The Geopolitics of Coronavirus
Interview
with Robert Steuckers
Strategika -April 6th 2020
(Translation: Eugene Montsalvat)
In
the midst of a global crisis unprecedented in its extent, Strategika offer the
clarity of thinkers and analysts recognized in their domain of expertise. We've
asked each one a series of questions focusing on different aspects of this
veritable crisis of civilization as well as its political, geopolitical, and
social repercussions.
Today
Robert Steuckers responds.
Robert
Steuckers, born in Uccle in 1956, graduated from the Institut Maria Haps,
associated with the University of Louvain, where he obtained his Master's in
English and German languages. He directed a translation agency in Brussels for
twenty years before devoting himself to various tasks teaching languages. He
created the think tank “Synergies européennes” in 1994, which has
organized summer universities in France, Italy, and Germany. He manages, with
others, the site Euro-Synergies which
has posted nearly 17,000 feature articles, available to everyone. He also has a
Twitter account Robert Steuckers (@RobertSteuckers) updated daily. Robert Steuckers is the author of numerous
books and essays, notably the trilogy Europa, a truly
complete work on the identity and history of European peoples as well as La
révolution conservatrice allemande and Sur et autour de Carl
Schmitt.
Strategika
– We read many contradictory elements according to different sources of
available information or opinions of health professionals. What is the
effective reality of this pandemic according to you?
We
cannot exclude a natural origin of the pandemic (though I remain skeptical
regarding the fable of eating pangolin or bat) but we should also agree to
discuss another hypothesis: the hypothesis of an act of bacteriological war
directed against China, Iran, and Europe, the three principle hosts of the
malady. The mutant virus, as it seems to have mutated, could also have escaped
from a Chinese laboratory or somewhere else but then why did it strike the
principal rivals of the hegemon, nearly to the exclusion of other regions of
the globe? If the hypothesis of a bacteriological war is accurate, we can
establish the following scenario: the nerve center of China is hit, its
industry, boosted by neoliberal relocations elsewhere in the world, especially
Europe, is slowed, which has an effect on its currency, capable of supplanting
the dollar in the intermediary term. Moreover, this slowdown or sabotage
stifles the establishment of the famous “silk roads.” Iran, the enemy number
one of certain neoconservative circles, was struck in turn, as it easily could
become the principal supplier of hydrocarbons to China and a very important
commercial partner with Europe, as it was during the end of reign of the last
Shah, notably with the EURATOM accords. This is the thesis of Houchang
Nahavandi, a former minister of the Shah and author of very important books on
the recent and ancient history of Iran, which I highly recommend reading.
In Europe,
calamities batter the weakest links and the principal motor of the European
economy, Germany. Greece must confront the refugee crisis on its Thracian
border, while its economic and financial health has wavered for a dozen years,
following the 2008 crisis. It has still mostly escaped the coronavirus but … Wait
and see ... Italy, recall, signed special accords, making it China's
springboard into the EU. Spain also received the full brunt of the pandemic
crisis as it is also a fragile economy that risks ruining the European project,
promoted by the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, then judged competitive
and deemed, notably by the Clinton Doctrine, as “alien,” that is to say
as a potential enemy, if not a declared enemy. France was struck too, even if,
officially, it is considered an ally since Macron, the president was
intellectually shaped by an American school. It is progressively emptied of its
industrial flagships (Alsthom, Latécoère,…) and slowly infested by the
coronavirus, quite simply because the hyperliberalism that has weakened it
since Sarkozy's presidency, has slashed through the non-mercantile sectors,
including medical. Without a strong medical sector, robust, capable of
predicting all forms of pandemic, including those which could be unleashed
through a bacteriological strike, a country is an ideal target for this type of
operation.
The moral of this
is that any state or state group, must imperatively, if it wants to survive the
intrigues of its enemies (there's always an enemy as Julien Freund said),
retain its industrial assets and refuse relocations and mergers with foreign
firms, preserve solid medical infrastructures and a competitive academic /
university system.
In
Germany, the expected mechanisms for a pandemic have been retained, which
explains their superior management of the coronavirus crisis. Nevertheless, the
future of Germany isn't rosy: the flows of refugees who've settled on their
territory are ruining their exemplary system of social security which was
established in the post war era and generate ceaseless disorder in streets of
towns; today the principal partner of German industry is China but this dependency
is fragile, the Chinese always end up producing what they need for themselves,
notably automobiles. German industry has wagered too heavily on the export of
its excellent automobiles, without imagining that this flow could dry up one
day. Furthermore, the German – Russian gas partnership is in the hegemon's
sights: European enterprises that contribute to the completion of the Nord
Stream 2 gas pipeline are directly threatened with trial by American “justice”
or the confiscation of their holdings in American banks. The affair of
Frédéric Pierucci, the Alsthom executive, illustrates well what this risk is,
notably in the testimonial book this executive drafted after his imprisonment
in the United States: The American Trap.
German decline is
inevitable, contrary to what we generally believe in France today, where
certain circles stir the specter of offensive Pan-Germanism again. Beyond the
Rhine, literature protesting the system is flourishing and it's no longer
limited to margins of the left or right but henceforth comes from the highest
economic and intellectual spheres. We must refer to it because the arguments
advanced by these critics would combine very well with the critiques of
Eurocracy in vogue in France. It's an excellent theme for Strategika!
If the pandemic
strikes the United States, whose hospital system leaves much to be desired, one
could argue that the hypothesis, which is only a hypothesis, which I sketched
here is erroneous because the hegemon, accused unleashing bacteriological war,
would be exonerated of this accusation, seeing that it is struck by the
pandemic itself. But the first victim can easily throw it back and spread the
disruptive agent back to the sender, every bacteriological operation has this
particular feature.
Strategika – Does
this pandemic precede an economic and systemic collapse?
I think so.
Firstly, confinement slows down industry in a system that tolerates no pause.
For Carl Schmitt, the world globalized through Roosevelt's will in the 1930s
and 1940s, highlighting the element of “water,” because the hegemony erected by
this American president is an ideologically liberal thalassocracy: so we
navigate this immense symbolic ocean on the flows of merchandise and
communications controlled from the start by American naval power: which quite
simply treads water against a flowing background as Carl Schmitt wrote in his Glossarium
(not yet translated). Finally, I always thought that the crisis of 2008, much
deeper than we believed until today, was not really resolved: they plugged
breeches on an ongoing basis through all sorts of artifices, they delayed its
consequences twelve years. These patch-up maneuvers are coming to an end. And
they will blame the virus for the definitive implosion of the system so that
people don't seek to name the guilty.
Strategika
– More than three billion people on earth are being asked to confine
themselves. For the first time in history, humanity seems to have succeeded in
coordinating themselves in a unitary manner against a common global enemy. What
does this situation make you feel?
This situation is
frightening because if there is a pandemic, it has doubtlessly not been much
more explosive than habitual seasonal flus, at least until now. The virus is
certainly more virulent than other flu viruses, more resilient once
expectorated from a human body and more aggressive towards the respiratory
system of the weakest patients, whose immune systems are weakened by other
pathologies. We're facing a situation comparable to the situation in 1968 and
1969-70 where a flu virus killed, at times, up to 4,000 people a week in France
alone! In 2018, from February 26th to March 4th, 2,900
people died from the seasonal flu in Belgium, in one little week!
The hypotheses
that say the dominant circles orchestrate panic in order to establish a
dictatorial, panoptical system, the vector of universal and ubiquitous
surveillance, should be taken seriously. The sheep-like comportment of citizens
is astonishing in such a context, when it's obvious that it's in the interest
of the ruling spheres to promote such a system: the Italy of Salvini or even
post-Salvini Italy is an unpredictable country that must be subdued; the France
of the Yellow Vests that rejects the hyperliberalism they wish to impose on it
deserves, in their eyes, severe punishment; and the Germany that boos Merkel at
each of her public appearances should also be chastised, so long as it heats
itself with Russian gas and runs its industry, automobile or otherwise, with
these Putinian hydrocarbons.
We've entered
into the era of planetary “monitor and punish” which Europe will be the
principal victim of, as the Chinese and the Iranians are more willing to accept
the human costs and possess capacities for resilience superior to ours, they
can draw on Shi'ite or Confucian religion or the corrected and revised
communist ideology, which more resembles the constructive projects of Friedrich
List in the 19th century and the projects that he inspired among the
ideologues of the Kuomintang, militants of a Chinese renaissance after the
“century of shame,” where the Celestial Empire had fallen into a deep decline.
At least Attali
formulates the project and there are traces of this messianic vision in a good
number of his earlier writings. Furthermore, in a work dealing with the world
as seen by the CIA, a dozen years ago, Alexandre Adler mentioned a pandemic as
an accelerator of globalization, amplified if not definitive. Nevertheless I
don't see Xi Jinping's China or Putin's Russia embarking on such a project.
Without speaking of Iran …
Strategika – Still
in 2009, Jacques Attali explained that “History teaches us that humanity only
significantly evolves when it is really afraid.” What do you think about this
idea?
This idea is a
general idea. Almost a truism. But if Attali, promoter of the globalizing
project in progress, mentioned it in 2009, he's referring to the idea that well
orchestrated social and media engineering could create, if need be, the fear
needed to bring a project such as the one he's dreamed of for a long time to
fruition. This creation of a global panic is what we're witnessing today. But
Attali is henceforth an old guru, the same age as all those he wishes death
upon so that hyperliberal governments don't have to pay for their retirement.
However, the new global guru is named Yuval Noah Harari, famous for two
bestsellers that we find in every language in every bookshop in the world, especially
in large train stations and airports, where those who adopt nomadic lives, on
big or small scales, pass. March 20th 2020, this Harari published a
long article in the Financial Times, where
the globalizing project in progress was presented in a pleasant and attractive
fashion, as usual: we can't criticize Attali or Harari for having a boring
style, incapable of keeping their readers' attention. Harari notes that with
coronavirus, there is an emergency and every emergency “fast forwards
historical processes.” Then, I cite: “Decisions that in normal times could
take years of deliberation are passed in a matter of hours. Immature and even
dangerous technologies are pressed into service, because the risks of doing
nothing are bigger. Entire countries serve as guinea-pigs in large-scale social
experiments.” Harari then evokes a world where there will only be online
work and especially online teaching: the confinement, which we are subjected
to, then seems to be a preparatory step to this future of complete reclusion,
concocted in the highest ruling spheres. Harari then mentions the global
monitoring of humanity, matched with punishments for the recalcitrant. He waxes
lyrical saying that today, governments are stronger than the Soviet KGB as they
now have “ubiquitous sensors and powerful algorithms” at their disposal. The
coronavirus, he adds as if he wants to add grist to our mill, has already
permitted the deployment of such an arsenal unseen in the history of humanity,
notably in China where the state constantly manifests itself through the
smart-phones of its citizens, using facial recognition technology on a wide
scale and it can determine the health of each Chinese person through tools
designed to determine if someone has a fever, that any policeman can carry and
use on public streets. The following step is also revealed to us by Harari:
feelings, like anger or joy, are biological phenomena like fevers or coughs: so
we can detect them and manipulate them with the same instruments that they use
to identify potentially “corona virus infected” fever patients in the streets
of China. Finally, Harari unveils the final objective, quasi-Messianic, in
short the Second Coming of the future: “global cooperation”, the only lifeline
against the virus that should induce us all to opt for “a globalist mindset”,
rendering local or national impulses useless. In other terms, Harari opts for a
radically different humanity than the one Claude Lévi-Strauss advocated for in
his time: Lévi-Strauss desired as many models of humanity as there were on the
planet when he devoted himself to his ethnological research, he desired to
promote an “ethnopluralist spirit” so that man had numerous available models to
imitate or absorb in case of the stagnation or the collapse of the model to
which he previously belonged, in which numerous generations of his ancestors
had lived. Humanity must be plural according to this Lévi-Straussian
ethnopluralism. For Attali and Harari, that doesn't seem to be the case. I am
nostalgic for Lévi-Strauss' project, I'm not hiding it from you.
Strategika – How
do you view the evolution of the pandemic and its political and social
consequences in the weeks to home?
I think that it will incite panic at
least until mid-May, until the moment where the slowdown of European industries
will have irreversible consequences and the crisis will be quite palpable, with
an incalculable number of failures among SMEs (small and middle sized enterprises).
The social crisis in France will be accentuated and the Yellow Vests movement
will regain vigor and continue with enhanced intensity. The other European
countries will follow, Germany included. Next, confinement will end up
agitating even the most patient natives and provoke unrest in risky
neighborhoods as Ramadan starts at the end of April and extends until the end
of May. There is something more serious: globalization aims to eradicate
European culture, of which the clearest and most spectacular symbol was the
burning of Notre-Dame de Paris. Confinement has sabotaged the implicit liturgy
of our civilization: Easter vacations and paschal festivities, including the
Spanish semana
santa, were canceled for the first
time in centuries, as well as the spring season in May, with religious
festivals and communions, pretexts for familial celebrations that unite
society. Following this sacrilege, as it must be called such, the summer
vacation season will quite likely be disrupted, although it is a secular tradition,
also punctuated by festivities. The humanity of our sub-continent will be
deeply disturbed, psychologically undermined, with both somatic and
psychological effects. It's the most frightening short term risk as once the
sacrilege to smash our millennium old liturgy has been unleashed, there will
always be the risk of repeating it. But even by itself the yearlong rupture of
the liturgical cycle, inherited from Rome, heralds catastrophes: they've never
dared to do it before.
Strategika – Does a political solution to
the situation you just described exist and what form could it take according to
you?
A political solution, truly
political in the sense meant by Carl Schmitt and Julien Freund, is only
possible through an act of force, a cruelly conflictual ordeal. Through an
upheaval equivalent to the Russian Revolution of 1917. But we are no longer in
the 1920s or 1930s where millions of soldiers were returning from the front and
didn't fear being wounded or dying confronting the bullets of regime supporters
or political adversaries. Moreover, today we can't bring down a regime with
simple rifles fitted with bayonets anymore. States are endowed with more
sophisticated weapons, that one cannot purchase at the corner store, not even
in the United States. They have “ubiquitous sensors and powerful algorithms” at
their disposal, to paraphrase Harari. In our days, there are drones, cameras,
centers hidden so well that it no longer suffices to seize the General Post
Office as in Dublin in 1916, or, confronting Yeltsin's armor in 1993, the
Moscow radio tower. Our humanity is much too weakened by decades of
“liberalism” (or the ideology of pleasure-seeking [Translator's note: festivisme
– see Philippe Muray's work on the “Homo festivus”, a characteristic figure of
contemporary Western modernity whose primary focus is to keep himself
entertained]) to dare such an
adventure.
The only form that a reaction could
take would be a slide towards illiberalism in the manner of Orban or Putin,
without duplicating the stupid left-right divide, as the enemy of both is the
same: the hyperliberalism brought about in our societies by the Thatcher-Reagan
duo from 1979 onward. But on the left, they retain heavy hostile reflexes
towards the political, on the right, there's still a tendency to sink into one
form of liberalism or another. These are pitfalls to avoid, by making an appeal
to a metapolitical imagination that can fuse opposed bodies into a new
synthesis, where the principles of social justice and suum cuique [Translator's note: Latin for “may all get
their due”] are respected.
Strategika
– How do you link the present crisis to your domain of expertise and your
field of research?
I'm
not an expert but an engaged observer. For me, the present crisis is the
culmination of the restrained crisis of 2008 and, I could be fooling myself, a
well targeted act of force, perpetrated through an act of bacteriological
warfare that aims to annihilate European economic power (the only form of power
that remains on our sub-continent), annihilate the Chinese challenger, and ruin
the “silks roads” project, with the continued support of planetary media
orchestration. We are engaged in hybrid wars or fourth generation wars, that is
to say wars where they no longer line up armies of tanks and infantrymen but
where they skillfully apply indirect strategies. Europe, as certain observers
already noted in the 1990s and 2000s, was the least well prepared handle the
media and cultural tools of this new dimension of warfare: that's extremely
true and it's paying the consequences heavily today. If Europe's project was
Clausewitzian instead of neoliberal, it wouldn't be in this situation …
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