In an article last week for the Financial Times, Richard Milne examined the issue of Sweden’s “dissent” when it came to policy responses to the spread of covid-19. The article is essentially a hit piece on Sweden, containing all the usual strategies of portraying the Scandinavian nation as an irresponsible outlier.
Sweden, of course, famously refrained from imposing lockdowns on its population, while relying on targeted isolation for vulnerable populations.
The fact Sweden refused to go along with other states, which, as Milne put it, “as country after country imposed lockdown restrictions on their populations rarely seen outside wartime” apparently dismayed the global media and politicians from other countries who demanded global lockdowns.
The result was a nearly endless stream of media stories about how Sweden’s response to covid-19 was disastrous. These comparisons, of course, conveniently omitted the fact that Sweden experienced better outcomes than numerous countries that imposed draconian lockdowns, including Belgium, the UK, Spain, and Italy. Moreover, as cases and hospitalizations are growing again in these prolockdown nations, Sweden has yet to show any resurgence as of October 2020.
Even more frustrating for the global pushers of lockdowns is the fact that the Swedish policy is “enjoying strong support” and “most of the criticism still comes from outside the country.”
It is quite likely that the leaders of large states and international organizations aren’t terribly fond of this sort of independence still enjoyed by nation-states in these matters.
The relentless drive to discredit the Swedish response is one indicator, and another is the growing chorus of calls for stronger “global governance” in matters of infectious disease.
Politicians, think tanks, and left-wing publications are all pushing for strong international institutions to “coordinate” responses to pandemics. But this then raises a question: Just how much coordination should there be, and how much of the sovereignty of individual states must be destroyed in the process?
These questions ought to highlight the dangers of global political centralization, and this has been illustrated by the global media’s focus on attacking Sweden for its “noncompliance” in the global drive for lockdowns. If one medium-sized country’s refusal to go along with the global “expert” will arouse this sort of vicious counterattack, it stands to reason that any reasonably powerful global institution with powers to impose health policy would happily crush any state that sought to go its own way.
After all, just consider how much easier it would be for global health bureaucrats to manufacture a narrative favorable to their own version of events if Sweden hadn’t done what it did. Without the example of Sweden, it would be far easier for politicians to claim that the death toll in the absence of coerced lockdowns would be double, triple, or even ten times larger than the death tolls experienced in countries with harsh lockdowns.
“Yes, Spain has experienced a terrible death toll in spite of our strict lockdowns,” the pundits might say. “But things would have been five times worse without the lockdowns!” Without Sweden, there would have been no national-level counterexample to point to.
Any situation that contradicted the asserted “you get either a harsh lockdown or an incalculable bloodbath” story would be largely hypothetical. But things didn’t turn out that way. Because of this, we must expect the calls for ever-greater global “coordination” and “governance” to increase. While few of these efforts will ever explicitly call for actual “global government,” the ultimate destination will be—as has been the case with the EU—a global bureaucracy that can demand compliance and implementation of mandates handed down by the governing bodies of these new and strengthened global organizations.
Pandemics, of course, provide the perfect rationale for demanding an end to sovereignty at the level of nation-states. If the refrain is “the virus knows no border,” then it naturally follows that countries unwilling to adopt the “correct” antipandemic policies must be forced to comply. After all, any independence in this matter could be construed as one nation endangering all its neighbors.
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