Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

Pandemic deepens social and political cleavages

Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor 22nd June 2020

The coronavirus crisis has inflamed cleavages in democratic societies which will be difficult to heal.

cleavages
Peter Hall

As Richard Evans observed in his studies of cholera in Europe during the 1800s, epidemics tend to intensify the faultlines in society, and that is certainly true of this new coronavirus. The most obvious lies between the generally well-educated who can retain their jobs and work remotely, while sheltering at home, and the workers who cannot afford to do so. The latter must labour, often for relatively low wages, at cashiers’ desks in grocery stores or pharmacies and drive trains or buses—and deliver the goods consumed by those at home.

cleavages
Rosemary Taylor

To some extent, this faultline mirrors the cleavage, deepening for some time, between those with the college education which confers cosmopolitan dispositions and market power in a globalised economy and those with less education who often hold more traditional values in jobs increasingly threatened by outsourcing and global competition. Members of the two groups are dying at very different rates.

In Britain, where the majority of middle-class employees have been able to work from home, as against only one in five among the working class, men in low-skilled jobs have been four times as likely to die from the virus than those in professional positions. It is one thing to feel ‘left behind’ and yet another to feel left behind to die. At some point, there will be a reckoning.

Populist right

Across the advanced democracies, the pandemic is also being used to deepen a political faultline between centrist parties, whose voters generally favour a sustained lockdown to prevent virus transmission, and potential supporters of radical-right populist politicians, who are using the economic distress to urge ‘liberation’ from lockdowns and resumption of activity. After weeks of political agitation, 78 per cent of American Democrats support stay-at-home orders, while only 45 per cent of Republicans do, and similar rifts are visible between centrist governments and the populist right in European nations such as Germany and Spain.

Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content.


We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Thank you!

Please check your inbox and click on the link in the confirmation email to complete your newsletter subscription.

.

To some extent, these faultlines overlap. Populist parties are striving to become the political expression of those deprived of work by the epidemic, throwing an unsettled politics into even more turmoil.

A third faultline, between young and old, is being rendered more salient. There has always been potential for conflict between generations over social policies which favour the elderly over the young, but hitherto that has been suppressed by the intergenerational ties which bind families together. The depression issuing from the pandemic may change that, however. Economic analyses show that young people who enter a depressed labour market pay lifelong costs for the slow start to their careers.

Whether the distributive consequences of depression will generate a full-scale political split between younger and older generations is unclear. But is it any wonder that, when professors ask how they can help their graduate students, some are replying ‘Retire’?

Racial faultline

The coronavirus has also exposed a racial faultline of special importance in the United States. Social epidemiologists have long known that people of colour are more at risk of suffering a variety of illnesses—such as diabetes, heart disease, and asthma—but these disparities have usually fallen below the public radar. Racial disparities associated with the coronavirus initially also escaped notice, partly because the nation was preoccupied by the threat to older people and partly because states were not releasing racial data on infections, testing and deaths.

Now that it is clear that African-Americans contract, and die from, this virus at especially high rates, the question remains as to whether these data will lead to wider recognition of the longstanding structural conditions underlying racial differences in morbidity and mortality. Will heightened awareness of the impact of police violence on black communities in recent weeks be enough to bring about a sea-change in perceptions and policies?


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

Of course, this virus is also intensifying nascent conflicts at the international level. For the European Union, the pandemic has become an existential crisis, as southern Europeans hard-hit by the virus have asked what European solidarity means if it does not yield real financial support, while many northerners have continued to insist that the EU must not become a ‘transfer union’. The recent Franco-German initiative to promote a rescue fund financed by joint borrowing, taken up by the European Commission, appeared to offer a route out of this impasse. But the failed European Council meeting last week showed this is still seen by factions in the north as too much.

On a grander scale, the epidemic is feeding tension between the US and China. Now that the virus has made it impossible for him to run for re-election as president on the strength of the economy, Donald Trump is campaigning against China in the hope that ersatz appeals to patriotism will lead Americans to rally round the flag in support of him.

That tactic is not unknown in politics and it has extra bite at the moment. People often want to believe that sources of contagion are foreign: just as some now label Covid-19 ‘the Chinese virus’, so the English once called syphilis the ‘French disease’ and most other European nations blamed it on their neighbours. In the current political battles, the World Health Organization has already become an inadvertent casualty, and many more dangers lie ahead.

Prescient warning

These observations remind us to beware of letting the anxieties a terrible epidemic arouses turn social divisions into deep political antagonisms. In the midst of another great depression, the then US president Franklin Roosevelt presciently warned of a ‘nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance’.

Nor can we depend on medical science alone to counteract the effects of this epidemic. No social vaccine will heal the divisions the virus has laid bare. Economic stimulus, while desperately needed, will not in itself stitch deep tears in the social fabric. We shall have to address the social inequities this epidemic has made manifest in material and symbolic terms.

That will require a dose of tolerance hospitals alone cannot deliver—as well as renewed efforts to deliver decent jobs and distribute resources more equitably than the policies of a neoliberal age have done.

Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor

Peter A Hall is Krupp Foundation professor of European studies at Harvard University and the editor with Michèle Lamont of Successful Societies and Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. Rosemary CR Taylor is associate professor of sociology and community health at Tufts University and has written widely on epidemics, past and present.

Home ・ Politics ・ Pandemic deepens social and political cleavages

Most Popular Posts

schools,Sweden,Swedish,voucher,choice Sweden’s schools: Milton Friedman’s wet dreamLisa Pelling
world order,Russia,China,Europe,United States,US The coming world orderMarc Saxer
south working,remote work ‘South working’: the future of remote workAntonio Aloisi and Luisa Corazza
Russia,Putin,assets,oligarchs Seizing the assets of Russian oligarchsBranko Milanovic
Russians,support,war,Ukraine Why do Russians support the war against Ukraine?Svetlana Erpyleva

Most Recent Posts

Sakharov,nuclear,Khrushchev Unhappy birthday, Andrei SakharovNina L Khrushcheva
Gazprom,Putin,Nordstream,Putin,Schröder How the public loses out when politicians cash inKatharina Pistor
defence,europe,spending Ukraine and Europe’s defence spendingValerio Alfonso Bruno and Adriano Cozzolino
North Atlantic Treaty Organization,NATO,Ukraine The Ukraine war and NATO’s renewed credibilityPaul Rogers
transnational list,European constituency,European elections,European public sphere A European constituency for a European public sphereDomènec Ruiz Devesa

Other Social Europe Publications

The transatlantic relationship
Women and the coronavirus crisis
RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?
US election 2020
Corporate taxation in a globalised era

ETUI advertisement

Bilan social / Social policy in the EU: state of play 2021 and perspectives

The new edition of the Bilan social 2021, co-produced by the European Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), reveals that while EU social policy-making took a blow in 2020, 2021 was guided by the re-emerging social aspirations of the European Commission and the launch of several important initiatives. Against the background of Covid-19, climate change and the debate on the future of Europe, the French presidency of the Council of the EU and the von der Leyen commission must now be closely scrutinised by EU citizens and social stakeholders.


AVAILABLE HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Living and working in Europe 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic continued to be a defining force in 2021, and Eurofound continued its work of examining and recording the many and diverse impacts across the EU. Living and working in Europe 2021 provides a snapshot of the changes to employment, work and living conditions in Europe. It also summarises the agency’s findings on issues such as gender equality in employment, wealth inequality and labour shortages. These will have a significant bearing on recovery from the pandemic, resilience in the face of the war in Ukraine and a successful transition to a green and digital future.


AVAILABLE HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

EU Care Atlas: a new interactive data map showing how care deficits affect the gender earnings gap in the EU

Browse through the EU Care Atlas, a new interactive data map to help uncover what the statistics are often hiding: how care deficits directly feed into the gender earnings gap.

While attention is often focused on the gender pay gap (13%), the EU Care Atlas brings to light the more worrisome and complex picture of women’s economic inequalities. The pay gap is just one of three main elements that explain the overall earnings gap, which is estimated at 36.7%. The EU Care Atlas illustrates the urgent need to look beyond the pay gap and understand the interplay between the overall earnings gap and care imbalances.


BROWSE THROUGH THE MAP

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

Towards a new Minimum Wage Policy in Germany and Europe: WSI minimum wage report 2022

The past year has seen a much higher political profile for the issue of minimum wages, not only in Germany, which has seen fresh initiatives to tackle low pay, but also in those many other countries in Europe that have embarked on substantial and sustained increases in statutory minimum wages. One key benchmark in determining what should count as an adequate minimum wage is the threshold of 60 per cent of the median wage, a ratio that has also played a role in the European Commission's proposals for an EU-level policy on minimum wages. This year's WSI Minimum Wage Report highlights the feasibility of achieving minimum wages that meet this criterion, given the political will. And with an increase to 12 euro per hour planned for autumn 2022, Germany might now find itself promoted from laggard to minimum-wage trailblazer.


FREE DOWNLOAD

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us on social media

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube