Precarious Sovereignty in a Post-liberal Europe: The COVID-19 Emergency in Estonia and Finland
- PDF / 791,911 Bytes
- 23 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 88 Downloads / 173 Views
Precarious Sovereignty in a Post‑liberal Europe: The COVID‑19 Emergency in Estonia and Finland Andrey Makarychev1 · Tatiana Romashko2 Received: 20 June 2020 / Accepted: 29 September 2020 © Fudan University 2020
Abstract The paper addresses a puzzle resulting from the current global state of alert: the coronavirus pandemic brought us back to the world of the allegedly sovereign nation states with borders and national governments in charge, yet in fact, this retrieved sovereignty looks very vulnerable and precarious. We explain this controversy through a triad of concepts—sovereignty, governmentality, and post-liberalism— that we apply to an analysis of a corona-imposed state of emergency in Estonia and Finland. Based on comparative case study research, we posit that sovereignty is precarious in post-liberalism due to its large dependence on the technologies of responsibilization and agency. From a biopolitical perspective, a major point in the anticrisis management is to convince people to sacrifice personal liberties for the sake of public safety. These issues of governmentality will be dealt with based on critical discourse analysis and media analysis in Estonia and Finland. Keywords Coronavirus · Estonia · Finland · Precarious sovereignty · Smooth governance · Governmentality · Responsibilization · Agamben · Foucault
1 Introduction This article stems from the general presumption that the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 is a major shaper of the ongoing transformation of the liberal international order. On the surface, it seems that traditional nation-state-based territoriality is re-emerging as there are growing demands for key elements of national sovereignty—borders, checkpoints, and other elements of a security infrastructure. Yet, the global state of
* Andrey Makarychev [email protected] Tatiana Romashko [email protected] 1
University of Tartu, Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, Tartu, Estonia
2
Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Jyvaskyla, Finland
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Chinese Political Science Review
alert, which is being largely administered by sovereign governments, has unveiled the vulnerability of sovereignty under exceptional circumstances. Discussions on this paradox are not new, and there have been plenty of voices in academia who, for decades, have been sceptical about the ability of national governments to protect their citizens from terrorism or properly take care of millions of refugees and internally displaced persons. The recovered sovereignty, indeed, looks vulnerable and precarious, which is particularly visible in Europe as a hotbed of post-liberal transformations, which test the ability of the EU and its member states to mitigate the implications of the restrictions imposed upon the population. We use the concept of precarious sovereignty as an inverted replica of Judith Butler’s idea of ‘precarious life’, thus pointing to the fragility of sovereign power in times of emergency. The conceptualisation of sovereignty as precar
Data Loading...
