Crisis Governance,(De)Mobilisation and New Inequalities: The Legacy of COVID-19

Introduction

According to many traditions of political theory, how states behave in exceptional circumstances reveals much about their underlying nature (Agamben, 2008; Lazar, 2006; Schmitt, 2005). The COVID-19 lockdowns, in that respect, should provide an extraordinarily fruitful opportunity to test presumptions about contemporary governance regimes. For many states, the pandemic was the most abrupt transformation in state-society relations outside of wartime or (counter)-revolutionary contexts. Globally, it ranks as the most severe downturn in capitalism since the Great Depression (Gopinath, 2020); its impact was to increase inequalities both within and between societies (Mahler et al., 2022).

Yet interest in the politics of COVID-19 appears to be waning. Leaders, scholars and activists have found their attentions diverted by a succession of subsequent shocks, ranging from renewed imperial rivalries to the onset of artificial intelligence and inflationary crises. Psychologically, the extraordinary and nearly ubiquitous mental shock of COVID-19 interventions, combined with the monotony of life during the lockdowns, seems to invite a tendency to forget – recent commentary on the aftereffects of the pandemic literally centres on the term ‘lockdown amnesia’ (e.g. Kelly, 2023). For scholars, the sheer volume of academic commentary during the heat of the pandemic likewise elicits the objection that everything that should be said has already been said. The topic of COVID-19 may thus appear exhausted and unfruitful for critical reflection. There is a noticeable gap between the early phase of superlatives – ‘extraordinary’, ‘unprecedented’, the ‘new (ab)normal’ – and the subsequent reticence to deliberate COVID-19.

Part of our purpose, in this special edition, is to re-register and reinforce the re-orientations towards the exceptional nature of these pandemic interventions; in particular, we aim to historicise their impact on European states with varying degrees of pretensions towards liberal democracy. What emerged was unquestionably among the most extraordinary episodes of state intervention in historical capitalism: an episode more peculiar for appearing at the tail end of the neoliberal order. During the pandemic, states were required to rapidly employ emergency powers in a manner that bypassed established liberal-democratic mechanisms of legitimacy and authority, in a manner that, within Europe, was ‘abnormal for most representative democracies’ (Altiparmakis et al., 2021: 1159).

These measures – which included the centralisation of political power, imposition of lockdowns, enforcement of border controls, in-territory check-points and interventions into capitalist economies – represent consequential transformations in state-society relations; and yet, for all the militaristic metaphors and libertarian complaints of an omnipotent state, these measures cannot be understood as simply recapitulating the ‘totalising’ state controls that were more typical of crises from earlier periods, as with wartime mobilisation. In fact, the restrictions placed upon civilian life and the normal functioning of the capitalist economy by European states and governments of all stripes emerged from within path-dependent liberal paradigms. Relatedly, perhaps, despite the presence of vocal anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination protests, the restrictions of this era and the radical (if temporary) demobilisation of the capitalist economy achieved both mass consent and broad political support.

This clearly presents a puzzle for multiple traditions of critical-theoretical research, which seek to understand the governance dynamics and practices in liberal-democratic state systems. Scholars in the Foucauldian tradition, for instance, were divided on the interpretation of the ‘biopolitical’ regime of policing, securitisation and surveillance within the pandemic (Lorenzini, 2021; McQuade and Neocleous, 2020), with some seeing prospects for a ‘positive’ (Bratton, 2022) or ‘democratic’ (Sotiris, 2020) biopolitics whereas others saw an illicit system of medical-police power (Agamben, 2021; Kheriaty, 2022). The pandemic has likewise proved a puzzle for Marxist traditions. Some early analyses presented the COVID-19 lockdowns as a break with neoliberalism (Saad-Filho, 2020); precursors of radical change necessary to combat civilisational challenges like climate change (Azmanova, 2020; Bhattacharya and Dale, 2020); or even a framework for an incipient ‘war communism’ of total economic mobilisation (Malm, 2020). However, as Tooze (2021) observes, the reality was radically distinct from wartime mobilisation, insofar as the latter acted as an accelerator of collectivisation. Instead, the COVID-19 interventions involved a distinct, if equally radical, process of state transformation that involved the temporary de-mobilisation of civilian life and the capitalist economy (Blakeley, 2020; Chodor and Hameiri, 2023; Lapavitsas, 2023). Ultimately, the unequal outcomes of the pandemic have revealed social divisions that have accentuated the focus of social movements and civil society organisations upon new and existing systems of inequality, exploitation and domination (della Porta, 2022; Leap et al., 2022) over already minoritised, racialised and otherwise vulnerable populations.

This collection, Crisis Governance, (De)Mobilisation and New Inequalities: The Legacy of COVID-19, has been inspired by these lingering legacies and puzzles of the pandemic. Emerging from the ENDURE Project, ¹ the collection examines the impact of state-led (de)mobilisation in response to COVID-19 to assess the prospects for greater post-pandemic equity. It brings together scholars across Europe to provide comparative insights into the interaction between state power and social mobilisations during crisis periods. By interrogating how five European states responded to the COVID-19 crisis, we have analysed the intersection between the governance regimes and existing (post)-neoliberal drivers of inequality. In this way, the collection addresses whether responses to COVID-19 enforced dominant governance perspectives upon states that reproduced hegemonic power relations; and examines how, and in what ways, minoritised populations, social movements and civil society actors survived or contested the exacerbation of existing inequalities. By focusing on these strategies, their effects and the mobilisations they encouraged, we identify commonalities and disparities with previous crisis events.

Situating the Research

To address the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on already crisis-afflicted liberal democratic states, our research starts from three foundations. First, the ‘irreducibly political and inescapably social’ (Leggett, 2017) nature of state-governance responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each contribution to the symposium therefore presents a relational analysis of political activity and the social context in which this materialises (Jessop, 2001, 2016). Second, the papers conceive the COVID-19 pandemic within a wider, interconnected set of historic and systemic crises that are characterised by complexity, uncertainty, contingency, (un)predictability and context-specificity. Third, the pandemic responses are conceived as part of a wider trajectory of state transformation that emerged symbiotically with the neoliberal order in its ‘globalised’ form (Chodor and Hameiri, 2023; Jones and Hameiri, 2022).

State-governance responses to the COVID-19 pandemic differed according to national and political contexts across Europe (Capano et al., 2020; Greer et al., 2020). However, one overarching feature was that the state did not mobilise to meet a common challenge, but instead sought to temporarily demobilise economic activity, politics and society, often using restrictive social and political measures combined with public health interventions (Jessop, 2021). These measures have had significant impacts upon pre-existing inequalities. Fischer (2021) has drawn attention to the highly unequal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, while Blundell et al. (2022) and Kallio et al. (2020) identify the COVID-19 pandemic as directly exacerbating existing inequalities. Bentzen and Torfing (2022) have observed ‘crisis-induced transformations’ in political processes and institutions, and Ansell et al. (2021) have noted the need for more ‘robust’ governance responses, especially within the public sector – similar to Weiss and Thurbon (2022) who advocate increasing state capacity to offset the weaknesses of neoliberal governance regimes. However, Dorre and Ibrahim (2021) argued that while we may have witnessed a new type of state interventionism, its permanence has remained doubtful. Others have used the pandemic to cast a more critical light upon the perceived ineffectiveness of contemporary neoliberal governance strategies that have characterised the response of many advanced capitalist democracies (Dodds et al., 2020; Jones and Hameiri, 2022; Saad-Filho, 2021). These conditions have led to counter-mobilisations by civil society actors and social movement actors from both the left and the right (Abers et al., 2021; della Porta, 2022; Kılıç, 2021).

The geographic scope of the contributions – covering Western, Central and South-Eastern Europe – serves to comparatively highlight the diversity and commonalities of pandemic responses while remaining sensitive to the interconnectivity and interdependency of states and societies. Importantly, the cases examined occupy distinct positions within what was previously conceived as an inevitable modernising journey towards liberal-democratic and ‘European’ norms. Poland, once considered alongside Hungary as a vanguard case for post-Communist modernisation and Europeanisation, later became synonymous (again, alongside Hungary) with the trajectory of ‘democratic backsliding’ and the illiberal turn in emerging democracies (Bernhard, 2021; Foley and Korkut, 2022; Holesch and Kyriazi, 2022). By contrast, Croatia is more often framed as a success story of EU enlargement and post-Communist transition. Yet researchers here have also registered an illiberal turn, albeit under the radar of mainstream European commentary (Čepo, 2021).

Germany has some claim to be among the most ‘Europeanised’ and liberal-democratic of states. Its reunification epitomised ‘end of history’ optimism and Germany provided the intellectual, financial and industrial impetus of the EU’s liberalised approach to economic growth (Hall, 2014; Streeck, 2009). Equally, at times, it has been portrayed as a Teutonic ‘variety of capitalism’, as against Anglo-American style free markets. However, stricken by a succession of crises, the German state labours under emerging economic and social problems that have reopened constitutional divides and given succour to a powerful far-right (Streeck, 2016). Even more so, Germany has recently been at the forefront of European securitisation policies targeting migrant populations, as well as the severe repression of protests against the genocide in Gaza.

Of all states, that of the United Kingdom occupies perhaps the most pivotal role, insofar as its governance of the pandemic was so explicitly framed around an existential crisis of the state form. The post-Thatcherite and Blairite transformation of the UK state transformed it from an archetype of post-colonial backwardness to a paragon of optimistic neoliberal modernisation (Edgerton, 2021; Foley, 2023; Hall, 1988). Its subsequent unravelling after the referendums of 2014 and 2016 has made the United Kingdom a cautionary tale of introverted populism and nationalistic retreat (Inglehart and Norris, 2016; Virdee and McGeever, 2018). The onset of the COVID-19 crisis would intersect with the maturation of this constitutional crisis, as Boris Johnson’s Conservative government sought to implement a mandate for ‘hard Brexit’. Having once epitomised the successes of neoliberal globalisation, the United Kingdom thus became an icon of how the resulting economic crises and austerity can reveal the fragility of underlying political order.

These cases illustrate that, quite apart from COVID-19, there was already an interaction between crisis logics at the economic-ecological level of accumulation and the imagined liberal-democratic framework of citizenship. Originally popularised by the European Union leadership in 2016, the term ‘polycrisis’ has become the ubiquitous expression of how slow-moving stresses (ageing populations, rising inequality, waning economic growth, climate crisis) interact with fast-emerging triggers (pandemics, political uprisings, wars, extreme weather events) to create the sense of entangled system breakdown (Lawrence et al., 2024). The link between these phenomena and the eruption of unexpected political phenomena – conventionally badged as ‘populism’ – has been widely accepted (Brubaker, 2021; Zeitlin et al., 2019). Even the most positivist and technocratic of accounts will acknowledge that interacting crises generate grievances which malign populists may use to undermine norms and weaken the rule of law. However, with so much emphasis on the sudden and inexplicable onset of systemic instabilities and political eruptions, it is more important than ever to historicise crisis events within the long-term trajectories within and between states. The stresses and shocks that now afflict governance systems accumulated over decades of superficially successful system expansion: the rules-based order and ‘post-democratic’ governance that emerged symbiotically with neoliberal globalisation.

Critical scholars have observed that the chaotic reaction of states to the pandemic was a consequence of a post-austerity crisis of state capacity (Capano et al., 2020; Jones and Hameiri, 2022; Serikbayeva et al., 2021). In this collection, rather than question the origins of COVID-19 measures, we emphasise how emergency measures interacted with and often serve to accelerate existing inequalities and conflicts within states. We analyse how states explicitly registered the question of inequality and ‘grievance’ during the pandemic. This includes the regimes and mechanisms by which populations were segregated or subjected to racialisation and minoritisation. Just as importantly, we emphasise what has been called the ‘organisation of irresponsibility’ (Veitch, 2007): the power of state actors to ignore or disclaim responsibility rather than to intervene in a totalising or authoritarian manner. This feature of contemporary state behaviour may go some way towards explaining the failure of the pandemic’s most optimistic prognoses, which centred on repurposing the pandemic’s powers to engineer an abrupt post-capitalist (or at least post-neoliberal) transition.

Finally, reflections on transformations in state power, authority and governance require consideration of politicisation, agency and resistance. In that respect, the COVID-19 era was one of political ambiguity. On the one hand, the phase of lockdowns did elicit forms of self-consciously radical anti-government protest. Most obviously, there was bodily-libertarian resistance to the lockdown measures themselves, but the period also saw Black Lives Matter protests that brought unprecedented breakthroughs in consciousness surrounding the carceral-racial American state and the colonial legacies of Europe. On the other hand, for all the obvious disturbances to routine and the unprecedented demobilisation of the capitalist economy, the period was arguably one of elite consolidation and restoration. The unruly and in some cases reactionary energies of bottom-up politicisation that featured during the Eurozone/austerity and ‘refugee’ crises played a lesser role during the pandemic. Nonetheless, as will be shown, the COVID-19 crisis did present opportunities for economic and political elites alongside the more reactionary or libertarian forces who exploited the resentful minority of opposition to lockdowns and vaccinations.

The more optimistic prognoses, during the pandemic’s early phase, had centred on a benevolent upward cycle of renewed state capacity, the creative repurposing of authority and a projected wave of optimistic resistance (Featherstone, 2021; Malm, 2020; Zizek, 2020). By demonstrating the creative power of state intervention, and the potential for extraordinary mass compliance in the common good, states would unintentionally generate an appetite for more utopian solutions to endemic challenges such as climate change. Unwilling or unable to implement more radical measures, post-neoliberal elites would be forced to surrender to the emerging agency of pandemic-era politics.

The weaknesses in this narrative are obvious in retrospect. As we have emphasised, one crucial feature of the pandemic was the de-mobilisation of the civic sphere which facilitated the incorporation of resistance within the state. The hope that a digital commons might replace this factor, or that online protest might provide sufficient enough agency to challenge emerging pandemic inequities, has proved to be overly optimistic. Business interests and pro-business intellectuals worked to ensure that relationships of production and exchange were frozen rather than transformed. Another factor, of course, is that the pandemic has not been memorialised. It has been hard to generalise from these interventions to a wider agenda of transformation because the impulse has been either to bracket and forget the era, or to absorb it within a wider bundle of system-level stresses and shocks. In this respect, re-examining what actually did happen during the pandemic – in particular, how early utopian hopes were channelled into a project of consolidation – can serve an expressly political purpose.

Contributions of the Research

As previously elaborated, the research gathered here interrogated the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on crisis-afflicted liberal-democratic states and sought answers to how emergency measures interacted with and served to accelerate existing inequalities and conflicts within states.

Foley and Kerr examine the Scottish Parliament’s devolved relationship with the United Kingdom to show how stylistic conflicts channelled and offset class-based grievances in Scotland during COVID-19. This is argued to epitomise Veitch’s (2007) notion of the ‘organisation of irresponsibility’, in so far as devolution served to incentivise superficial jurisdictional conflicts while dispersing accountability. Devolved governance in Scotland, framed within the context of the United Kingdom’s state modernisation efforts, is scrutinised to show the complex dynamics of collaborative governance during crisis periods. Set against the backdrop of wider austerity measures that characterised post-2010 politics in the United Kingdom, it illustrates how contemporary state power in Scotland is underscored by this organisation of irresponsibility, and emphasises the role of resilience partnerships in dispersing accountability. Combining desk-based documentary analysis with 21 semi-structured interviews with Scottish ministers, governance officials and civil society actors, the research engages with the experiences of governance actors by drawing out their interpretations of events and draws attention to the governance structures within which they operated. In this way, it highlights how the Scottish Government’s response to COVID-19 was characterised by a dysfunctional tension between different layers of government and provides important insights into the effect of state transformation upon contemporary state management of crisis events.

In the case of Germany, Froehlich and Varga examine how crisis governance and its associated discourses can reinforce anti-systemic and far-right narratives, focusing on the German federal state of Saxony during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent energy and inflation crisis. By comparing government and opposition responses to these interlinked crises, the study highlights a pattern of urgent, non-consultative governance that can ignite far-right mobilisations. Methodologically, the study employs a discourse-historical approach to analyse the thematic dimensions of public narratives. The findings reveal that the crisis governance strategies, marked by an emphasis on urgency and lack of alternatives, not only created a new cleavage between the political mainstream and right-wing populists but also facilitated a seamless transition of protest networks from the COVID-19 pandemic to the subsequent energy crisis. This continuity in governance practice and public discourse, the article argues, has deepened political cleavages and politicised civil society. This is a salient reminder of the importance of acknowledging long-term risks in crisis governance in order to prevent far-right mobilisation. The demonstration of the intricate link between crisis narratives and anti-systemic movements is crucial for understanding state transformations under the exceptional conditions of novel and overlapping emergencies.

Cichecka, Karolak and Ufel’s contribution is critical for comprehending state transformations and the evolving meanings of governance under the exceptional conditions of a pandemic, by illustrating the uneven and often contradictory nature of crisis governance in Poland with a focus on societal responses to public health governance and quarantine policies. The authors examine bottom-up and top-down viewpoints of government actors and civil society groups in Poland during the pandemic, and the implications these had for social movements and civil society mobilisations. Employing desk research and social media analysis, the article explores the interaction between centralised state power and grassroots initiatives. The findings reveal a crisis of governance within the neoliberal capitalist state, showing uneven patterns of public health management and highlighting the role of grassroots initiatives in filling gaps left by state inefficiency. The paper also engages with contemporary debates on civil society, challenging Bob Jessop’s (2020) claim that grassroots movements act as a reservoir for ideas that could democratise governance in times of crisis. Informed by gender and class perspectives, the paper indicates that crisis management in Poland deepened inequalities and put an uneven burden on those already least privileged, portraying a public tragedy in so far as this reflected the broader regional context of de-democratisation and the creation of new clientelist elites. More uniquely, the study identifies four types of state-society relations: compliance, contestation, complement and correction. These relations reinforce the importance of understanding governance not just as a normative ideal but as a historically tangible political process with far-reaching social implications.

Bužinkić and Šelo Šabić demonstrate how the COVID-19 governance in Croatia exacerbated the politics of ethno-nationalism and securitisation by furthering the racialisation of migrants and national minorities in Croatia. By examining governance forms in the context of perpetual crises, the study reveals how the crisis instigated by the COVID-19 pandemic enabled the Croatian government to invoke a state of exception, circumventing constitutional protocols and reinforcing politics of control and disciplining of racialised populations. Employing critical discourse analysis and detailed case studies, the research uncovers the biopolitical governance that perpetuated the disenfranchisement of vulnerable populations. One case study highlights the erection of a fence around an asylum seekers’ center, intensifying surveillance and control, while another exposes the exclusion of refugee and minority youth from online schooling during lockdowns. These findings highlight how pandemic governance not only deepened existing social divisions but also reflected broader trends of exclusion and control, contributing significantly to understanding state transformations and emergent governance patterns under exceptional conditions.

Barthoma focuses on the response of migrant communities to the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany and proposes a new analytical lens with which to conceptualise the role of bottom-up governance dynamics. His article critically examines the dynamics of pandemic governance in Germany, focusing on the Assyrian migrant community’s responses to top-down policies during COVID-19. By analysing public health governance, vaccine policies and societal reactions, the study uncovers how informal practices and community networks from below emerged as responses to state-driven measures. Adopting a grounded theory approach, it utilises diverse data sources, including reports, media articles and interviews with key stakeholders. The research highlights three themes: the reproduction of informality in everyday practices, alternative epistemologies based on mistrust of authorities and migrant agency in navigating governance structures. Theoretically framed within the context of neoliberal globalisation and state transformations, the study highlights the disproportionate burdens placed upon migrant communities during the pandemic, which was exacerbated by cultural misunderstandings and social inequalities. It identifies a crucial gap in existing scholarship by exploring how migrants navigate and potentially reshape formal governance structures through informal means. The findings reveal a spectrum of responses, from compliance to resistance, demonstrating the complex interplay between formal and informal governance. This contribution is vital for understanding state transformations and the emergent patterns of governance under exceptional conditions, highlighting the often-overlooked agency of migrant communities.

The papers in this symposium collectively highlight the complex governance dynamics of state-society relations during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the profound effect of previous and ongoing transformations of the state during the crisis periods. By examining state responses across different European contexts, the contributions put into sharp relief the ways in which state-led crisis governance strategies often reinforced social divisions. Pandemic governance measures that were intended to manage public health crises often accelerated existing inequalities associated with class, gender and race and propped up exclusionary politics across different states. State interventions, while necessary for managing the immediate health crisis, often served to entrench dominant governance paradigms and reproduce hegemonic power structures. Moreover, the collection sheds light on the (de)mobilisation of social movements and civil society during the pandemic. It reveals a complex picture where state actions not only suppress but also ignite social mobilisations. While some civil society actors faced heightened repression, others found innovative ways to contest and resist exacerbated inequalities. This complex duality brings into focus the capacity for resilience, adaptability and resistance of social movements and civil society actors in times of crisis.

Davies and Hobson (2023) have argued that the complex and uneven experiences of the pandemic offer ‘powerful indications of processes and phenomena in world politics that defy easy resolution’ (p. 150). The papers contained within this symposium have sought to interrogate the governance of state-society relations during the COVID-19 pandemic to offer further insights into these processes and mechanisms, and to renew focus on the political sociology of crises. Analytically, the papers collected here enable us to first consider continuity and change in state-governance strategies in crises (Hay, 2002; Marsh, 2017), and to examine the effect of these strategies on existing inequalities. Strategically, the research examines the response of social movements and civil society organisations to these strategies by illuminating practical examples of contestation; critically, this collection shows the extent to which dynamics of state-society relations are important here, as the state can either include or exclude in terms of the interests it responds to. Finally, the research reflects on how the COVID-19 pandemic fits into a more ‘entangled’ understanding of multiple, overlapping and systemic crises. As other authors have argued (Calhoun and Derluguian, 2011; Davis, 2022; Harvey, 2014), individual crisis events are more accurately thought of as part of more entangled and generalised social, economic and environmental crises. Ultimately, the insights gathered from this symposium offer a more sophisticated understanding of how crises can both challenge and reinforce existing power relations, providing valuable lessons for future responses to socio-ecological crises.