to recover from the downturn caused by the trade war and make the most of the Lunar New Year. In that regard, Xi prevented people from being agitated through media control instead of taking appropriate response and information disclosure of this crisis. In addition, China has a history of making international cooperation difficult by not officially admitting infection of the virus for 6 months during SARS, or reducing or concealing the actual situation of infection, so, in this COVID-19 situation, they could not get a great deal of trust from the international community. The irony is that at the time of the spread of SARS in China, the cause of the widespread of SARS was depicted as the initial hiding of information. This led to the introduction of the Information Disclosure Law in China in 2008 and pieces of information from the public institutions began to be open to the public. However, the Chinese government forgot that hiding the information brought significant negative impacts to the international community and repeated what the same mistake from the SARS crisis.
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James Tipney
7/5/2020 11:40:36 am
Good insights here Jiwon. The opennness of the democratic systems should help and China is now getting a lot of criticism for not acting sooner - prioritsing politics over people. But at the same time, Western leaders were over confident that their political system would naturally adapt - and it didn't.
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Len
10/4/2020 08:35:04 am
While it is valid that authoritarian political systems are easier to implement decisive policies that may help to contain the spread, I believe that not only authoritarian states are equipped with the authority to carry out those perhaps radical measures, and democracies are also equipped with the power the civic population is willing to grant to the state, in the times of an emergency. Such power that arises in a state in a crisis is called emergency power - an extraordinary power invoked as a means of resolving a crisis. Essentially, emergency power also grants democratic states the power to implement strong policies that they otherwise wouldn’t have had. I believe with the active utilization of emergency power to implement strong measures and the democratic free media that stimulates active reporting, democracies can prove to be more effective than authoritarianism. Taiwan’s case of the successful establishment of a sanitary cordon is a case where the state effectively utilized its emergency power, whereas in Europe, the government is unable to utilize the additional power they have.
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Len
10/4/2020 08:54:00 am
However, it is inevitably true that some emergency measures that are implemented with the purpose of containing the virus, are here to stay even after the pandemic - and this may lead to a breach in the current democratic systems in some states. This perhaps leads to a phenomenon where the government is perhaps attempting to permanently gain power. After the crisis, some states may maintain overly regulated policies and breach the civic populations’ personal liberty. Current example cases include Russia’s installation of one of the world’s largest surveillance camera systems equipped with facial recognition technology in Moscow, to regulate their civic population. Israel’s government also has cited the coronavirus to authorize its Shin Bet internal security agency to use vast amounts of location-tracking data from the cellphones of ordinary Israelis. Governments may want to maintain their temporarily increased power, and it may be hard to remove them, as the continuation of the surveillance dilemma after the September 11 attacks reveals. It may be a question of “Can democratic systems survive after the crisis?” rather than “Can states with democratic systems survive the crisis?”.
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Jerry
10/4/2020 08:41:40 am
1. Arguments that democracies are not well set up to tackle this kind of crisis?
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Kae
10/4/2020 09:00:30 am
1.Arguments that democracies are not well set up to tackle this kind of crisis?
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Suin
10/4/2020 10:06:04 pm
I think this pandemic will definitely change European political perspectives since people will realize a need for the stronger government to provide a fast and decisive response. Also, there will be a paradigm shift in politics with the problems of populism - people are becoming aware of the need for expertise and realization of objective reality instead of travel bans and blaming others. Moreover, in my opinion, I think there will be a rise in eurosceptics since people realize that the power of IGOs like the EU is very limited and they cannot interfere with domestic politics. Even though the EU can actually provide credible solutions for such transnational issues that no single states can provide, states will be unwilling to compromise for the shared values with the ongoing domestic problems.
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Gabriel
12/4/2020 04:34:21 pm
Why might authoritarian states be at an advantage?
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James Tipney
7/5/2020 11:43:19 am
Well considered - a good example of philosophy colliding with reality for sure.
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