Pandemic nationalisms

Abstract

This paper examines how the pandemic emergency as a global challenge – the first of its kind since WWII – has activated what I call a ‘pandemic nationalism’ that was simultaneously both inclusionary and exclusionary. On one hand, the national community was re-defined in relation to their common fate (of facing the pandemic together because residing in the same territory) extending hence the boundaries of membership to temporary residents or those with precarious status. On the other hand, it became increasingly closed towards the exterior enhancing what has been labelled ‘vaccine nationalism’ and a sense of being in competition with other nations on a common, global public good (notably vaccines and cures addressing the virus). Closures and exclusions arose also internally against those minorities that were associated with the ‘external threat’ notably people of east Asian origin. At the face of these contradictory developments, the question arises whether we could consider the Covid-19 pandemic as a turning point that signals a new phase of development of nationalism. Such nationalism is meant to respond to the increasing challenges of globalisation by incorporating those who serve the community while Othering those who are perceived to threaten its well-being.

Introduction

I have argued elsewhere that we need to pay less attention to the ethnic or civic content of national identity and rather focus more on the ways in which a given understanding of the nation and nationalist ideology interacts with ‘others’, whether real or imagined, internal or external (Triandafyllidou, 2001, 2013). While I see this as an ongoing process that has always characterised nation (trans)formation, I have argued that under conditions of accelerated globalisation and interconnectedness as well as increased migration and intensified diversity, we need to pay more attention to that interaction with Others rather than to the actual ‘content’ of national identities.

During the last 2.5 years – notably between 2020 and 2022 - national governments have taken unprecedented decisions sealing their borders and even restricting mobility between provinces or regions. And yet they all have had to admit that their borders are permeable even when closed; that we are more interdependent than ever (for collaborating on medical research, exchanging data, distributing vaccines or tests, and seeking to fight the pandemic). One might have expected that a common, indeed global threat, that threatened the basic common good for all, notably human life and health, might have invigorated a sense of a ‘global community’ and a global solidarity given that in this situation “we are as strong as our weakest link” (Zhou, 2022: 451). A closer examination of the policies and practices implemented during the pandemic by a number of democratic liberal countries, reveals important contradictions.

Closed borders brought to the surface important distinctions in terms of status – citizens in most cases allowed in (and even repatriated during the first lockdowns of March-April 2022) even when borders were closed but aliens including even extended family members kept out. However, such privileges of crossing borders for non-essential reasons was afforded also to temporary resident aliens to the extent that they could prove that they were effectively residing at the given country, regardless of the conditions of their status. The pandemic emergency also forced governments to consider and implement important exceptions to closed borders, allowing (actually bringing) in migrants who worked in agriculture and food processing or health care – sectors which were considered ‘essential’ for the well-being of the nation. The pandemic brought about unexpected changes in terms of access to health care as the latter was provided to all, including prevention of Covid-19 through vaccines, regardless of status. As borders were closed and mobility disrupted, many countries extended the legal stay of temporary migrants and some offered options for regularising their status to undocumented migrants or refused asylum seekers, in deviation from existing laws and regulations specifying procedures and waiting times. Contribution to the community through work in an essential occupation became an important criterion for inclusion and status. Considering these changes, the pandemic shock brought about important novelties to the notion of membership to the community and citizenship, expanding rights and reinforcing inclusion on the basis of effective residence and civic merit.

At the same time though the pandemic reinforced exclusionary trends as regards national identity and the perception of external Others. Vaccine nationalism (defined as the mindset and act of gaining preferential access to newly developed COVID-19 vaccines by individual countries, in practice those with higher income, (Zhou, 2022: 451)) developed rather swiftly as governments and pharmaceutical companies raced to discover both a cure and a vaccine against the new virus. Geopolitical tensions surfaced and states engaged in competition with each other seeking to develop faster and then pre-buy their ‘own’ vaccines neglecting the fact that the virus was global and its eradication had to equally involve all countries and world regions (Zhou, 2022). Some political leaders like the then US president Donald Trump severely fuelled discriminatory discourses by labelling Covid-19 as the ‘China virus’ and blaming China for the situation. This in turn fuelled suspicion and both covert and explicit racism towards Asian Americans in the US as well as Asian origin people in other countries. Such exclusions reproduced historical racist stereotypes and further exacerbated them (Gover et al., 2020; Hahm et al., 2021; Perng and Dhaliwal, 2022). In addition, people who were particularly vulnerable and outside both their community of origin and their destination, notably asylum seekers seeking entry to a safe country, were also kept out as they were identified as potential threats to the community well being (because carriers of the virus). In that case national identity clearly excluded those populations.

This paper investigates in more details these developments arguing that the pandemic emergency as a truly global challenge – the first of its kind since WWII – has activated a ‘pandemic nationalism’ that is simultaneously both inclusionary and exclusionary. At the face of these contradictory developments, the question arises whether we could consider the Covid-19 pandemic as a turning point that signals a new phase of development of nationalism. Such nationalism is meant to respond to the increasing challenges of globalisation by incorporating those who serve the community while Othering those who are perceived to threaten its well-being. While the notion of ‘serving the community’ and related civic merit is an inclusionary element, it may also become highly instrumental (only those who ‘serve’ can become members). At the same time, it risks undermining transnational solidarity in a world that is intrinsically connected and interdependent exacerbating global inequality and exclusion. This new dimension for considering membership is somewhat vertical to Will Kymlicka’s theorising of multicultural citizenship as a mode for addressing and incorporating diversity. Civic merit and service to the community does not concern claims that immigrant groups make for the accommodation of their cultural or religious diversity. At the same time, as I will elaborate further below, this dimension relates to Kymlicka’s attention to empirical considerations (see the introduction to this volume) as well as to Kymlicka and Banting’s perspective on ethics of membership (Banting et al., 2019).

This paper starts by outlining my analytical approach pointing to the interactive nature of nationalism and how different events and broader socio-economic developments shape the form and content of national identity. I then turn to discuss in detail the notions of effective residence, and civic merit as critical inclusionary innovations as they have emerged in reaction to the pandemic. Section four turns to discussing the exclusionary trends of vaccine nationalism, including anti-asylum seeker policies and anti-Asian racism and the interaction between geopolitical antagonisms and internal exclusions. In the concluding section, I bring the different arguments together to question whether these developments signal a new phase of nationalism in a globalising world which reinforces national boundaries in the hope of taming globalisation, albeit causing important negative side effects. ¹

The interactive and contextual nature of nationalism

I have argued elsewhere (Triandafyllidou, 1998, 2001) that we need to pay less attention to the ethnic or civic content of national identity and rather focus more on the ways in which a given understanding of the nation and nationalist ideology interacts with ‘others’, whether real or imagined. I have argued that globalisation requires us to pay more attention to that interaction with Others and have proposed the notion of plural versus neo-tribal nationalism (Triandafyllidou, 2013, 2020).

While the conceptual and empirical inquiry into the onset of nations and their ethnic or civic configuration and historical circumstances of formation offers rich insights into how nations were formed into national states, with a particular focus on Europe in the last two centuries, it falls short of providing for a useful analytical tool in the 21st century context. The socio-economic developments of the last 25 years, particularly since 1989, including the collapse of Communism, the intensification of socio-economic and cultural globalisation, the advent of the internet of things, and the increasing relevance of migration and diversity (see Triandafyllidou, 2020) compel us to rethink what are the main driving forces behind nationalism and nation (trans)formation. While the ethnic or civic ‘materials’ that make a national identity and the historical process of nation formation ought not be neglected completely, they need to be considered under a more interactive lens that puts mobility and diversity centre-stage in the discourses and practices of nationalism and nation consolidation or change in the 21st century. I have thus proposed (Triandafyllidou, 2020) the notions of neo-tribal versus plural nationalism as the main analytical categories through which to make sense of contemporary nationalism discourses and ideologies.

My analytical framework on plural versus neo-tribal nationalism is complementary to the analysis of multiculturalism proposed by Kymlicka and other scholars (e.g. Tariq Modood) as it seeks to address the broader picture of how majority and minority identities and diversities are intertwined in a fast evolving socio-economic and geo-political global context. My approach is premised on two observations. First, our word is more interconnected and more mobile compared to the post-World War II period and even compared to the 1980s and 1990s when Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Anthony D. Smith and other renowned theorists of nationalism developed their conceptual work. Our everyday lives today are imbued by services and products generated in other countries and continents.

Cultural and ethnic diversity has acquired an ever more important everyday consumption feature that is no longer confined to cosmopolitan habits of small elites. Not only has the distinction between high (elite) culture and low (popular) culture receded but ethnic cultural consumption has also become popularised. Tasting food from other continents, listening to ethnic music, reading cartoons from distant cultures and watching TV series produced in other continents is increasingly common among wider population strata. We live in a world of frequent mediated or real interaction with people from other cultures, countries, ethnic backgrounds. This interaction with diverse cultural products and services makes Others, both real and imagined ones, more salient and more relevant in our understanding of who we are and who ‘others’ are. Such cultural consumption and indirect contact however does not necessarily imply openness or acceptance of other cultures and peoples. On the contrary such multi-cultural tasting may trigger the urge to clarify one’s own identity and sense of belonging in a world of increased complexity and inter-cultural contact (Lemaine et al., 1978).

Second, today groups of reference for individuals, and boundaries among different groups have become more blurred, potentially permeable, ‘liquid’ (to borrow Zygmunt Bauman’s term). As Bauman (2000) argues while free individuals in modernity were to use their freedom to find the appropriate niche where to settle and adopt the rules and modes of conduct identified as appropriate for that location, free individuals today have lost their stable orientation points. Their point of reference is universal comparison, argues Bauman (ibid.), generating too many patterns and configurations available to the individual – indeed an ‘unbearable lightness of being’ – to use Milan Kundera’s words (Kundera, 2005).

In this 21st century context of liquid identity and multi-cultural connectedness and consumption, nationalism – and particularly that of the populist and nativist variety – re-emerges with new force, filling the cracks of a ‘liquid’ and uncertain later modernity condition. However, it does so in different ways. It can propose neo-tribal identities that seem to restore the certainty and ‘solidity’ of the past, or it can acknowledge uncertainty (Scoones, 2018) and ‘liquidity’ and create a nuanced and complex sense of belonging that acknowledges mixity and interdependence. The pattern that different countries follow and the ways in which different nationalism discourses (and related policies and practices of inclusion and exclusion) develop is not, I am arguing, a function of their ethnic or civic content but rather depends on how different nationalisms have reacted to increased exposure to mobility and diversity and is usually the outcome of agonistic processes of democratic deliberation (Triandafyllidou, 2013, 2020). My work is thus inscribed in the broader school of those who consider that multicultural citizenship and immigration issues need to be considered together rather than separately (Baycan Herzog, 2021; Teo, 2021, see also the introduction to this special issue).

Thus we need to analyse new waves and discourses of chauvinist, populist nationalism or of transnational, universalist solidarity and of mixed belonging along a continuum that ranges from plural nationalism (an open form of nationalism that acknowledges diversity, interacts with it and eventually embraces and synthesises a new national configuration) to neo-tribal nationalism (a reactive form of nationalism, that is exclusionary, based on the construction of an authenticity and homogeneity that is organic and does not change). Neo-tribal and plural nationalism are of course ideal types, not black and white distinctions. They make more sense as the two extreme points of a continuum along which we can position the re-emerging nationalisms of today.

Plural nationalism acknowledges that the nation is based in some commonality. Such commonality may invariably be based on cultural, ethnic, religious or territorial and civic elements. What is important is that the ingroup perceives such commonality and identifies with it, organises around it. Within this plural nationalism there is certainly a majority group that to a large extent has given its imprint on the national identity, through the historical process of nation formation which may have been smooth and gradual or traumatic and conflictual. However this majority national cultural, ethnic or civic imprint does not monopolise the national identity definition and the relevant dominant discourse. By contrast plural nationalism acknowledges openly a degree of diversity in the nation that may stem from the period of nation formation and the existence of minorities within the nation, or may have evolved later through the experience of immigration. Plural nationalism acknowledges the changing demographic or political circumstances of the nation and the nation-state and through a process of tension, even conflict, and change, it creates a new synthesis.

A concept similar to plural nationalism has recently been advanced by Tariq Modood (2019) who has argued for a multicultural understanding of nationalism. Modood’s notion builds on his earlier writings arguing that British national identity should accommodate post-migration ethnic minorities who ask for recognition and inclusion within the national self-concept (Modood, 2003).

My notion of plural nationalism is not in reality particularly distant from the multicultural nationalism of Modood albeit with a caveat: I am concerned not only with minorities within the state but also with real or imagined Others outside the boundaries of the nation-state.

In contrast to plural nationalism’s interactive and dialogical relationship with diversity and Others, neo-tribal nationalism is predicated on a rejection of diversity. I use the term tribal to emphasise that this type of nationalism, regardless of whether the ingroup is defined in territorial-civic or blood-and-belonging terms, is predicated on an organic, homogenous conception of the nation (see also Chua 2018). The nation is represented as a compact unit that does not allow for variation or change. The only way to deal with challenges of mobility and diversity is to close ranks and resist and reject it. Neo-tribal nationalism is not static. It is dynamic and interactive too. Albeit its reaction to new challenges and to diversity from within or from outside is one of closure and rejection. I call this nationalism tribal, not in the sense of an ethnic, genealogical commonality but to emphasise that such a nationalism advocates for an organic type of national identity that is somehow amorphous, non-self-reflexive, and develops also beyond or in contrast to political institutions. Neo-tribal nationalism may be seen as pre-modern in this respect.

However it is not pre-modern and hence the prefix neo-before the adjective tribal: this type of nationalism develops and thrives not only in a world that is ever more interconnected and mobile but also in a reality that is also dominated by electronic and in particular by social media. While social media may be seen as the epitome of the modern, technological evolution, they bring within them the seed of a return to a tribal, closed understanding of the world. Social media and internet algorithms allow for people who are transnationally connected to the world (through videogames, youtube channels, social media influencers, on demand television shows) to be confined within their own little echo-chamber, within their digital bubble of like-minded people. They create a transnational digital community that is neo-tribal. Chauvinist nationalists of the world can unite today. They may share the same zero-sum, competitive, nationalistic view of the world and through their sharing of Instagram and Facebook groups may feel that their views are very mainstream, not extremist at all. It is in this sense that neo-tribal nationalism is not simply tribal.

Taking stock of these analytical observations about the different directions that nationalism can take and the way in which broader socio-economic and political developments and relations with Others shape concepts of the nation, the pandemic emerges as an important turning point that has brought about significant developments in our concepts and practices of national membership. In the next section, I discuss the notion of effective residence and civic merit as they emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic, redefining who belongs to a given community and who does not.

Pandemic membership

The two developments that I am discussing in the following sections concern two policy and discursive innovations that took place under the pandemic and which to some extent carry our inquiry on multiculturalism sideways. These two developments concern (a) acknowledging effective residence – being a member of the community because one lives there, regardless of legal residence or citizenship status (b) facilitating membership on the basis of civic merit – contribution to the community because one is performing ‘essential’ work.

Effective residence

The pandemic has brought about significant practical and normative dilemmas as to whether members of the nation/citizens should be prioritised at all costs, and aliens be kept out or excluded from the nation-state. Exclusion or inclusion concerned different levels: actual access to the territory (border closures and discretionary openings); stay status under conditions where one could not leave or if one left could not return to the country; access to health services and socio-economic allowances to offset the impact of the pandemic.

Since usually in most countries not everyone residing there is a citizen, it became soon clear that decisions had to be made and boundaries (re)drawn about who belongs and is entitled to rights of entry, stay and welfare, and who does not. The complexity of these decisions can become bewildering in countries with different immigration statuses ranging from that of temporary resident (under different legal status such as temporary worker, family member of a temporary worker, asylum seeker or international student, or also a visitor) who effectively has strong or weak ties with their ‘host’ country, to that of a long-term/permanent resident (someone with the ‘right to abode’ for an indefinite period of time, in the EU an EU citizens from another member state for instance).

The pandemic has emphasized the existence of different layers of membership within each country, an element that by itself is not new (immigration and enforcement policies have always played a role in (re-)constructing imagined communities of ‘aliens’, Aleinikoff, 1995; Romero, 1998). But the pandemic has pushed the boundaries of these different layers, blurring and redrawing their contours. The emergency has raised important clarification questions: where does the boundary between insiders and outsiders effectively lie and who should be in or out? For instance, should people with temporary status be given exemptions from border restrictions or should they be excluded? What matters most: their effective residence or their immigration status? Similarly, should asylum seekers be included – in respect of the international right to asylum – or should this right be suspended during the pandemic? These questions push our discussion outside the narrower remit of multiculturalism considerations considering what happens outside the citizenship realm, which however influences our understanding of membership to a society and hence of national citizenship too.

We can imagine the effective population of a country as a set of concentric circles (see also Triandafyllidou and Veikou, 2002): The inner group includes the citizens, those who belong and who have a clear and stable legal relationship with the state. The citizens are expected to take priority in terms of protection of their right to life and health, both as regards their protection through reduced international mobility but also through access to the public health or welfare system. At the same time, they are expected to show loyalty and solidarity to fellow citizens, which in the case of the pandemic emergency may include adhering to the guidelines of the authorities or, for instance, restraining from international but also domestic travel with a view to avoid spreading the virus.

In immigration countries like Canada or Australia or the US, people accepted as permanent immigrants (e.g. green card holders in the US, so-called PRs in Canada) are treated like citizens for what concerns their socio-economic rights, including for instance access to public health or family reunification rights. In other countries with significant immigrant populations, like Britain or Germany, this status is called ‘the right to abode’ and is given to people who were initially temporary migrants but acquired long-term resident status. Transnational entities like the European Union create an additional layer of belonging as European citizenship gives EU citizens who live in another member state equal rights with those of the citizens of that country (Baubock, 2019). Such people who are not citizens but who have an enhanced residence status have been treated under the pandemic like citizens and the pandemic actually has somehow reinforced their belonging to the in-group.

The situation was more complex for people with temporary status who have been admitted to a country for a specific period, whether for study or work, and who are likely to be relatively recent arrivals. These have faced significant hardship (Raghuram and Sondhi, 2022) as the permits of some expired during the lockdowns while others lost their jobs and hence risked losing their status as a result of the pandemic (Wright, 2020). The pandemic though has forced countries to consider what Canada has termed the ‘effective residence’ of temporary aliens. Hence beyond the issue of citizenship, the pandemic has brought to the fore the notion of ‘effective membership’. It forced governments to ask where people live habitually, where they send their kids to school, where they pay taxes or have health coverage.

The pandemic pushed this outer circle of transient members of the community into the inner circle of those who effectively live in the country for what concerned border restrictions (from which they were exempted). At the same time these transient members were internally excluded in some countries as they did not have access to emergency unemployment or family benefits (as happened for instance for temporary migrants in Germany, migrant domestic workers in the USA (Rosinska and Pellerito, 2022) and for Syrian refugees in Turkey).

While effective membership may thus still seem tentative, the pandemic has raised the question of whether this notion of effective residence can be codified into law. For instance, it could become a criterion for citizenship acquisition in a way more substantial than currently duration of residence in a country is. In fact, today in many countries only the period spent as permanent or long term resident counts for applying for citizenship. One could expand this definition and argue in favour of recognising the years of ‘effective residence’ that may have been spent under temporary status. Effective residents are recognised as such because they live, work, pay taxes, contribute to the community, send their kids to school, and participate in public life even if they do not have a long term status or political rights. In other words, they contribute to the society in different ways and are recognised by others and the sate as ‘fellow members’.

In addition to foregrounding the ‘effective residence’ criterion of temporary migrants and enhancing their rights, the pandemic also pushed countries in many cases to offer blanket extensions of temporary permits. Many EU countries (including, for instance, Spain, Portugal, Poland, and Germany) implemented blanket extensions of stay permits for all foreigners during spring 2020 to avoid people losing their legal status under the lockdown (EMN, 2020a). Similar measures were taken in Canada, Chile, Israel, and New Zealand, while Italy implemented a regularisation program with a view of providing status to illegally staying aliens working in agriculture and the care sector (Corrado and Palumbo, 2022). Some countries implemented different facilitation procedures like allowing for online renewals of permits, as in the Netherlands, or automatically renewing the status of people who had lost it during the pandemic, as happened in Canada, until the end of 2020, to give them more time to gather necessary documents or find a new job or both (Triandafyllidou, 2022b). Beyond extending legal status, most EU and OECD countries took concerted efforts to share information in different languages so as to reach out to migrant populations (EMN, 2020a: 8).

It is quite surprising that in all the above cases, the ethnic or civic definition of the nation appeared less relevant. These temporary migrants were imagined as part of the community because they shared its fate as all people present in the country had to face the pandemic there. One might argue that a sense of shared fate and shared responsibility emerged, over and beyond considerations of origins or status. The pandemic pushed people to re-imagine their community (to use Benedict Anderson’s (1981) famous metaphor) as all people present in the territory without distinctions of status, foregrounding their shared humanity and pandemic ‘fate.’ In that sense these deliberations cut across ideas of polyethnic groups, national minorities or indigenous peoples as very aptly categorised by Will Kymlicka 25 years ago, bringing the effective community of persons residing in a given polity centre-stage.

‘Essential’ contributions to the community

The pandemic has exposed further fissures and dilemmas in our understanding of the limits and hierarchies of membership. As it happened in countries like Canada, the US, Germany, Italy or Spain, many of the frontline workers in senior care homes, farms, or food processing plants were people with often precarious status, notably temporary or seasonal migrants, asylum seekers waiting for their application to be processed, or mere sojourners without the right to work. They performed work that was essential for the well-being of the community as it ensured the food supply chain and the care of the elderly or sick, even though they did not belong to the nation and some did not even have secure legal status.

Under the emergency, specific categories of workers (which include migrant workers) have been characterised as ‘essential’ – vital for the economy and the community’s well-being (see Macklin, 2022; Gahwi and Walton-Roberts, 2022). These have included medical and paramedical personnel, care workers but also farm labourers and people working in the food processing industry. These workers have not only been essential but also vulnerable as the sectors they work in and the conditions under which they work put them at risk of contracting the virus.

Governments in Canada and Germany but also Italy, Spain, and Poland mobilised to find appropriate solutions for bringing in migrant workers for agriculture, including chartered flights with few passengers sitting at a safe ‘distance’, assistance to employers for the quarantine period in appropriate accommodation, and self-isolation (Corrado and Palumbo, 2022). However, these measures had less to do with a new sensitivity about the living or working conditions of these temporary foreign workers. Special measures aimed to protect the ‘essential’ work rather than the ‘essential’ workers (Triandafyllidou and Nalbandian, 2020a, 2020b). The concern was also to protect the local community from contagion and a possible outbreak if a migrant worker tested positive for Covid-19. Indeed, the safety measures and monitoring and support only extended through the quarantine period. After it was lifted, there was little follow-up or protection for the migrant workers (Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, 2020), who were often returned to crowded accommodation or given protective equipment when their work did not allow for physical distancing. The meat industry in several European countries, the US, and Canada emerged as a pandemic hotspot (Palumbo and Corrado, 2020). Similar challenges were faced by care workers in private homes under the pandemic (Caregivers Action Centre, 2020; Marchetti and Boris, 2020) who were confronted with restriction of their freedom, laid off without notice, and often risked irregular status and expulsion because they were found to be in breach of their stay permit through no fault of their own.

However, the fact that these workers contributed to work that was essential for the well-being of the community often under conditions of high risk led to a mobilisation asking for a preferential access of these workers to secure legal status. This was the case in Quebec, Canada, in June 2020 when asylum seekers employed in senior care homes – which were hard hit by the pandemic – mobilised, asking to obtain permanent residency status as a recognition of their contribution to the safety and care of community members (Levitz and Kestler d’Amours, 2020). The Prime Minister of the province refused but after further negotiations with the federal government, a special path to permanent residency was announced by the then federal minister, Marco Mendicino, on 14 August 2020. Minister Mendicino explained the decision by reflecting on the fact that these asylum seekers put themselves at risk day after day on the pandemic and ‘they demonstrated a uniquely Canadian quality’ (argued Mendicino) ‘in that they were looking out for others and so that is why today is so special’ (Seidle, 2020). It is particularly noteworthy that the Minister emphasises that the behaviour of these workers qualified them as ‘Canadians’ bridging thus their important contribution to the notion that ‘caring for the other’ is a very special element in the national identity. The performative aspect of membership and citizenship is here emphasised pushing us to consider how such action can lead to a change in the rules of who belongs to the national ingroup.

Deservingness has been a notion mobilised in relation to undocumented migrants and their access to services and rights or overall the possibility of regularising their status (Spencer and Delvino, 2019) while scholars have also argued that migrants with undocumented status often ‘perform citizenship’ (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas, 2020) by being diligent workers, consistent tax payers, honest family persons and engaging in local matters. These have been bottom up strategies of mobilisation to acquire legal status. The contribution that these migrants or asylum seekers were making to the community was less ‘essential’ than the one that essential workers have been performing under the pandemic. The question arises whether contributing to the community can become a criterion for membership – notably for long term/permanent residency and ultimately for citizenship and of course how could such a criterion be incorporated in Kymlicka’s theory of rights for different types of groups. One’s civic contribution to the nation is generally recognised as an aspect of membership but usually such recognition would facilitate access to citizenship only when people performed exceptional deeds (like for instance the young undocumented migrant from Mali who saved a child’s life and to whom French citizenship was conferred upon a special decision of French president Emmanuel Macron, Pradier (2018)). Under the pandemic though, regular work in certain sectors took the quality of an exceptional contribution to the community.

Pandemic exclusions and racism

By contrast to the mostly positive developments outlined above of recognising effective membership and civic merit, the pandemic triggered also exclusive reactions. On one hand, exclusions and internal border delineation had mostly to do with asylum seekers. On the other hand, racist and xenophobic reactions towards people looking Asians proliferated putting to the test even those nations that define themselves as multicultural and inclusive as it happens in Canada or the US.

While for temporary migrants maybe the dilemmas of border restrictions and service provisions were easier to solve through an inclusive approach, the dilemmas raised by asylum seekers entering a country to seek protection or temporary migrants whose status has expired led to exclusionary measures preventing asylum seekers from entering or confining them to reception/detention camps with a view of protecting the well-being of the citizens.

Asylum seekers posed important dilemmas to countries with long traditions of asylum like EU member states or Canada (Abji et al., 2020; Ellis, 2020; George, 2020). For those inside the country, the approach has been inclusive in affording them protections based on both a human rights perspective and with a view to overall limiting the spread of the virus in the community. However, there were often inhumane practices too (Flynn and Welsford, 2020): for example, in Greece asylum seekers in the metropolitan area of Athens or the Aegean islands were confined in the reception centres when positive cases were discovered. The crowded living conditions in these centres did not prevent the virus’s spread within those communities, while access to healthcare was also limited or non-existent (Molnar, 2022) with priority given to keeping the virus in the camps and avoiding its spread among the wider community of citizens outside the camp. The border in those cases was recreated within the state, separating those who do not belong from those who belong within the country’s territory. Similar approaches were documented in the US too where detention centres became Covid-19 hotspots (Boris, 2022).

Refugee claimants seeking protection by crossing international borders were however the most vulnerable and most exposed category where the pandemic showed how citizenship is prioritised over an international right to asylum or an international respect of human rights. Asylum seekers were pushed back from the Canadian border to the US (Ellis, 2020) and prevented from entering Greece via Turkey. While in both cases there are international safe-third-country agreements in place that could legally justify the move, in both those pushed back were in vulnerable conditions and the countries to which they were pushed back are not particularly safe. The Federal Court of Canada in fact ruled on 23 July 2020 that the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by allowing Canada to send refugee claimants back to the US. More recently, in September 2021, thousands of Haitian asylum seekers were deported back to Haiti from the US-Mexico border under the emergency pandemic measure known as Title 42 (Montoya Galvez, 2021). Even though some asylum seekers were allowed in (Sullivan, 2021), in the US or elsewhere it was clear that the inner political community of members could not ‘afford’ to help aliens under the pandemic emergency by allowing them to enter the country. Similar challenges were documented in South Africa (Rugunanan, 2020) and in Singapore and Malaysia (Petcharamasree, 2020).

In addition to the exclusion of asylum seekers, the pandemic has led to an increase in anti-Asian racism and hate speech towards specific ethnic minorities. Reproducing historical experiences of prejudice, discrimination and racism, the pandemic led to a significant rise in anti-Asian hate crim in the US (Gover et al., 2020) fuelled by institutional racist discourses about the ‘China virus’. Such discourses are not a novelty as anti-Asian racism in the US and Canada is well documented in history through past racist immigration policies (Gover et al., 2020; Trebilcock, 2019). Migrants have often been blamed for being sickly or bearers of disease (Taylor, 2019) suh as for instance Irish Catholic immigrants in the US in the past being blamed for the ‘Irish disease’ (cholera), or Jewish immigrants for ‘consumption’ (tuberculosis) or Italian newcomers for polio (Cohn, 2012). What is perhaps different in the pandemic case, is that anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racism was particularly fuelled by tense geopolitical relations around vaccine nationalism and mutual attributions of the blame for the pandemic. Thus then US President Trump accusing then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for visiting Chinatown in San Francisco in support of Asian American owned businesses (Behrmann, 2020) or a US senator accusing China for the spread of Covid-19 asserting that Chinese ‘culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs’ (Wu, 2020).

In all these instances the pandemic has triggered a re-imagining of the global community as a battlefield where the nation has to defend itself from external Others be they individuals seeking entry and protection or other countries accused for being bearers of disease because of their race or culture. While it is clear that racist discourses and incidents were fuelled by racist statements of the US government and related social media messages, they also proliferated in countries where such discourses were not reproduced by official sources, like in Canada and in EU countries. These developments point to the need of considering not only what happens within the national community but also the geopolitical context around it, when investigating the accommodation (or lack thereof) of immigrants and other minority groups.

Such racist discourses were also catalysed by the emergence of vaccine nationalism among the higher income countries around the world. As they hurried to form public-private partnerships with large pharmaceutical corporations to boost research and secure vaccines as soon as possible, it was economic power that became the ultimate criterion for access to vaccines or medicine rather than a sense of protection of the most vulnerable. Despite relevant mechanisms set up at the global level like COVAX, competition among countries like the US, the UK, China, and Germany (and the whole of the EU) arose as to who would secure first vaccines for their populations. There was little consideration of the interconnected nature of the challenge, and despite transnational scientific collaboration, health policy followed nationalistic ‘me-first’ criteria (Zhou, 2022).

The pandemic crisis has thus had a polarising effect on the understanding and practice of membership: while it pushed people with temporary status towards the inner circle, it pushed outside those who may have needed protection the most while also alienating parts of the national community that were labelled as ‘alien’ and stigmatised. At the same time, the importance of the national boundaries was reinforced and the global community was re-imagined as full of threats and enemies of the nation.

Concluding Remarks

This paper has looked more closely to some important dilemmas that the recent Covid-19 pandemic has exposed with regard to who belongs and who does not and at what level. The pandemic has forced states to rethink the rights and membership claims of migrants with temporary or precarious status, beyond considerations of the diversity claims or traits of different groups. National governments have almost inadvertently codified a notion of effective membership for people who had temporary status but effectively lived in a given country. It thus foregrounded the ties that these people have with their place of residence bypassing migration regulations and definitions of citizenship. In addition, the pandemic has brought to the fore the notion of civic merit – or contribution to the community – or performing ‘essential’ work – as a criterion for membership to the community and eventually of a pathway to citizenship.

While these developments did not directly arise from a confrontation with the ‘Other’ in the ways in which I have argued it can happen with processes of pluralising national identity (Triandafyllidou, 2020) I am suggesting here that the pandemic did lead to a more plural nationalism in that it has diversified the criteria of membership, setting them free of considerations of ethno-cultural or religious belonging, and foregrounding both directly (in performing essential work) and indirectly (in effective membership) the de facto belonging of the migrants or asylum seekers in question. Piccoli (2023) has coined the term pandemic citizenship to point to the important innovations that have sprawled out of the pandemic emergency with regard to citizenship rights for non-citizens. These developments and my analysis of them call for some new thinking into theories of multiculturalism with a view of better incorporating the interaction between the internal and the external dimension of citizenship.

The pandemic has solidified the external functions of nationalism notably as regards the relations with other countries promoting competition even when it comes to a common transnational good such as global public health. Vaccine nationalism has short circuited with pre-existing systemic racism towards Asian communities leading to the redrawing of internal boundaries among citizens. Being the first truly global pandemic that tangibly threatened human lives around the world, instead of triggering a higher level of global solidarity as a response to the common challenge, it led to competition and racism against external Others. Multilateral health governance was undermined by vaccine nationalism and Othering discourses (Zhou, 2022).

The political question arises whether the developments analysed in this paper were a knee jerk reaction to an exceptional and unexpected challenge and as we leave the pandemic hopefully behind us, both positive and negative developments will gradually disappear, or whether the pandemic signals a turning point for the development of nationalism in a phase of intensified globalisation and enhanced interdependence, where instead of transnational solidarity and cooperation, external boundaries become harder and more inimical, while internally though the community becomes more cohesive and inclusionary. The analytical question that arises is how can we make sense of such internal-external dynamics in our existing theories of multicultural citizenship of which Will Kymlicka has been one of the most influential and prominent thinkers.