Adam Tooze’s non-fiction book “The World in Lockdown”. Review. – Culture

If there is one experience that describes life in the Corona years 2020 and 2021, it is the experience of being thrown back on yourself. Cut off from otherwise normal social contacts, often even from one’s own family, restricted by measures whose purpose is much more abstract than the mere direct protection of health, one suddenly becomes aware of the radical inner space of one’s own life.

The notorious uncertainty of the pandemic surrounds this interior space with question marks, makes the normal the exception, the otherwise accustomed certainties shake. But unlike the media’s view of national interpretive frameworks and again different from what the protests directed against the respective governments and their conspiracy narratives suggest, this experience is one that is shared with billions of people around the world: a truly global one The order of magnitude of the radical internal view.

The “World in Lockdown”, the title of Adam Tooze’s new book, is not just a book that aims to tell about the world’s reaction to the pandemic. It is also a radical interior view of this world that is being thrown back on itself by the corona pandemic. The British economic historian with German roots specializes in the context of Crises and transformations connects with each other.

“If we want to keep up, we have to run to stand still.”

How do power, politics and economics work together? What possibilities arise in crises, the fight against which is “driven” “by the real nature of the immediate situation” and which are at the same time “trapped” in a network of interests “which have to” assemble their own instruments while they are doing their work “? He examined the economy of National Socialism, the economic crisis of 1929, but also the economic and financial turnaround of the crisis-ridden seventies, with regard to being driven and trapped, and revealed how crises and the opportunities that arise from them Make history.

But all of these are historical issues that are at least 40 years in the past. What is special about “World in Lockdown” is that it focuses on a crisis as it is happening. It’s a kind of participatory observation that Tooze uses to look at the corona crisis between January 2020 – when the disease became known to the world – and January 2021 – the inauguration of President Joseph Biden in the United States. This unconditionally situated description, which in a paradoxical movement carries out a kind of direct historiography, is more interested in entanglements than in broad lines.

Here, too, “driven” and “trapped” are the two words that sustainably determine the theme and the execution of the presentation. It is a unique attempt to grasp the complexity of a crisis unfolding while writing and to keep track of things: “If we want to keep pace with it,” Tooze pointedly writes in the final part of the book, “we have to run to stand still. Whether it is we like it or not, we are in medias res. “

Nevertheless, despite all the complexity, there are vanishing points that are primarily predetermined by the interest of the economic historian Tooze. One of these vanishing points concerns the changing role of the central banks, which in the spring of 2020 supported the tumbling market for government bonds with massive purchases and thus prevented worse things from happening. Ironically, the often invoked self-referentiality of the global financial system has stabilized it: governments ran up debts, their central banks bought them.

This was not only necessary to keep the notoriously unstable financial market on course. In order to compensate for the economic damage of the pandemic, the richest countries in the world in particular launched unprecedented economic and rescue packages. The Federal Reserve, the American central bank, acted, according to Tooze, strangely separate from the world of Trump-USA, which – another self-referentiality – occupied itself in ever new populist loops.

What appears to be a solution to problems from one perspective creates new ones from another

The second vanishing point concerns the rise of China. The politics of the USA from the 20th century, in which right-wing populists and capitalist functional elites face each other, meets here with development dynamics of the 21st century. The success of China in overcoming the Corona crisis, the globalization of Chinese vaccines, the massive support of developing and emerging countries, the pioneering role also in the structural change towards climate neutrality is contrasted with the failure of the USA and Europe, whose democratic governments are up too late Lockdowns agreed and failed miserably in managing a global pandemic.

The simple lines of ideological prejudices blur on closer inspection: China is the more efficient capitalist state, an emerging world power that also forces the EU to recognize it as an equal partner. The USA, in which “corporate liberalism” faces an alliance of reactionary big capitalists and disappointed workers, once mixed left with right-wing phrases, can only see a reflection of the Soviet Union in China.

But these vanishing points are really only recognizable in contours, especially since the historian Tooze makes every effort to dialectically break his representation again and again. What appears to be a solution to problems from one perspective creates new ones from another. Tooze denies the reader a simple judgment despite all recognizable escalation and partisanship – for example against Trump’s politics or in favor of the Chinese interventions in the world economy – and does not keep silent about Trump’s successes or the massive authoritarian character of Chinese decisions. That doesn’t always make reading easy, especially since Tooze loses sight of the focus on the corona crisis more than once in the second half of the book. The English subtitle is clearer: “How Covid Shook the World’s Economy”. It is, that is, not only about the reaction of the world economy to Corona, but above all about the global economic framework in which this crisis occurs.

The problem with real-time historiography is that the judgments do not come to a head

In passages like this, you feel like you are in a not uncomfortable, but strangely one-sided situation. It’s like sitting down with Adam Tooze for a never-ending bar talk in which he tells you everything that comes to mind about the corona and the global economy. Corona is the main focus of the first part, in which the presentation is exhausted in a repetitive enumeration of the reactions of different countries to the crisis, as well as in the passages that in the fourth part of the “race for the vaccine” between humanistic mission, Big Describe pharmaceutical and profit interests.

This reveals a problem with real-time historiography, as Tooze tries to do: the judgments cannot be pointed, reactions are “not really … inadequate”, but “in the face of a rapidly spreading pandemic … catastrophically inadequate”. The contrast is lost if you want to depict complexity and at the same time make the representation revisable at all points. The synopsis of the different perspectives is impressive: The chapters offer crash courses on the role of central banks, the market for government bonds, the coping strategies of emerging countries, the national crisis in the USA, the history of vaccine development and the – often but not always wise – China’s strategic decisions. What they don’t offer is a story.

At the end of the day, Tooze leaves it open whether this is just due to the way it is represented or whether the world itself is in the process of getting rid of the function of its previous history. The anachronistic step backwards that the United States is taking into the 20th century suggests this. “The intellectuals of the Chinese regime,” writes Tooze in the end of the book, “are working on their own version of the story. We are all involved in this story, whether we like it or not.” In the radical interior of space, capitalism and communism have intertwined in a new story. The question is, do we want it to become our story?