The following article is an extract from the new report, The Dangers Ahead: Covid-19, Authoritarianism and Democracy, published by the London School of Economics Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit. The report can be read in full here.
The Coronavirus crisis has massively aggravated the existing systemic risks facing the international order. Prior to the crisis a powerful global tendency towards authoritarian governance already existed. Political nationalism has proven very amenable to the economic conditions created after the 2008 financial crisis. At the level of domestic politics nationalism provides a vocabulary of fear and diversion, directing grievances towards ‘aliens’ and other minorities within the polity and raising hostility towards imagined ‘foreign’ enemies outside it.
