Thanks for these clarifications, Prem. But I don’t think even your revisions take account of what the pandemic actually teaches.
Start with Wuhan. While the lack of any sort of free press in China certainly contributed to the delayed response, local officials' first instinct was apparently and disastrously to cover up. This is, worldwide, a common reaction by local officials to all sorts of problems. In the case of the virus, around the world it includes hiding deaths, making utterly wrong local decisions on the amount of social distancing needed, how to provide for the transient populations that were so maltreated in India—and elsewhere—and on and on. The problem of localism or nationalism persists even at the nation-state level, of course. Is anything at all gained by the US’s head-in-the-sand response at the national level? What about the UK or even Spain and Italy? I’m sure there are many ways the EU’s bureaucracy is sclerotic, but I suspect that public health measures advocated more centrally and then followed locally would have been more timely. Here in the US, where I live in Berkeley, it so happens the response was very quick, and the state of California nearly as quick, but the absence of freedom to act on a national level, by organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control, led to the tens of thousands of deaths so far in this country. The WHO, had it had real independence, would probably have declared a pandemic sooner than it did, but even that late, it wasn’t heeded in many places where it should have been. Had air travel and cruise voyages been halted and quarantines put in place globally right away, the worldwide pain would have been much less. When it comes to steps to ameliorate the dislocations, the US’s federal system keeps local officials easily able to divert funds and attention from the most in need of it. And the lack of anything remotely like a global response of course injures the poorest most. Looking beyond COVID-19, here on the very wealthy outskirts of Silicon Valley, another aspect of localism is NIMBYism, which operates to to prevent sufficient housing for the huge number of homeless. While, in Berkeley there is at least a high-level of concern, whether effective or not, just an hour away in even richer Palo Alto, the policies are completely terrible. More rural parts of California treat migrant labor as nearly as slaves as they can get away with. Finally, consider the world scientific community. The degree of international cooperation has been intense, and seems most likely to lead to better treatment protocols and clearer understanding of the appropriate protective steps, if not to working medications and a possible vaccine more quickly than anything in the past would have allowed. (To be sure, Big Pharma acting to increase profits, may well be more of a hindrance than a help in this.) We are probably stuck with localism and the nation-state model for some time to come, but we should not be at all happy with that. Finding better ways to ensure a sense of global citizenship and struggling for the loose but effective means of internationalizing governance and networks that truly exclude none should be goals. Best, Michael > On May 7, 2020, at 12:06 AM, Prem Chandavarkar <prem....@gmail.com > <mailto:prem....@gmail.com>> wrote: > > Thanks Michael, > Perhaps I was not clear. I do not propose an isolationist self-reliance - > that is not feasible at all. International scales of operation are still > necessary. I only argue that in the attempt to define what should be done at > the local level and what should be done at the national or international > level, we should go by the principle of subsidiarity. So it is more the > question of a layered hierarchy of scales than isolating any specific scale. > # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
