‘Vaccine nationalism’ is all the rage – according to some, at least. Is anybody surprised? Great afflictions – or what the enlightened amongst us call ‘challenges’ – usually bring out the worst, and sometimes the best, in humanity. Today’s pestilence is no different. Why should the presumed cure be so?
In any war of all against all, the tendency is to point fingers at the top. Not only, though, to the country where the pestilence evidently originated, and which has done better than nearly every other to contain it – China – but rather to the country with the most casualties – the USA. We are told that the latter is a sure sign that ‘American exceptionalism’, if it ever existed at all, is rather dystopian. It will be a long time before anyone again listens to the advice and admonishments of finger-wagging Americans.
Maybe so. But that charge – which is as old as the American Republic – is quite beside the point. There are no perfect lines between ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ affairs in this world; no hard borders separating even the most isolated nations; no cosmic scale weighing winners and losers from ‘East’ to ‘West’. If any good comes from this pandemic, it will be a more mature, honest understanding of worldwide interdependence. And, at long last, an end to the petty civilisational discourse of the previous century. We’re all living and dying together on the same self-centred and selfish planet earth – and nobody, and therefore everybody, is exceptional.