Greg Sheridan
is the foreign editor for
The Australian
. Today’s featured quote is from a column of his in tomorrow’s (March 19) edition. The lead sentence is “Coronavirus is the hunter-killer enemy of globalization.” He modifies that a little later in the piece with a reference to “globalization … as we have known it.” A little, but not much. Here is the full paragraph with today’s featured quote:
First, the centre of every citizen’s sense of accountability for this virus is their national government. No one asks: what is the Indian Ocean Regional Association for co-operation doing about this. They ask: what is Canberra doing?
Mr. Sheridan makes several arguments in a fairly short article, including these three:
First, from Wuhan to the Rome and from London to Los Angeles, the COVID-19 pandemic is a consequence of globalization.
Second, countries around the world have declared war on the virus. And wars, Mr. Sheridan writes, inevitably strengthen the hand of national governments. Strength is the key thought here. “Structurally,” he writes, “the crisis will see power flow to national capitals everywhere.” Earlier in the piece, there was this:
Redistributing wealth is the aim of every internationalist ideology and association on the planet. Building wealth, in contrast, is always a national objective, a national project.
Third, COVID-19 is giving politics in several countries a powerful shove in the same direction in which they were already headed. As he puts it:
All around the world, center-right politics was already being transformed from old-style market liberalism to a more pragmatic, democratic nationalism, à la
Boris Johnson, Donald Trump
(despite his many flaws),
Shinzo Abe, Narendra Modi
and many others.
