The political and economic fallout that has emerged with the COVID-19 pandemic fits the criteria of events that Mann and Wainwright specify as likely to engender the planetary Leviathan: “Processes are more likely to drive the creation of Leviathan if [a] they present an existential threat; [b] they are large scale (global); and [c] they pose challenges for the existing political order” (2018., 142). However, the history enfolding before our eyes doesn’t look like the birth of a new global sovereignty. Given that nothing close to either a Leviathan or Climate X alternative to the nation-state presented itself, citizens are left with no choice than but to rely on adapting extant public institutions, infrastructures, and state directives. At the national level, the US government responded by blaming the symbol of global public health, the World Health Organization, among its other political rivals, China and Iran. This is in keeping with the “Western” world’s tactic of pointing the carbon-emission finger elsewhere as well:
“Unfortunately, in discussions of climate politics, China is usually considered only a problem, an amoral polluter. How often are we in North America or western Europe told our efforts to slow climate change are meaningless because whatever ‘good’ we do, ‘China’ will ultimately render it futile? Sometimes this is a product of ignorance, sometimes of racist Eurocentrism, sometimes both” (Wainwright and Mann 2018, 116).
Both the Chinese and Iranian governments have returned condemnations along with supporting conspiracies. Thus, rather than leviathan, we seem to be witnessing a Behemoth scenario in which “one or more of these competing powers will continue to compete with the United States” (Wainwright and Mann 2018, 143). And perhaps we should take heed the warning that “History would seem to suggest this will lead to war, and it may well” (2018, 143). Currently these Behemoth-like counter hegemonies are merely struggling to win a rhetorical war of self-righteousness and self-preservation. What is uncertain is whether or not these responses to COVID-19 are indicative of a schismogenetic pattern developing in the contemporary geopolitical order. As Wainwright and Mann comment:
“The implication is that the management of the planet would unfold in the context of a world system that is neither democratic (since the vast majority of nation-states and peoples would have no real involvement in the important decisions about the Earth’s management) nor clearly dominated by one hegemonic power. Planetary governance would unroll on a lumpy, conflictual geopolitical terrain upon which elites continue to seek “adaptations” that meet their needs—political stability, continued accumulation, and so on” (2018, 143).
