A better world can emerge after coronavirus. Or a
much worse one
Timothy
Garton Ash
Most Europeans support a universal basic income, yet
young people doubt democracy’s capacity to deliver change
@fromTGA
Wed 6 May
2020 12.17 BSTLast modified on Wed 6 May 2020 17.04 BST
The coronavirus
crisis seems to be encouraging belief in radical change. An astonishing 71% of
Europeans are now in favour of introducing a universal basic income, according
to an opinion poll designed by my research team at Oxford university and
published today. In Britain, the figure is 68%. Less encouraging, at least to
anyone who believes in liberal democracy, is another startling finding in the
survey: no less than 53% of young Europeans place more confidence in
authoritarian states than in democracies to tackle the climate crisis. The poll
was conducted by eupinions in March, as most of Europe was locking down against
the virus, but the questions had been formulated earlier. It would be
fascinating now to ask Europeans which political system they think has proved
better at combating a pandemic, as the United States and China, the world’s
leading democracy and the world’s leading dictatorship, spray viral accusations
at each other.
Those two
contrasting but equally striking survey results show how high the stakes will
be as we emerge from the immediate medical emergency, and face the subsequent
economic pandemic and its political fallout. What kind of historical moment
will this turn out to be, for Europe and the world? It could lead us to the
best of times. It could lead us to the worst of times.
The
proposal for a universal basic income was until recently often dismissed as
far-out and utopian. But during the anti-pandemic lockdowns, many developed
countries have introduced something close to it. Spain’s economy minister has
said that its “minimum vital income” could become a permanent instrument in the
country’s system. Hardly a day passes now when I do not read another article
suggesting that universal basic income, or some variant of it, is an idea whose
time has come.
This would
be one ingredient of a possible future in which we managed to turn one of the
greatest crises of the postwar world into one of its greatest opportunities. We
can address the soaring inequality, both economic and cultural, which has been
eroding the foundations even of established liberal democracies like Britain
and the US. Having learned to work in different ways, more from home and with
less unnecessary travel, we turn this into a new life-work model.
After
turning out on our balconies and rooftops, all across Europe, to applaud the
doctors, nurses, social care and other essential workers, we do not forget them
once the medical danger has passed. Not only do they get a better deal socially
and economically – the postwar slogan “homes fit for heroes” comes to mind –
but there is also what Polish populists slyly call a “redistribution of
respect”. And in making that necessary redistribution, we also deprive the
nationalist populists of their electoral appeal.
At the same
time, we recognise that a planet stalked by genuinely global threats, such as
this virus and climate change, requires more international cooperation, not
less. And the EU, which earlier this week convened an international meeting to
raise funds for fighting Covid-19, becomes a prime mover of global collective
action.
That’s the
dream. But then there’s the nightmare. This may be a postwar moment, but what
if it turns out to be more like the years after the first world war than the
post-1945 liberal and social democratic reconstruction. The nationalist
impulses we see in Donald Trump and Xi Jinping become even more pronounced.
With beggar-my-neighbour policies, the post-coronavirus recession descends into
a great depression. Inequality soars, rather than being diminished, both within
our societies and between different countries.
In Europe,
wealthy northern European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands simply
don’t show the necessary degree of solidarity with the battered economies of
south European eurozone members. Instead, they use the EU’s crisis-justified
suspension of limits on state aid to pump public funds into their key
industries, and the gulf between northern and southern Eurozone states grows
wider. In a couple of years’ time, a populist like Matteo Salvini, or someone
even worse (yes, it’s possible), gains power in an Italy where public debt is
now about 160% of GDP and blames all the country’s woes on a lack of north
European solidarity.
Meanwhile,
in the eastern half of the continent, Hungary remains a dictatorship, with
Viktor Orbán’s temporary emergency powers mysteriously becoming permanent.
Poland, where the governing party is currently, grotesquely, insisting on
carrying out a presidential election entirely by postal ballot that cannot
possibly be free and fair, follows down the Hungarian path. The EU, no longer a
community of democracies, and torn along both its north-south and east-west
axes, gradually weakens and disintegrates. Left to their own devices, its
member states fail to provide adequate job prospects, social security and an
ecologically sustainable future for their younger citizens. And so, as already
shockingly foreshadowed in our poll, they turn to authoritarian solutions.
Europe looks ever less to the US, ever more to China.
Come 2030
we probably won’t have either this hell or that heaven, just some version of
our usual human purgatory. But which variant we come closer to is entirely up
to us: to Americans and Chinese, Russians, Indians and Brazilians, of course,
but in Europe, it’s mainly up to us Europeans – including the post-Brexit
British of course, who are still Europeans, whether they like it or not.
That’s why,
on the website that presents our survey results, we’ve also set up a
self-interview facility for anyone with 10 minutes to spare to tell us your
best and worst European moments, and your hopes for Europe in 2030. Thus far,
the fall of the Berlin Wall has been the most widely mentioned formative moment
and Brexit the top-scoring worst moment. But maybe this coronavirus moment will
overtake them both. Come and tell us on europeanmoments.com.
• Timothy
Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist
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