Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Review of: Reseña de: Agamben, G., ŽiŽek, S., Nancy, J.L., Berardi, F., López Petit, S., Butler, J., Badiou, A., Harvey, D., Han, B.C., Zibechi, R., Galindo, M., Gabriel, M., Yañez González, G., Manrique, P., Preciado, P.B. (2020). Sopa de Wuhan. Pensamiento contemporáneo en tiempos de pandemias. ASPO, 188 p.

Review of "Ringe, N. y Rennó, L. (Eds.) (2022). Populist and the Pandemic. How Populists Around the World Responded to COVID-19. Routledge, 320 p."

Editorial Número 52

This article aims to analyze the role of intellectuals in times of a global pandemic, whereby their discourse is assumed as a counterbalance to the hegemony of experts. It takes as a case study several exemplar speeches by Noam Chomsky, linguist and political activist, which were produced since the beginning of March 2020 regarding Covid-19. We will try to show that what marks Chomsky’s discourse is related to the ethos (Maingueneau 2020) of an “intellectual engagement” (Bourdieu 2003). Within the universe of possibilities for choosing intellectuals’ speeches, who are not necessarily convergent on topics affecting the world, and who, in general, don’t talk about the same things, we chose to circumscribe our research on a specific intellectual: Noam Chomsky. In our view, he is an actual example of “intellectual action”, representing properly “the relations between intellectuals and power” (Bobbio 1997). Therefore, it is necessary to understand the statements of intellectuals like Chomsky in moments of global uncertainty, and as a discourse of a different nature that stands against the experts’ power in major media corporations or in government technocracy. Thus, far from wanting to exhaust the possibilities of interpreting the role of the wider category of intellectuals during the pandemic, our proposal is to outline the main points of how an intellectual like Chomsky has been developing and taking the same political positions since the beginning of his activism, in the 1960s, which refers to a type of intellectual engagement similar to that taken since the Dreyfus Affair. In the Dreyfus Affair we have an “inaugural archetype” of the concept of an “engaged intellectual” (Bourdieu 2003, p. 73–74), from which the one who has social capital as an erudite, a scientist or a writer, comes out publicly criticizing the established powers and denounces crimes committed by “the reasons of State” (Chomsky 1973). Therefore, we understand that Chomsky comes from a lineage whose representatives are inserted into a form of intellectual activism; a lineage that became known as “the century of intellectuals” (Winock 2000), the intellectual conceived as the one who “tells the truth”, as Chomsky (1996, p. 55) himself define the “intellectual's responsibility”: “At one level, the answer is too easy: the intellectual responsibility of the writer, or any decent person, is to tell the truth.” On the one hand, there is a patent argument of authority behind the experts, based on a “scientific discourse”, but, on the other hand, there is a kind of “moral commitment to the truth” behind the intellectuals' discourse that becomes a “deeper criticism”.  That is, a holistic view to ponder, in the case of Covid-19, the humanitarian problems created due to the pandemic, but also to think about relating this crisis to previous and further geopolitical reasons, from a freer position, not committed to companies and States. This position of the intellectual engagement is idealized in opposition to the “normal science discourse”: the genre of the scientific discourse is produced under official means; it is plastered, blunted, does not allow the spokespeople of science to speak beyond what their research allows. In other words, the scientific experts are inscribed in discursive structures of “scenes of enunciation” (Maingueneau, 2006) that don’t permit them to surpass the barriers of “objectiveness” and enter the field of moral judgment. Seeking to understand how Chomsky acts as an engaged intellectual during the pandemic, we searched his political network and the media in which he is involved. From that, we chose our corpus of analysis, selected from Noam Chomsky’s innumerous speeches to a left-wing or clearly progressive press during the first months of Covid-19 pandemic in the form of interviews from March to June: an interview to Michael Brooks (2020), at the Jacobin Magazine (Brooks, M. 2020); an interview with his longtime interviewer, David Barsamian (2020), an Armenian-American journalist and political activist, published on the website Literary Hub; an interview with the British socialist newspaper Morning Star (2020); two interviews he gave to Amy Goodman (2020a, 2020b) for the American journal Democracy Now; an interview with the Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat (2020), from which we will use only the parts of the transcript that we found published by Al Jazeera and not the video; an interview to the writer Chris Brooks to the magazine Labor Notes, channel for the proletarian movement; an interview to Cristina Magdaleno (2020) for the Euroactiv, a non-profit organization for democracy in European Union, as well as an interview Chomsky and Robert Pollin gave to C. J. Polychroniou (2020). We believe that through this corpus it is possible to cover the vast majority of Chomsky's speeches on the Covid-19 pandemic, centered on media where Chomsky usually features and that name themselves as having a more progressive bias. We assume that what gives Chomsky’s speech authority to talk about the pandemic, to be invited multiple times to do so, is not his expertise in the subject; it is not his background in epidemiology studies, which he lacks, neither his linguistics theories, that do not relate to the topic, but his image as a great surviving intellectual. It’s to say, what authorizes Chomsky to speak and, therefore, to make his contribution to the studies of this pandemic situation, is not what interests the State, or what would lead the actions of government officials, as they are in general centered on the discourse of experts. Instead, it is his trajectory as a critic without corporate scruples, engaged in telling another kind of “truth”, as one that can discuss and propose a different future for humanity. So, with this article we intended to produce a discussion about the following problem: the type of discourse raised by Chomsky is not that of government experts, men of science who must anchor themselves in statistical studies on disease proliferation curves, researchers who need to give prevention guidelines or economists who provide “get out of the crisis” scenarios. In other words, differently from a biologist, a disease proliferation specialist or a market administrator, Chomsky conceives the pandemic beyond Covid-19, as a long-term crisis, which will cover economic, social and environmental aspects of much greater proportions. In short, with this article we seek to understand how Chomsky assumes himself as a spokesman for all of humanity and how he constructs this position discursively.  He is concerned with “bigger problems”, not diminishing the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic, but insisting on the fact that global warming and the economic crisis created by the debacle of neoliberalism, as well as nuclear war menaces, are much greater threats to human species survival and the maintenance of the planet. We also bring an overview of three important intellectuals who also acted and contributed their reflections on the Covid-19 pandemic during its inception. They are Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Byung-Chul Han. The purpose of incorporating these distinct views is, in the first instance, to compare to what extent they may resemble the Chomskyan discourse, but also to show how intellectual discourse is constructed in times of a global pandemic in the face of the discourses of health experts or specialists who occupy the spaces of intellectual speech authority.

This article takes stock of the response of Latin American and Caribbean regional organizations to Covid-19. It asks whether they have contributed to addressing the pandemic. It proposes explanations for the considerable divergence between the responses of nine regional organizations: the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), the Andean Community (AC), the Caribbean Community (CARICOM),  the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), the Pacific Alliance (PA), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the Forum for the Progress and Integration of South America (PROSUR), and the Central American Integration System (SICA). In other words, Latin American regional institutions are analyzed as an independent variable influencing national governments' responses and crisis management during the pandemic. In that order of ideas, first, it is pointed out that Latin American regionalism was already in crisis before the arrival of Covid-19. Some of the characteristics of this crisis were: a decreasing economic regionalization, a growing regional political polarization, a lack of leadership, and the paralysis and/or disintegration of some regional organizations such as CELAC and UNASUR. In addition, these elements have also aggravated historical structural weaknesses of Latin American regionalism, such as intergovernmentalism and inter-presidentialism, which have given impetus to regional integration in times of ideological affinities but sometimes have also paralyzed and set it back in times of divergence and lack of leadership. For these reasons, it is argued that expectations regarding the performance of regional organizations during the pandemic were quite low. Subsequently, combining academic and primary sources, the article provides an assessment of the actions deployed by each organization in the face of the covid-19 pandemic. Based on a categorization previously proposed in the academic literature, which we apply to more cases and test on a broader empirical basis, these actions are divided into three types for their evaluation: information pooling, interstate coordination, and collective action (internal and external). Information pooling refers to an organization's ability to provide and centralize data, knowledge, and expertise. Interstate coordination encompasses actions aimed at jointly organizing the movement of goods, services, people, and the distribution of medical supplies. Collective action refers to actions that involve combining national resources or using shared resources to achieve common goals. It is subdivided into external or internal depending on whether the actors involved in the action, or the objective of the action, are internal or external to the organization itself. Mixed results were obtained in assessing the organizations based on this typology of the actions deployed. Some organizations performed well, and others performed poorly, especially if their constituent mandates and the totality of their institutional capacities are taken into account. In the second part of the article, based on the academic literature on international and regional organizations and analyzing the nine cases under study, we argue that structure, mandate(s), and past experiences of regional institutions matter. Further, four variables have the most explanatory power to account for the divergence of the responses of regional institutions to the pandemic: functional differentiation, organizational autonomy, leadership, and accumulated know-how. Accordingly, this section shows how functional differentiation of the various integration agendas can allow progress to be made on specific issues that are seen as more technical, even amid ideological divergences and beyond the presidential summits. Regarding the autonomy of the organizations, it is argued that the organizations' capacity for agency vis-à-vis the Member States also allows them to increase their margin for action. Beyond the delegation of competencies and authority, the ability to set agendas and mobilize resources more autonomously allowed several of these organizations to act more decisively. Regarding the leadership variable, it is argued that leadership, be it the president of a member country (for example holding the pro tempore presidency) or a strong general secretariat of the organization, can be decisive in bringing organizations out of paralysis (as in the case of CELAC) or in advancing in response to the crisis even amid disputes between the presidents of the member states, as shown in the case of SICA and PAHO. Accumulated knowledge (know-how) also proved to be critical, as is shown especially in the cases of SICA, CARICOM, and PAHO -in this case, the accumulated experience in health crisis management proved instrumental in preparing and facing the virus. Moreover, it is interesting that the awareness of the structural weakness of SICA and CARICOM member countries has led them to develop know-how and more capacities for fundraising and channeling external resources to deal with crises. The importance of accumulated know-how makes the dismantling of regional institutions such as the UNASUR Health Council (which had experience and contributed to the management of previous pandemics) even more worrisome. In its third section, the article derives some more general lessons for Latin American regionalism from the responses of these regional organizations to Covid-19 (and the absence of particular actions in some cases). However, some caveats are also raised about the limitations of these lessons. Some theses are discussed, and some proposals are formulated to contribute to the debate on how to shield regionalism from the ideological divergences that come with political changes in Latin America. Particular emphasis is placed on the idea that a more technical, functionally differentiated, and segmented regionalism can better withstand the onslaught of ideological polarization in Latin America. The critical point of segmentation is the creation of separate organizational bodies to deal with strategic and regionally less controversial issues -either because they are considered more technical or there are fewer dogmatic positions than in other regional agendas. For example, a South American health organization or a South American center for disease control could be created. It is argued that such an organizational approach can better withstand the assault of growing regional ideological polarization, especially when compared to the risks of paralysis and crisis of "umbrella" organizations that cover a multiplicity of issues through numerous councils or other sub-units. Segmented organizations on not-so-political or technical issues, which are endowed with greater autonomy, could be much better protected from the spillover of political polarization and conflicts between presidents. It could also be easier for civil society actors to work with such sectoral, technically oriented organizations. A more technical approach to regional cooperation would also strengthen the role of development banks such as the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF) or the Inter-American Development Bank as “orchestrators” of regional initiatives as it happened during the Covid-19 pandemic. The article also warns that there is also a risk that lessons will not be learned, similar mistakes will be made again, and positive developments will be reversed. The essentially intergovernmental character of regional cooperation means that more technically oriented organs cannot be completely shielded from political cycles. Functional segmentation is not the solution to all problems of Latin American regionalism. There could always be a backlash against an overly independent and apolitical orientation of such technical organs, or they could become more politicized. Despite some positive examples of successful cooperation in combating the pandemic, many of the structural limitations of Latin American regionalism have not changed for the better.  

The aim of this article is to present a theoretical-methodological proposal based on a model of analysis from the Copenhagen School of Security Studies, which incorporates the examination of legislative texts into the study of securitization processes. With this objective, we propose an approach to the study of the securitization of the Covid-19 pandemic through the comparative analysis of two texts that have given legislative coverage to the management of this health crisis in Spain. The text of (1) Organic Law 4/1981 on the states of alarm, exception and siege; and the text of (2) Law 2/2021 of the Basque Parliament on measures for managing the pandemic. After the publication of Security: A New Framework For Analysis (Buzan et al.1997), numerous investigations have used the securitization analysis model of the Copenhagen School of Security Studies to study security policies on phenomena such as migratory movements (Müller and Gerbauer, 2021), the climate emergency, or the health crisis of Covid-19 by examining the texts published on social media (Karyotis et al., 2021),or the analysis of the audiences (Bengtsson and Rhinard, 2019) or political discourses (Kuleteva and Clifford, 2021). Securitization theory holds that what gives an issue the status of threat results from an interaction between an actor, whether it is a state, an organization, or the media, and which tries to define a certain problem as an existential threat, and an audience that accepts or rejects this attempt. Under this premise, security is considered a social construct, which has enormous consequences when it comes to its study. The analysis of the security agenda no longer consists of evaluating those threats considered real, but rather aims at the communicative processes through which actors and audiences agree to securitize an issue. The contributions of Balzacq (2005), Salter (2008) and Stritzel (2007;2012), among others, have also broadened the objects of study of securitization, which have ceased to be exclusively texts of a political nature communicated in a linear manner to incorporate also the audience as an agent that interacts and participates in the creation of the securitizing discourse, the performance associated with the execution of the discourse or the interactivity of the discourse in socio-digital networks. However, despite this diversification in the approach to the study of securitization, most research continues to focus on texts belonging to political or media discourse. There is an absence of analysis of securitization in other types of texts, such as those of a legislative nature which are also interesting to study within the framework of these processes. That is, texts that, in many cases, give legislative coverage to the application of security policies and could represent the legal crystallization of previous political-media discourses. That said, given the legal nature of the texts examined in this article, it is important to make clear that the analysis proposed is, following the model of the Copenhagen School, a discursive analysis. This article does not carry out a legal analysis of the documents or a study on the legal consequences of the implementation of these laws, a study that would need another theoretical-methodological approach. Without conducting a legal analysis, we propose to observe the discursive construction of security that underlies the texts analyzed and the consequences that, according to the hypothesis of the Copenhagen School, this entails. Thus, the current analysis is about the securitization processes of the Covid-19 crisis. This health crisis has been one of the most disruptive episodes globally in recent decades. The unexpected appearance of the virus and its rapid spread made Covid-19, in just a few weeks, as UN Secretary General António Guterres pointed out, the greatest threat to global security. The pandemic surpassed any of the established international protocols, and the lack of multilateral agreements between different countries and measures against the virus showed in turn a lack of global governance to deal with this type of threat. At first sight, we could say that Covid-19, an illness that, being new, poses a threat to the health of the entire world population since most people do not have immunity against it. However, this health crisis is once again a good scenario in which to observe that the threat is perceived and constructed in a very diverse way among the population. The study by Kirk (2022) on the securitization of Covid-19 in the United States refers to this. She analyzes the discursive battle between different security narratives about the health crisis in a country where the wearing or not wearing of a mask in public places often becomes an expression of a political position. The delimitation of the object of study to the examination of the texts of the Organic Law 4/1981 on states of alarm, exception, and siege, and (2) the Law 2/2021 of the Basque Parliament on measures for the management of the pandemic, is done for several reasons. In the first place, both texts, of an eminently legal nature, respond to the necessary characteristics to carry out the analysis in accordance with the objective of the study. Secondly, despite the substantial differences that both laws maintain in their preamble and the context of their drafting, the two texts have served as a legal framework for taking measures to deal with similar events, specifically, the crisis health of covid-19. This allows, following the proposal of the Copenhagen School, to contextualize the analysis of the securitization construction of the texts based on these facts. Third, the choice of texts, which share a legal framework, responds to the proposal to carry out an analysis of a state nature, and not an international one, given the prominence of state legislation in the coverage of policies and implementation of the security measures against the covid-19 disease because of the lack of international legal frameworks. The article is structured in three parts. In the first section, a brief theoretical-methodological approach is elaborated on the evolution of security research in the field of International Relations and to the theory of securitization developed by the Copenhagen School. In the second, the context of the global health crisis and the case of Spain are described together with the securitization processes that accompany it. Thirdly, the documents examined and the operationalization that allows their analysis are presented. Subsequently, the discussion on the results and conclusions is addressed.  

The competition between powers to consolidate a hegemonic position on the international scene has been a recurrent object of study in International Relations, giving rise to numerous analyses of the evolution of the phenomenon of global hegemony. The global Covid-19 crisis has introduced a new element into the analysis of relations between states, as it has revealed the asymmetries that exist not only in managing the pandemic, but also in acquiring and/or maintaining a dominant position on the current geopolitical chessboard. This disruptive event has affected the competitive relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, players who were engaged in a strategic competition for global hegemony. With this starting point, the direction of our research hypothesizes that the pandemic has been a determining element in the evolution and intensification of the competition for hegemony between the United States and the People's Republic of China. If up to now hegemonic disputes have been resolved through conflicts between contenders or in the context of war, in our opinion the pandemic could be a disruptive element that determines the evolution of the US-China competition and conditions which actor will be hegemonic and which model of hegemony will be implemented in the long term. With this starting point, we will elaborate a theoretical framework to understand the phenomena of the rise and fall of hegemonic powers. Starting from a theoretical approach to hegemony, we will include elements of analysis that will allow a deeper understanding of how disputes in the field of hegemony take place at present. In line with this objective, the key elements we will use will be: the theory of complex interdependence developed by Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane, the importance of the post-war international system, Seva Gunitsky's conceptualization of hegemonic shocks, and the influence that the nuclear variable has on the current geopolitical chessboard. Going deeper into the theoretical realm, authors such as Wallerstein or Agnew contribute to establishing the basis for understanding hegemony at a conceptual level. However, hegemony does not take a simple definition as it is part of an adaptive process. Due to this adaptability, authors such as Kindleberger or Gilpin offer us a starting point to understand how hegemonic transitions take place and provide us with tools to understand these processes. Although the authors of reference in the field of international politics offer us a solid basis for understanding the processes of hegemony, it is necessary to bring to the discussion the current debates on this object of study. Therefore, these analyses will be complemented by current authors, where we highlight mainly two: Graham Allison and Seva Gunitsky. With regard to Allison's contribution, we will briefly analyze his theorization of the Thucydides Trap and consider whether a conventional war between powers aspiring to conquer hegemony is still inevitable today. In the case of Gunitsky, we will focus on his conceptualization of hegemonic shocks, arguing from a scientific point of view that disputes between great powers do not necessarily end in a conventional war, but these shocks are the elements that end up facilitating hegemonic transitions. Subsequently, we will analyze the influence of three elements that in our opinion are conditioning processes of hegemony and conditioning hegemonic transitions at the present time. These three elements are: the post-war international system, complex interdependence and the nuclear capability of states. These three elements limit the ability of the great powers to initiate a conventional war between the hegemon and the contenders. The international system establishes a unity of action between the United States and Europe that different countries respect or fear to challenge, while economic, political and social dependencies result in reciprocal effects in case of conventional war and the nuclear variable discourages war between nuclear powers due to Mutually Assured Destruction. These elements condition the current disputes between the United States and China, forcing both contenders to seek new strategies to advance in the consolidation of a dominant position. In addition, these limitations mean that the hegemonic shocks theorized by Gunitsky become a key element in understanding how hegemonic disputes are currently settled. After providing sufficient theoretical elements to understand the current global situation, we will move on to the empirical part by analyzing three areas in order to conclude whether the pandemic has been a determining factor between the two actors. Understanding the complexity of operationalizing concepts such as hegemony and hegemonic disputes, it is essential to provide our research with empirical elements. Therefore, the theoretical analysis will be complemented with the analysis of quantitative and qualitative variables to confirm or refute our hypothesis. To do so, we will start with a comparative analysis between the United States and China in the economic sphere to determine to what extent the pandemic has affected competition between both actors and we will analyze the evolution of the pandemic data in both countries. We will analyze various economic aspects because an intensification of economic disputes is a symptom of the hegemon's loss of power, and we will be able to observe whether its economic supremacy is threatened by China. After focusing on economic variables, it is essential to analyze the infections and deaths caused by Covid-19.  This is due to the fact that the internal management of the pandemic is an element of great importance since, in addition to measuring the capacities of the health systems, it contributes to offer an image of leadership and a reference to the rest of the actors. Finally, after addressing the empirical data, we will analyze the diplomatic strategies that both actors have used in dealing with the global crisis. While measurable data may reflect certain objectifiable trends regarding the impact of Covid-19 on the U.S.-China dispute, analysis of the diplomatic strategies developed by both actors is also important. At this point, we will analyze those carried out by the United States and China, focusing mainly on Beijing's strategy because it has proved to be a more complex. For this purpose, we will analyze the coronavirus diplomacy developed by Beijing, establishing itself as a major supplier of medical supplies globally and the enhancement of its soft power following its response to the coronavirus crisis. In the case of the United States, we will focus more briefly on the communicative strategy followed by the Trump administration after the outbreak of the crisis.  

From a historical, sociological, and political science perspective, and inspired by the paradigm of historical materialism, this article proposes an approach to the different contexts that circumscribe the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic through two types of sources: on the one hand, the bibliography, of a historiographical, sociological and epidemiological nature, in which the collection of articles published in 2020 by Rob Wallace, under the title Big farms, big flus, stands out. Agro-industries and infectious diseases, and on the other hand, the primary sources, that is, the work of analysis of the press, especially El País or El Mundo, the Resolutions and communications of the WHO, as well as other diverse documents, located on the internet. This macro-schematic approach defines our starting point: a reflection on questions such as: What has happened to us? What is happening to us? How can international relations be interpreted?  What value does the nationalist shift occupy at the moment? And even, why have we suffered a pandemic with dramatic consequences? With this in mind, the article proposes five objectives: to analyze the epidemic structure of contemporary times, to observe the analogies between cholera morbo, influenza and Covid-19, to describe the founding process of the WHO, the role of China and the transformations of the new world order, and finally, to interpret the Chinese virus, from the context of the rebirth of nationalisms and to relate this interpretation to the Covid-19 pandemic. To develop these objectives, we propose a diachronic analysis of the different social constructions around pandemics from 1832 to 2020, likewise, we also intend to establish analogies between the different pandemics and the international relations that developed over three moments: he Asian morbid cholera (1817-34), the Spanish flu (1918-20) and Covid-19 (2020-22).  In short, we will define the epidemic structure of contemporaneity. Next, as the central thesis of the work, we propose an approach to the consequences of the Livestock Revolution and climate change due to anthropogenic causes, and its relationship with human health to lead to a possible connection with the Covid-19 pandemic. This thesis needs a historical analysis in which different conditions that develop since 1970, during the third Industrial Revolution, are established. After the demographic explosion of the 1970s, during which time industrial livestock farming has been dominant in the United States, the production model soon spread to Latin America, Asia and Europe in such a way that a gradual relocation is set in motion that will accelerate during the 1990s. That is, when Eastern Europe (just like Asia or Latin America) joins the international market and offers attractive deregulation scenarios for international food industries. For this we mainly use the hypotheses of Rob Wallace and K. Shortridge: it is essential to take into account relocation tactics, industrial strategies related to the mass production of poultry meat, and the appearance of new epidemic outbreaks that affect the population since at least 1997 -as well as the origin of typical pneumonia, known as SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and its relationship with the coronavirus. In addition, the study of this specific context (1970-2020) allows us to understand five vital aspects to interpret the emergence of Covid-19: the decisive role of China and its policies of opening up to the market economy between 1980 and 1985, which accounted for more than one billion new consumers. In the face of this explosion in the demand for food and raw materials, millions of hectares are cleared to establish crop fields, and a large part of the planet's ecosystems are destroyed. That is why ecological arguments become one of the new contradictions in the North-South dialectic; the process of collapse of the Soviet Union supposes the rebirth of nationalisms in Europe. From 1990 to 2007, nationalisms are consolidated, grow and evolve towards populist content, useful for the different governments during the financial crisis; the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 between Canada, the United States and Mexico will imply the practical disappearance of the traditional model of small or medium farms in the United States and Mexico, to the benefit of vertical operations of millions of pigs and poultry. In 1998, the first outbreak of swine flu was declared in North Carolina and, later, in Veracruz; the consolidation of neoliberal economic policies (Hayek-Friedman), which support globalization and reconstruction of the new world order; and lastly, the evolution of the functions of the WHO (World Health Organization) since its foundation in 1948.  This was oriented towards the cooperation and development of great health campaigns in the third world and as a factor of North-South balance until the shift presented by the secretary General Halfdan T. Mahler, who would define the goal of health for all by the year 2000. From this chronological and plot line, we lead to the financial crisis of 2007 to find the specific context in which the pandemic is declared in March 2020. On the other hand, this article deals with the effects that the outbreak and unexpected spread of a new virus has produced in the forms of (official) political communication of ethnocentric and nationalist content. These speeches raised xenophobic markings based on the rapid growth in morbidity and mortality statistics due to the new virus. So the concept of the Chinese virus, a social construction launched by Donald Trump, has configured a biased vision, successful until now, for the benefit of the West. Faced with a global problem with dramatic consequences, the response of governments will take the form of populist tactics whose objective will be the exoneration of their political, economic, social and health responsibilities. Given this situation, it will have to be the WHO that considers it essential to establish scientific criteria to refer to the mutations of the virus in order to end political stigmatization. The WHO will take the lead in naming information-neutral and information-friendly variants of interest (VOI) and variants of concern (VOC), renamed with letters of the Greek alphabet. In short, it is convenient to take into account the populist response of the different governments (United States, Brazil, France or Germany) centered on collective emotions typical of a language of war.  

The most important and effective action to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, once it was verified that the initial immunity due to contagion or generalized confinements did not solve the problem in the medium term, has been vaccination. The success of vaccines is nothing new. Throughout the history of humankind, vaccines have served to reduce and even eliminate some serious communicable diseases. It is not an exaggeration to say that, together with the purification of water and penicillin, the vaccination of the population against certain diseases is one of the greatest achievements both in the fields of public health and the health of individuals. However, the success of vaccines, not only in this pandemic, but throughout history, has always been in doubt. Despite the evidence of the preventative effect of vaccines, the anti-vaccine movement has endured over time and has even grown in recent decades. Such opposition has not diminished with the efficiency and safe results that the new vaccines against Covid-19 have produced using mRNA technology; on the contrary, it has continued to expand. After the development and authorization of vaccines against covid-19 in record time, the first challenge faced by vaccination campaigns around the world was to determine the priority in access to the resource when the availability of vaccines was still scarce. The criteria followed at this point were, at least in Europe, quite uniform, prioritizing the vaccination of those most in need.  That is, the elderly, who are the most prone to suffering serious illnesses. Access to vaccines was very unequal worldwide and, to avoid this, different strategies were proposed, including the suspension of patent rights or the creation of the COVAX vaccine initiative to supply countries that could not buy them. Once a greater number of vaccines were available, and prioritizing access to them was no longer the main ethical-legal issue, the debate arose in many countries about the opportunity to incorporate vaccination as a legal duty. This involved changing the majority opinion in the world; although already the subject of discussion before the pandemic, it was argued to be a moral duty to receive the recommended vaccines to preserve public health and that of others.  World public opinion was very attentive to this issue of compulsory vaccination, perhaps due to the rejection that vaccines aroused in certain sectors of the population and, in particular, the vaccine against Covid-19. The discussion about the balance between the freedom of individuals and the achievement of a collective interest as important as public and individual health was resolved at the legal level by the courts of justice. Specifically, the rulings of the Supreme Court in the United States and the European Court of Human Rights in Europe established criteria that were basically convergent. Both courts understand that states have the competency to oblige the population to be vaccinated in order to safeguard their health as long as certain requirements are met: a serious risk of a pandemic, a safe and effective vaccine to combat the disease exists, and the absence of less invasive measures to achieve the same result. These rulings have served to support the specific legal measures that were adopted during the pandemic by both the different states of the United States and the member states of the Council of Europe. Necessarily different concepts have been confused in the debate, in particular those of mandatory and forced vaccination, which do not belong to the same category because they limit different fundamental rights and do so with different levels of intensity. When speaking of mandatory vaccination, reference is made to a duty whose non-compliance determines a legal consequence, be it an economic sanction or a limitation of a right. Thus, the individual who neglects the obligation to be vaccinated will be fined, have their freedom of movement restricted, their working conditions altered or their employment and salary suspended. The legal consequence is not the forced vaccination of those who resist the vaccine, but generally an economic fine. On the contrary, when it comes to forced vaccination, the individual who disregards the obligation will be legally compelled to be vaccinated, resorting even to force if necessary. In other words, the right affected directly by the measure here is the integrity of the individual. These are, therefore, two measures of different significance, from the perspective of the rights ultimately affected by the limitation, and this difference must be taken into account from the principle of proportionality. In this paper we offer an overview of the various responses adopted by different States in relation to whether or not vaccination is mandatory, which have ranged from mandatory for certain groups or even for the entire population. Among those measures of indirect persuasion for vaccination are “covid passports”. Our work identifies a broad agreement in the international community on the compatibility between mandatory vaccination and the safeguarding of fundamental rights when certain conditions are met. It is also recognized that proportionality in the adoption of measures is the most effective way to achieve the desired objective of reaching high levels of vaccination in the population. In any case, it would have been desirable to have advanced formulas of persuasion that would have gone beyond information and training, without incurring in the adoption of measures that strongly restrict personal liberty, such as compulsory vaccination. Faced with this international agreement, we do not find shared criteria in other areas related to vaccines: their development and authorization, their fair distribution, or information about them. This absence of shared visions and cooperation gives rise to rivalries that reinforce the traditional clashes between powers. As the purpose of the work is to compare the legal foundations of the mandatory nature of vaccines in two territories that exert significant influence in other parts of the world, and to do so from a contextual perspective. The work has not attempted to carry out an exhaustive approach to any of the many questions raised, but rather to outline, based on some of the most accredited jurisprudential and doctrinal sources, some provisional conclusions which, at least in some cases, must be subject to successive revisions.  

The challenges facing the European Union (EU) can sometimes create tensions, in which the organization must answer both to the protection and guarantee of the fundamental rights of its citizens, and to global needs that exceptionally require the suspension of those same rights for the greater good. In its liberal political tradition that believes in the existence of a public and a private sphere, it has established systems of checks and balances, rule of law and stable institutions to protect the rights and freedoms of its citizens. Yet sometimes these must be suspended in cases of exceptionality for their own preservation. This was the case during the 2020 pandemic, when the European Union and its member States decreed quarantines against the consolidated and fundamental freedom of movement of persons, to restrict contacts and try to contain contagions. In this context, digital policies were also implemented to deal with crisis management, like Covid applications for tracing and monitoring contacts between individuals. This invasion of the private sphere of citizens had to be accompanied by a set of limitations and guarantees, to protect this inherent and private individual’s right. These applications were subject to the requirements of the European legislative framework (the commonly known acquis communautaire), which included several legal instruments laid out by the EU to create a framework to guide the performance of its member-state Governments on this matter. Apart from the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive, we underline the importance of Recommendation (EU) 2020/518 that connects health rights, health management and data protection; and also, the importance of Communication 2020/C 124 I/01 that set a series of ideal elements to guide apps functions, and established the importance that it is Government agencies that manage digital apps, so there is a guarantee of the protection of citizens’ rights. Through the comparative study of how apps were managed when they first appeared in 2020 throughout most of 2021, and how apps evolved (both in management and use) in 2021 and throughout 2022, we can address the evolution of EU policy on digital matters, which have meant to create new frameworks for internet navigation. At first, there were 24 different apps for the 24 out of 27 Member States who decided to create and promote the use of these instruments among their citizens. Most of them were managed by national authorities (except for Austria and Romania who were managed by Red Cross and a local NGO respectively), and were developed by a public-private collaboration, or only public agencies. At the end of the crisis, at least politically since societal weariness and the economic crisis rendered it difficult to keep up the restrictions introduced in the spring of 2020, in June 2021 the EU created its GreenPass or vaccination passport. This policy was implemented in most countries and even though 24 different national health services were still in place, they all used the EU passport, available to citizens via their national health websites or apps. Even though the exceptionality of the pandemic has ended, one of the outcomes has been the establishment of a system of data gathering, storage and management for public means, managed by National Authorities, which has technically created a digital contract where the State guarantees citizens’ digital rights. This is even more important as we attend to an increase in the digitalization of public services, especially since 2020. The changes were thus promoted in a state of exception during the crisis to regulate Government interference in the citizen’s private sphere but have laid a roadmap for the development of the digital framework, which may lead to the conclusion of a digital social contract. The social contract appears in the EU’s liberal tradition as a metaphor of the relation between the State and the individual, it defines the notion of sovereignty as the set of rights possessed by the citizen that may be subject to special protection. Hence, the social contract serves as the basis for creating modern societies, yet it is not permanent and can (and will) change when societies change accordingly. Several critiques have been made to the original social contract, creating new and developed contracts, including the class critique (from worker’s movements and Marxism during the 19th Century to Piketty’s present denouncing of social inequalities), the gender critique (as Carole Pateman’s Sexual Contract puts it, the social contract institutionalized patriarchy), the racial critique (where Charles W. Mills develops the gender critique from a racial point of view where the social contract created a system of domination by the Western world) and finally the environmental critique (where its advocates claim for an eco-social contract or a nature social contract that shifts the approach to a bio-centric system). Therefore, the contract serves as a theoretical framework that can be changed, and in this case, it challenges the evolution towards a digital social contract. The evolution of internet and tech structures that support the web and its processes has been marked by three stages: its birth in the 80s by the hand of the State and linked to military research; its deregulation during the 90s and the privatization of the main telecommunications enterprises (in the case of the EU, the digital policy followed this trend); and the consolidation of a digital sphere in the 21st century, where the EU has taken a step back and created a set of instruments to guarantee the protection and freedom of its citizens when they navigate the internet. We can see how the EU has responded to global dynamics at the level of digital regulation, prioritizing today a multi-stakeholder system with several actors, and counterweights and limits for both companies and public administrations in their exchange with users on the internet. With the emergence of new spaces for social relations such as in the digital sphere, new types of sovereignty must be considered in order to guarantee the rights and privacy of users (we must not forget the importance of the separation between spheres, as fear liberalism reminds us, and of limiting exceptionality to those circumstances that really appear as such). Once the foundations on which the model of digital guarantees can be developed have been laid, the next step can be the creation of a real digital contract between users and the state on the internet. However, the contract is but an idea of reason for understanding politics and institutions, which begs the question of what digital politics we aspire to as societies.