The Brazilianization of the World
The periphery is where the future reveals itself. —Erroneously attributed to J. G. Ballard by Mark Fisher
“I t couldn’t happen here.” Pandemics and other threats to health security were supposed to be problems in and from the Global South. But the deficiencies Western states have faced in developing and executing coherent plans, coordinating state agencies, communicating with the public, or even just producing and storing sufficient medical and pharmaceutical equipment (to say nothing of the EU’s scandalous vaccine rollout), have highlighted state failure in the very heartlands of global capitalism. Hollowed-out state capacities, political confusion, cronyism, conspiratorial thinking, and trust deficits have exposed the crumbling legitimacy that now makes rich and powerful states look like banana republics.
Surveying the rankings of pandemic readiness from before Covid-19 struck—like the Global Security Index or the Epidemic Preparedness Index—one finds that the United States and the United Kingdom were supposedly the two best-prepared countries, with EU countries ranked highly, too. These were states that felt they had nothing to learn from the previous experiences of countries such as Brazil, China, Liberia, Sierra Leone, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And although countries that have managed the pandemic well are few and far between, state failure in the heart of Western capitalism puts paid to any complacent notions about the End of History and the primacy of one model over another. We all seemingly live in “less-developed countries” now.
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