Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: As we write at the end of December 2020, reflecting now on almost a year of living with the SARS-Cov-2 virus, we are heartened by the emergency authorization of several vaccines in the United States, the European Union, Great Britain, China, and Russia. The first of these vaccines is notable not only for the speed, but also the international collaboration which has facilitated its development. It was developed in a small scientific lab in Germany, BioNTech. Its founders are a husband-and-wife team, Uğur Şahi and Özlem Türeci. One was born in Turkey and immigrated to Germany at the age of four; the other is the daughter of Turkish immigrants. In February 2020, they partnered with the U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which had the infrastructure, scale, and logistical capacity to conduct large-scale trials and manage the eventual manufacture and distribution of the vaccine. While the company Pfizer is U.S.-based, its CEO is not. Albert Burla is a Greek national who grew up and received his education in Thessaloniki. He has lived and worked in several countries for the past quarter century. Even as the pandemic has prompted many countries to close borders and prioritize the nation, these biographies tell an important story about the global production of knowledge, global trade, and global cultural networks. The past year has felt dominated by a retreat into smaller and smaller spaces, as we have been denied travel across borders, across town, and even out of our apartments and houses. In the midst of these closures, the global persists, not only in the constantly traveling virus, but also in the scientific research conducted to fight against it. Before the spring of 2020, global pandemics were the stuff of history. Highly infectious or difficult to treat viruses, such as Ebola or H1N1, did erupt in some countries, such as China and Liberia. Experienced local governments, sometimes with the assistance of other nations or transnational organizations like the Red Cross or World Health Organization, deployed resources (modern medicine, hygiene and protective gear, contact tracing and tracking) quickly, containing each outbreak. Global, uncontrolled pandemics occurred only in the distant past. They are not supposed to happen in the twenty-first century, and they are not supposed to happen to us. Our faith in these measures made 2020 all the more disorienting. The virus spread with devastating and unpredictable, if uneven, speed. And, we were confronted with the reality that our public lives were put on hold, our travels curtailed, our access to archives, university libraries, colleagues, and students transferred to the digital realm. Some of us had close, frightening contacts with the virus or faced heart-wrenching decisions about which options were safe and which were sustainable. As editors of a journal concerned with international relations, we could not help thinking, even in the midst of our own adjustments, about what the rapid spread of the virus across the globe meant. Compared even to the 1918 flu pandemic, the virus, information about it, and the response spread amazingly quickly. Our interconnectedness was laid bare in the most dramatic way. The disease was a global crisis. And even in those early weeks of pulling in, it was equally clear that the solution to the crisis had to be a global effort, regardless of how much nationalist rhetoric circulated in the public sphere or how many borders were closed. Corona nationalism, as one of our contributors termed it, neither reflects the reality of the pandemic nor does it aid the science needed to end it. For our small group of editors, the pandemic had little effect on our editorial work. We, after all, already had been conducting partially remote meetings, since the members of our team live and work in five different states. Journal work felt like one of the few normal things in our lives. But as the weeks passed with no end in sight, we began to ponder the larger implications of this pandemic for our work as editors and teachers, our research, our students, and our colleagues who faced personal and professional challenges, including looming tenure deadlines, small children at home, and job insecurity. We also started to ponder how this pandemic would affect our journal and whether Diplomatic History had something to contribute to the evolving discussion about what the pandemic meant, how it affected our thinking as historians of foreign relations, and what the current and long-term implications might be for our profession. The result is the current issue. We asked a broad cross-section of scholars within the SHAFR community to share with us their thoughts on how the pandemic was influencing their thinking about their scholarship. The invitation was purposefully vague, prompting people to consider whether they were asking different questions, noticing certain omissions, or interrogating established methodologies. We stated directly that we were not asking for reflections on what it has been like to live through the pandemic; we were interested in what our colleagues were noticing about the topics they usually think about. We wanted scholars at the beginning of their careers as well as senior members of the profession; we wanted those at research-heavy institutions as well as teaching schools; scholars from the United States as well as from abroad. The personal is the academic, always, and we suspected that people living through the pandemic in different ways would have different responses. The essays were written over the course of the summer of 2020 and only slightly revised in the fall, mostly to update numbers, as infections and death toll kept rising to levels unimaginable in the spring of 2020. The results exceeded even our high expectations. The authors were generous in sharing thoughts still in formation. Some essays demonstrate that the pandemic indeed has not changed everything, while others draw attention to fissures and connections already in place but overlooked, as well as to those developing in the midst of this crisis. Some of the twenty-three essays are traditional scholarly essays, while others reflect on the connections among personal circumstances, academic opportunities, and intellectual engagement. In this introduction we want to explain what we hoped to accomplish with this issue and highlight a few themes that resonated beyond a single essay or struck us as particularly prescient for our readers. We had some guiding objectives. First, we wanted to prompt our colleagues to imagine how the pandemic might change common assumptions, concepts, and the methodologies we apply in our research. In other words, we wanted to know whether extreme times like these would leave an imprint on the actual scholarship we produce. Would it lead us to ask different kinds of questions, would we become aware of blind spots in our previous research and analysis, would it alter our thinking about topics we already wrote about? Second, when we conceived of this special issue, during late spring 2020, it had become clear that we would be living with the pandemic for some time. Our lives were consumed and structured by the demands of the pandemic. It was difficult enough to live in the moment for many. Our usual thinking and writing took a back seat to more pressing concerns. For precisely those reasons, we thought it was the perfect time to invite colleagues, if they could, to do what they do best: analyze the world with the tools of a historian. The quality of the essays demonstrates that our colleagues have much of value to say. One contributor, a senior scholar, found doing this work “cathartic.” It was a relief to think about research rather than hand sanitizer and face masks. Third, we see this collection of essays as a first draft of history as well as a historical document. As historians, we are all well aware that our understandings of this moment are incomplete and partial, subject to reinterpretation and revision by future scholars. This set of essays begins the process of chronicling the intellectual history of the pandemic, and its effects. There is no doubt that our interpretation of this historical moment will evolve over time, but it is important for both scholars and students to see where we started, what our initial reactions were, what we anticipated, and how we framed what we perceive will be a watershed moment in history. Although it was not an explicit goal of the project, the set of essays in some ways serves to create a record of what our professional and personal lives looked like during the summer of 2020. The essays as a whole provide insight into the challenges our colleagues faced as they navigated lockdowns, closed archives, and other hardships. How did they experience the pandemic in the United States, how elsewhere in the world? How did status in the profession affect the experiences of recent PhDs, untenured faculty, senior scholars? Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites reflect our day-to-day experiences effectively, but are perhaps more ephemeral guides to how we lived through the pandemic. These essays, by contrast, provide a considered, if initial, reflection on our lived experience. The topics of the essays that follow range from food security, to meanings of death and bodily representations of health, to geopolitics and security, to global circulations of art and intellectuals, to exile and belonging. It’s tempting to think of these themes in terms of before, during and after the pandemic, but that would be too simplistic for the arguments made here. They reflect the broad set of concerns we have as scholars of foreign relations. It is impossible to neatly categorize the essays, but these contrasting themes connect and cut across this set of essays. In identifying these apparently oppositional themes, as many of them are, we are not suggesting that they are, either temporally or conceptually, opposites. Mobility and confinement, or isolation, is a theme in most of the essays. Even before the transnational turn, scholars of foreign relations were more attuned than most other scholars to movement, the crossing of borders, and travel. The crashing halt in our own movement in spring 2020 drew our attention sharply to the ways in which most people now take for granted the ability to move with ease and few restraints, and the loss we feel now that we cannot. Our casual reliance on travel to research and write foreign relations history prompted some essayists to question its future, with those based in Europe, surprisingly, feeling more cut off and isolated than those based in Asia. Others noted the ways this current disruption has prompted them to look again at the historical figures they study, seeing the travel circuits differently, and paying more attention to those who traveled and those who stayed, willingly or unwillingly. The relationship of the global and the nation, of globalization and nationalism, is a familiar subject for historians of foreign relations. Although nearly all contributors touch on this topic in some way, few take it as their main focus, perhaps because the pandemic merely revealed or enhanced tensions between the national and the global. Those who do highlight this topic are at odds as to what they predict the effect of the pandemic may be. The essays as a set demonstrate effectively that the nation and globalization remain strong forces, and that the pandemic reveals the fault lines in their tension. Trade protectionism thrives in the United States and Britain while international coalitions develop vaccines. People use technology to connect more than ever and refugees continue to flee in the face of virus threat, while borders slam shut to prevent people and viruses from crossing. Art and ideas often can circulate without regard to borders, but borders also can limit some while facilitating other relationships among artists and intellectuals. The essays pay remarkably little attention to the effects of pandemic disruptions on global supply chains, despite the lingering shortages of ordinary consumer goods, although one essay does issue a call for such work to be done for both the 1918 and 2020 pandemics. A varied group of the essays addresses questions about U.S. standing in the world. Some look at traditional geopolitics, addressing questions of superpower competition, while others interrogate the ideological underpinning of the U.S. political system and the ways it is designed to respond poorly to this kind of challenge to the wellbeing of Americans. Some essays barely mention the United States; the authors look through pandemic lenses to see how actors from other countries are now ordering, and have previously ordered, the world to suit their own needs, paying scant attention to existing U.S.-made structures. Lively debates exist already about whether the United States is in decline, and these essays may contribute to that discussion, but their purpose is weightier, of interest beyond the present moment. They ask what the nature of U.S. power is, and what it means for both Americans and the rest of the world that the United States wields power as it does. The intersections of health, disease, death, and care with the exercise of power prompted essays that demonstrate the myriad ways health and foreign relations are intertwined. These essays sit at the intersection of affect and analysis, resonating intellectually and emotionally. Some contributors focused on how the state has shaped bodies and health, how the state promotes particular models of care, and how those models of care are inequitable and resisted. Others explore how we feel about health, disease, and death and how those feelings shape what we expect and allow from the state. These authors also help us think through the corporeality of the politics of covid-19. They offer ways to bridge the gap between the intimate and the state, the personal and the polity. Some essays address the relationship of the pandemic to Black Lives Matter and the massive protests against racial injustice in the summer of 2020. The original invitations were sent out just before the murder of George Floyd and did not anticipate the ways this issue would intersect with what we had asked people to write about. Those who wrote about Black Lives Matter saw the pandemic as revealing preexisting inequities and racism deeply embedded in the United States. That the BLM movement sparked similar protests around the world also reveals that racial inequities in policing, health, and wealth are not confined to the United States. Many societies are ready for racial reckoning. The question of whether the pandemic has revealed what already existed or caused ruptures in an existing social structure is a final theme informing many of the essays. This initial effort will likely get some of those assessments wrong, but historians will continue to explore where continuities are entrenched and changes are initiated. The essays appear below in alphabetical order by the authors’ last names. We did not want to prejudice the connections you may find among them by imposing our own groupings. They are short enough to read several at once, or to assign a handful to a class, but each provides much to think about. Even while we think this set of essays offers a compelling first draft of an intellectual history of the pandemic, we are also aware that it is incomplete. Some important themes and topics are absent. Only one essay, for instance, touches on the hidden nature of this pandemic, and does so in the context of unseen deaths. Much else is going unseen, too. Illicit activities such as international trafficking of drugs and street dealing to customers appeared to decrease dramatically early in the pandemic. Drug trafficker supply chains were as disrupted as for any corporation, and traffickers could not apply to their government for assistance. The number of border crossings, licit and illicit, dropped so much that it was more difficult for traffickers to blend into a crowd. Similarly, when no one was outside in March and April, street dealers could not be either, at least not without attracting attention. Drug traffickers have adapted, some even more effectively than licit corporations, and are benefitting due to inattention from law enforcement, who have other pandemic-related duties or whose numbers have been thinned by disease or cuts. For the twelve months before May 2020, the most recent reliable statistics, the United States experienced its highest ever number of overdose deaths: 81,000.1 Drug manufacture, trafficking, and use have been effectively hidden during the pandemic. As we are able to think about and then study that, what will it help us understand about other hidden activities? We might also explore further how the pandemic related to environmental concerns. Julia F. Irwin’s Bernath lecture, included in this issue but not part of the forum, addresses this very important topic head on. The climate crisis, a dominant issue prior to the outbreak, was initially pushed aside by the more dramatic and immediate effects of the pandemic. Yet scientists soon noticed secondary effects of the global lockdown, such as the dramatic improvement in air quality in many urban areas across the globe. If there was one positive outcome of the pandemic, this was it. Though not yet accepted as a feasible long-term solution to the climate crisis, the dramatic reduction in global traffic offered a glimpse of what was possible, if only the world decided to reduce its addiction to motorized travel and shopping. We hope these essays will offer opportunities for reflection, generate debate, and serve as a starting point for the transition of a current event into history. When we initiated this project, we were not sure what the outcome would be, but we felt a sense of urgency about getting our pandemic thoughts in print, as both historical record and spur for what comes next. The essays here prompt us to think deeply and differently, to with familiar and familiar colleagues, and to help our students see how historical are and The pandemic may be as people to take vaccines. Our of its are just is of History at and of Diplomatic is the of of The United States and in and on U.S. relations with and is of History at and of Diplomatic is the most of The of A History has on and history and and on and
Source: Diplomatic History
DOI: 10.1093/dh/dhab018
Authors: Anne L Foster, Petra Goedde
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3175229183