Healthy Sovereignty: International Public Health Policy in the Age of COVID-19

The Omicron variant is on the rise, bringing questions of international sovereignty to the fore of political discourse as borders slam shut, travel restrictions are reinstated, and yet another blow is struck to the notion of a multilateral solution. While many have obsessed over the activities of International Organizations (IOs) and their potential erosion of state sovereignty, I will argue that this is a misconception. While the primacy of the state has been eroded by a collection of social forces and non-state actors, states have not been and will not be superseded for the foreseeable future. In fact, the push to dissolve state sovereignty has been met in equal force with a reassertion of sovereignty during the COVID-19 pandemic. Regardless of your position on COVID-19, the response by states towards IOs and other states throughout the pandemic has notably been predicated on an ideology of self-help that has often neglected to reflect the advice of public health experts and ignored the most efficacious and ethical policy measures (Liptak, 2021; Bayram & Shields, 2021). I will argue that this backlash has driven failures in COVID-19 policy and severely damaged global confidence, security, and stability.

At its most simple, sovereignty is assigned to a person, body, or institution within or representative of the state which possesses the ultimate authority to establish or amend laws. In traditional International Relations (IR) and geopolitics, we examine states as sovereign entities. In other words, there is no higher authority beyond the individual state in the system. This remains the core assumption of Realism, Neoliberalism, and Constructivism, comprising the current dominant perspectives of IR (Waltz, 1979; Keohane, 1984; Wendt, 1999). Sovereignty confers on the state the right to act legitimately, without constraints or undue influence, in matters of domestic governance. However, we should not understand this as fixed, but polysemous, temporal, and contingent as political scientist Raia Prokhovnik (2007) does. Prokhovnik (2007) conceptualizes six discourses which constitute “overlapping clusters” of general features of sovereignty to understand its flexibility dependent on acknowledgement, recognition, and use (p. 19). This defines the boundaries of knowledge and bestows power upon others, with secondary rules as products of legal or cognitive expression reliant on performance. Political concepts like sovereignty are shared frameworks for debate and discussion which mediate action, behaviour, and meaning, and hold the latent urge to depoliticize themselves. They shift over time to suit both the period and material conditions, responding to articulations and action in discourse, policy, and practice. For our purposes, I adopt Prokhovnik’s general position, including the conventional political and legal distinctions, as well as de facto and de jure distinctions, to understand how COVID-19 has seen a re-assertion of state sovereignty. It is also worth noting sovereignty’s influence in determining how politics is enacted: defining who gets to be at the table, conferring legitimacy and authority, how one should behave and what must be excluded, as well as whether something is “apolitical” or “neutral” (Prokhovnik, 2007: p. 13).

IOs have undeniably dismantled aspects of state sovereignty, though they are not the sole driving force. The Rights Revolution following the horrors of the Holocaust drove the proliferation of IOs and their branching bureaucracies. The combined force of civil society actors, governments, and institutions drove the creation of the UN, universal declarations of human rights, and the recognition of minority, Indigenous, and gendered rights. These and subsequent transnational movements have proven the value of IOs, civil society actors, and their institutions in facilitating change, embedding external and internal constraints, imposing consequences, and exerting pressure to undermine the value of state sovereignty.

However, this undermining of state sovereignty has been multifaceted, also driven by new technology and communications, the globalisation of supply chains, the internationalisation of finance and the division of labour, the rise of transnational corporations, and regional integration have all blurred the sanctity of borders. These 'problems without passports' undermine how we conceptualize sovereignty and its translation into material reality in the modern era. These are part and parcel of an increasingly sophisticated system of global capitalism which has undermined the utility of the state as an analytic concept to the exclusion of others. As a result, the traditional state-centric paradigm is problematic, as perspectives on IOs can jump between extremes of benevolent, non-partisan angels and subversive agents of foreign influence, ideology, and greed. We cannot solely base assumption of IOs on individual examples but must understand them as partisan agents operating in a political space to further an agenda. Abandoning this dualism expands the role of IOs and their potential as extensions, critics, and sculptors of state power. Putting all of this in mind, in response to this push by social forces, there has been a backlash against this undermining of state sovereignty which has only been exacerbated by COVID-19.

Response to the COVID-19 pandemic by states has been sporadic, panic-driven, and (arguably) selfish. Initial reports from China were dismissed by many, and states were slow to act (Lewis, 2021). By March of 2020, many had rejected WHO recommendations and opted for hard border closures in line with the United States following initial cases (Kislenko, 2021). While the rejection may have been symbolic, it is worth noting that, “Only the WHO has the membership (and thus, the legitimacy) to engage in collective action” which is necessary to combat this virus (Bayram & Shields, 2021: p. 14). These closures may have had some potential efficacy early on in the pandemic, but their effects are likely overstated and they were not combined with other effective control measures like contact-tracing, accurate and clear public health directives, and enforcement (Mallapaty, 2020; Kislenko, 2021). In this regard, border closures represented both a superficial and very real assertion of sovereignty intended to inspire confidence in government, placate, and reassure us of the government’s preparedness (or lack thereof). This was followed with a scramble for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in which “rich countries [pushed the] poor aside,” (Bradley, 2020) driving PPE shortages until well into 2021 by hoarding supplies in a fashion likened to a corporate “law of the jungle” (Meredith, 2020; Lee, 2021). In line with this behaviour, Western states like Canada, the European Union countries, Switzerland, and many others rejected calls to waive intellectual property (IP) rights surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines at the WTO, which would have provided doses at a low cost and as quickly and effectively as possible (Ntaba et al., 2021; Beattie, 2021). Thus, select states have wielded their sovereign authority to defend corporate interests and the profit motive, and have attempted to depoliticise vaccine discourses to preclude conversation of waiving IP rights. This has constructed an artificial scarcity favouring wealthy OECD countries benefiting from the plundering of neocolonialism to the tune of trillions yearly (Hickel et al., 2021: 1042-1044) while structuring demand in a competitive market.

Instead of offering mass-produced at-cost vaccines for all countries, the WHO and the ever-magnanimous international community have produced the COVAX program. While the program is both impressive and unprecedented, it represents a medical and logistical failure on a global scale, having failed to meet every target and demonstrating how the global community abandons its most impoverished (Sharma et al., 2021; Stephansky, 2020). Additionally, the partisanship and politicization that have infected the discourse around vaccination policy have likewise tainted perception of the WHO, with polls in the US showing heuristics like partisanship, ideology, cooperative internationalism, and nationalism are key to shaping public trust in the WHO (Bayram & Shields, 2021), and that conservatism, nationalism, and protectionism correlates with distrust in the WHO alongside non-cooperation with public health measures.

The single potential light in an otherwise dark tunnel presents itself in the form of the COVAX program. An international partnership with states, IOs, and other levels of governance to equitably distribute vaccines, McAdams et al. (2020) characterize the program as a pragmatic approach to incentivizing states to participate against their interests. Rather than deter states from forging bilateral deals, COVAX encourages nations to guarantee rapid and equitable access to vaccines worldwide, increasing vaccine fungibility and harmonization of production, with the goal to distribute 2 billion vaccines by the end of 2021 (McAdams et al., 2020; Sharma et al., 2021). COVAX has failed to achieve this and represents less of a “naively ambitious” failure (Goldhill, 2021) than a clearly predictable one, a result of underfunding, poor planning, actionless rhetoric, and states’ proclivity to prioritize the profit motive over people’s lives. Its biggest problem remains the acquisition of doses (Mueller & Robbins, 2021). This embodies a Realist view of the world, one shaped by concepts of self-help and a drive for survival in a zero-sum game. In line with that cynical view of the world, COVID-19 has reinforced and even delegated further authority to border control agencies (Kislenko, 2021).

The COVID-19 pandemic has also fueled nationalism, with both positive and negative results. One can observe challenges to sovereignty emanating from nationalist movements in the US, across Europe, and Australia with anti-lockdown protests, charging of state legislatures, and a rise in hate and violent crimes (Ellis-Petersen & Rahman, 2020; Woods et al., 2020; Viladrich, 2021). We have also seen the use of insecurity in COVID-19 as a means to challenge electoral security, as in the US recently, and more underreported in Peru (Levitsky & Vergara, 2021). These movements have been decidedly anti-vaccine, anti-globalist, anti-WHO, and largely conspiratorial in nature (Woods et al., 2020). They represent a continuity with the rise in Far-Right political parties, movements, and paramilitary groups such as Brexit, the Nordic Resistance Movement (primarily Scandinavia), American Alt-Right political parties, Hindutva and the Bharatiya Janata Party (India), the National Rally in France, and the recently founded Reconquête party (also French). Similarly, states like China have been emboldened, with their hostile takeover of Hong Kong and their current posturing with Taiwan, which has in turn driven a reassertion of Taiwanese sovereignty (Woods et al., 2020). According to the US-based Freedom House, democracies in 80 countries have grown weaker since the pandemic began, citing rising distrust, pandemic misinformation, uncredible or cancelled elections, rising instances of violent rhetoric, policy, and action, as well as newfound and unwarranted restrictions on media, minorities, and religious groups (Repucci & Slipowitz, 2021). In short, while social forces have invariably pushed to undermine state sovereignty, vitriolic backlash directed against COVID-19 measures have driven the reassertion of state sovereignty from multiple non-state actors.

The conduct of states during COVID-19 only serves to reinforce this narrative, underscoring how states have sought to undercut each other through competition over vaccines and PPE, unfailingly prioritizing the profit motive and the ill-defined idea of the nation over people’s lives. I must stress this was not guaranteed, but one of many possible outcomes that continue to develop and multiply as I write this article. Tomorrow we could waive IP patent rights for vaccines, likely shortening this pandemic, saving many lives, and costing pharmaceutical companies and Western states billions of dollars (much to their chagrin). However, that doesn’t appear to be a likely outcome if we base inferences on political precedent. Rather, we have observed a reassertion of sovereignty by states which has invariably generated poor COVID-19 policy. However, while states remain at the centre of how we conceptualize, conduct, and interact with politics in the real world, we must expand this understanding and abandon the methodological nationalism (or state-centric approach) to the exclusion of outside factors. COVID-19 remains a problem without passports, and no balance of powers can restrict its rising force.

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Nicholas Donaldson is a 3rd Year undergraduate at Queen's University majoring in Political Studies (specializing in Political Economy) and minoring in history. His research interests include the global political economy, migration politics, the Western Sahara conflict and crises of capitalism.