Wednesday, April 29, 2009

The global politics of swine flu

Adapted from Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Lesson: Crises could create opportunities, more crises, or both.
We may be at the incipient stage of swine flu's deadly spread across the globe, but already signs of new trans-Atlantic fissures over EU travel advisory to the United States and Mexico.
Swine flu is a contagious respiratory disease that usually affects pigs. "Hysterical", "unwarranted", "overreaction" and "ineffective", were the top choices of words used by US officials in reaction to the EU health officials' alarm bells, and the stern US responses to the Europeans' health disaster response reminds one of China's similar response when the US Center on Disease Control, put this statement on its website in response to the early reports of the SARS epidemic in Asia: "Don't go to mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Hanoi unless you really have to.
Hundreds of US flights to and from Mexico have continued unabated since the swine flu outbreak, and there has not been any attempt by the US government to either close some borders with Mexico or even reduce the substantial human traffic crossing those borders, fearing the adverse economic impacts in today's climate of global economic recession. The trick is undoubtedly not to make policies based on worst-case scenarios, but then again there is also the grave risk of avoiding a painful "great reshuffling" of policies. "A severe pandemic might encourage us to rethink the deadly pace of globalization and biological trade in all living things," wrote Nikforuk. Clearly, Third World Mexico's lack of an integrated strategy to combat the infectious disease with adequate resources has a lot to do with the flu's high mortality rate compared to its impact in US and Canada. As usual, the North-South gaps reveal themselves with glaring and oppressive clarity in such outbreaks of public illness. At the same time, by posing the US as a "risk society", a whole new fertile field of discourse on America's (health) identity has been opened by the threat of swine flu. An imagined pandemic may sting the US nearly as much as a real pandemic and the sheer indeterminacy of the flu's potency and future growth simply adds to its dispensation of a new unhealthy image for the US. Swine flu points at the growing linkage between foreign policy and health policy, as well as the nexus between health and security. Should it turn out that we are merely witnessing its first phase of attack, which is pregnant with multiple subsequent waves causing greater and greater disruptions in world trade, transport and trans-border human movement, something impossible to pre-calculate at this stage, then a whole new logic of de-globalization may be inevitable. On the other hand, this flu has the potential to be labeled as a "metropolis disease" that does not contaminate much of the the Third World. On the whole, swine flu can take one of two directions, it can either act as a circuit-breaker for a renewed globalization in terms of collective response, or a potent source of "international solidarity" as envisioned by UN chief Ban. Or, finally, it may have the contradictory effect of pushing both chariots simultaneously, at least in the short run.