Humanity is getting better only as a result of great wars. All other large-scale shocks, among which pandemics rank first, only exacerbate the consequences of original depravity and create conditions for some collectives to become stronger and others weaker. The reason is that they do not threaten the existence of states, which, as European history shows, will calmly survive the suffering of some citizens. Great wars usually end with individual states disappearing from the map, and this is their sobering power.
The enemy marching through your land becomes the most compelling argument for the fact that power in international politics should be limited by rules and regulations. Pandemics do not have such a direct relationship to the difference of opportunity factor. Therefore, one can hardly expect that the general nightmare of coronavirus infection - the first "plague of the 21st century" - will lead to changes in the behavior of human communities. While international politics will continue to plunge into the gloomy world of the American philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, where the human mind is the servant of the collective interest.
Great wars gave rise to progress in terms of relations between peoples. The Peloponnesian War gave us our first deep reflections on the nature of such a relationship. The Great Migration of Nations created the modern European civilization - the cradle of humanism and Enlightenment. Thirty Years' War 1618-1648 led Europe to the idea that it is impossible to live without morality and law - this will lead to mutual extermination, which the inhabitants of the German lands have experienced. The wars of revolutionary France, according to the Austrian diplomat Clemens Metternich, inspired the European monarchs with the idea of the need to see their interests as part of the interests of their neighbors and vice versa - that is, the concept of international cooperation appeared for the first time. The Vienna "concert" basically contained the idea of the need for monarchist regimes to stick together. This has helped Europe avoid great wars for nearly 100 years.
"The Second Thirty Years War" 1914-1945 made a reality that was previously not even possible - a working compromise between strength and morality. The UN and especially the Security Council with its permanent composition is the embodiment of the most daring ideas of the British historian and diplomat Edward Carr about the optimal combination of factors in the distribution of forces and the need for relative justice in relation to the weak. Not to mention the fact that two military disasters of the twentieth century led to the emergence of European integration - generally a unique example in political history, when a compromise was found between strong and weak members of the community. Now this compromise is being destroyed, but it will remain in the treasury of achievements.
The UN or the WHO are nothing more than powerless instruments in the hands of national governments, and accusations against them look, to put it mildly, not entirely correct. International organizations are, in principle, about states that in some way restrain their egoism and take into account the categories of cooperation. With very few exceptions, they do not have a government-independent law governing and empowering. Therefore, to reproach the UN or WHO for inaction, speaking from national positions (and there are no others), is to flog ourselves.
The most important function of international organizations is to maintain peace and increase the predictability of the intentions of states through their socialization. They successfully coped with this task and are coping with it. Otherwise, world war would have become a reality long ago. The most striking and well-known example is the veto power of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, which is a substitute for war. It is no coincidence that this institution survived even during the triumph of the liberal world order, when the power domination of the West was indisputable. Achievements of this magnitude really need to be taken seriously. It is understandable why Henry Kissinger, one of the greatest realists of the twentieth century, calls for the preservation of the basic institutions of the liberal order: this order is too good to be discarded. Until another great war forced to create new, more perfect,forms of achieving relative justice.
Of course, after the creation of nuclear weapons, the world as a way of relations between states received strong support. Thucydides wrote, citing the appeal of the Athenian ambassadors to the Melonian: "It will be more profitable for you to become subject to us than to endure the most severe disasters." This maxim of realism best reflects the rationality of war as a way of resolving objective contradictions between the interests of states. All technological inventions in history, up to the tanks and the Maxim machine gun, only confirmed that he was right. Nuclear weapons are the only innovation that has made war less rational, as "the worst disasters" are guaranteed to be tolerated on both sides.
At the same time, deterrence operates not only in relations between the great nuclear powers. Peace in Europe amid the growing power of Germany also depends on the fact that its neighbors - Russia and France - have nuclear arsenals. Even if Emmanuel Macron is unable to convert his own nuclear weapons into global political influence, the very fact of his existence determines the balance of power in Europe and forces powerful partners east of the Rhine to seek cooperation. And Russia in the 1990s. for all its political insignificance, it could not be considered as a potential target for absorption. Or quite primitive resource development by not only the United States, but also its European neighbors, as was the case with the weaker members of the international community.
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Due to the action of the nuclear deterrent factor, radical changes are possible only when the territory on this planet ceases to be the only objective sign of the existence of a state, and this is still a long way off. But the impossibility of a great war also means the absence of the likelihood of transformation of the collective interest of the state and, therefore, progress in international politics. The immediate changes brought about by the pandemic will have negative consequences in this sense.
So, for example, one can speculate that differentiation will begin to increase in the field of education. Distance learning will lead to the emergence of millions of poorly and moderately educated (depending on the quality of the courses mastered) specialists and thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of a select few who will have access to face-to-face communication and knowledge. This will only exacerbate the already multilevel imbalances that hinder the development of normal relations. In any case, so far all our reasoning about the upcoming innovations is based on the immutability of the hypothesis of selfishness and the search for ways to increase their capabilities by each actor. Even if in the United States, following the pandemic, by some miracle, signs of a welfare state and a health care system appear, this will only increase their capabilities in the bipolar struggle with China.
The "Black Death" of the 14th century did not force England and France to end the war, although both suffered approximately the same. All other more or less significant pandemic disasters affected the balance of power, but did not correct the nature of the behavior of states. During the Cold War, the United States and the USSR helped their allies in the Third World countries to get rid of very destructive epidemics, because they sought to strengthen their positions in the global confrontation.
It is hardly possible to count on the fact that now states will be capable of more. Modern conditions are not even favorable to persuading individual significant members of the community to prohibit their citizens from eating wild animals and infecting the whole world with new infections. We can only count on their own selfish interest. Since a world war is now not a rational solution from the point of view of states, international politics will have to move on without any major changes.
TIMOFEY BORDACHEV