COVID-19 – crisis events and social transformations

More than 3 years have passed since the eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its impact on social life across the globe was so strong that it was immediately discussed in terms of its potential to trigger a major social transformation, not least by scholars in the social sciences and humanities. ¹ By now, it may seem as if such interpretative reaction was premature. Although policy measures and restrictions on behavior often lasted for a long time, in most countries social life appears to have returned to a kind of normality that was not expected and is not much different from the situation before the pandemic. Rather, the pandemic may have been superseded in public attention by newer as well as older urgencies. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the financial crisis of 2008 have been and are, arguably, more impacting on society and politics than the COVID-19 pandemic. All three events have had multiple impacts on the global economy and world politics as well as on everyday life, as some supplies become insecure, food prices go up, and mortgages can no longer be paid.

Despite the current impression, therefore, one should not lose sight of the pandemic. It can be seen as part of a sequence of global crisis events with possibly accumulating long-term consequences. Let us carve out some broad commonalities: The financial crisis, the pandemic, and the invasion of Ukraine have all local or world-regional origins, but global impact and consequences. They were all perceived as relatively sudden events, but once they have happened, it becomes easy to see that they have a longer history of comparatively minor events of a similar kind that preceded them. By implication, they were indeed not as unexpected as they were treated once they had happened, because prior knowledge was well available, about the deregulation of global finance and its risks; epidemiological and virological knowledge about coronaviruses and their spread; and about Russian aggression against other former states of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine itself in 2014.

There are many reasons why this knowledge was not heeded, but one of them stands out: Since the 1980s, a view of ‘globalization’ and ‘individualization’ as dominant trends of global economic, political, and cultural developments had emerged. Intensified commercial exchanges and a new global division of labor; information and communication technologies of instant global reach; and the increasing integration and subordination of existing states into functional global arrangements were indicators of these trends. Without this often being made explicit, (relevant parts of) humankind had returned to a belief that had first arisen in the 17th and 18th centuries, namely that spontaneous order would be generated as the aggregate of the multitude of actions and interactions of free human beings. Doux commerce would reign supreme, and the possibility that the truly significant ‘invisible hand’ might belong to financial speculators, virus carriers, or war-mongering statesmen was not seriously entertained. Legitimately organized collective action had been discredited and the power to tie these hands had been largely relinquished.

We have mentioned three recent crisis events and noted the comparatively minor preceding events that built up to the crises and of which knowledge was available. Clearly, this thought should lead to considering that there may be a future crisis event that has already announced itself and is known in principle but has not yet happened. We do not have to go far in this search: The upcoming event is a major climate catastrophe. Extreme weather events occur already, and many of them have had deadly consequences, for instance, the floods in Pakistan in 2022. One could also say that the catastrophe has already happened, only in relatively slow motion. We know that the situation will be deteriorating, and experts expect tipping-points to be reached soon. Nevertheless, there is little action taken to prevent the crisis event from happening. In contrast, significant actors keep moving toward it. They are the speculators, virus-spreaders, and warmongers of the coming climate crisis event.

Seeing the pandemic as a crisis within a series of crises with some common features helps us to understand it as being of lasting, not merely passing significance, despite the current impression. The contributions to this issue can be read in this light, and across different aspects of the pandemic they touch upon broader and more general dimensions of organized social life and ongoing social change. Maybe most significantly, the pandemic upset a fairly well-established boundary between the public and the private. It demanded changes of behavior and lifestyle, many of which are quintessentially private matters, and these changes required public guidance and restrictions. As the article by Beggar and Ghazali shows, the interaction and communication between citizens and institutions was often overall adequate, but the pandemic nevertheless took its toll on health and well-being, as evidenced in the study on students by Khomssi and Achahbar. Some policy measures, such as vaccine passports, carried the full ambiguity between their enabling role, on one hand, namely, giving access to public spaces, and the constraining one, on the other, being a tool of control and disciplinization, as discussed by Ajana et al. The attempt at controlling the virus needs to work with tools of risk assessment and perception but cannot avoid the emotionality that comes with everything affecting directly one’s own health and body as well as those of close others, as explored with the case of emotional advertising by Chirig, Bouziane, and Zakhir. Furthermore, even though coronaviruses are well researched, the features of the particular SARS-CoV2 were not, leaving for a long-time considerable uncertainty about the adequate course of action. The combination of strong authoritative intervention into the private sphere with some evolving degree of uncertainty lends itself to doubts and controversies about what is true and correct, analyzed by Mifdal.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought into the open long existing tensions between the public and the private; between authoritative collective action and personal freedom; between official risk assessment and personal emotional attachments; and between knowledge and uncertainty. With great variation between societies, these tensions had often been institutionally stabilized and domesticated. But they are not immune to social change in general, which often manifests itself in particular crisis events. At the very least, the pandemic had the effect of reopening debates about the most adequate way of handling these tensions.

Furthermore, there may also be more lasting shifts in interpreting the tensions. The pandemic has shown that public administration, even though it faced the crisis under long-lasting neglect and ill-equipped in many countries, has been able to respond to an urgency. Despite COVID-19 protests and conspiracy theories, collective action mostly prevailed over hyper-individualistic understandings of freedom (see also Vogt, 2021), and action based on limited knowledge over knowledge claims without foundations (see Boltanski and Esquerre, 2022 on the creation of political news). As a consequence, the necessity, even if not always the credibility, of purposeful social action was reasserted against the belief in spontaneous order – which was not yet the case at the moment of the financial crisis. The public and scholarly debates about the two ongoing crises – the world-order crisis and the climate crisis – point to the same direction of necessary long-term social change. With the necessity claimed, the possibility of such change requires further investigation.

Social Science Information welcomes further contributions to analyzing the COVID-19 pandemic, especially those that set the pandemic in the broader context of crisis events and social transformations. For this issue, we would like to thank Karima Bouziane (Chouaib Doukkali University, El Jadida, Morocco), who made us aware of intense research and debates about the pandemic among Moroccan scholars in the social sciences and humanities. The four contributions that deal with the pandemic in Morocco have emerged within these debates.

Peter Wagner
ICREA and Universitat de Barcelona, Spain