Twelve - The Nation and the State

Summary

When I was a child, I wanted to be a librarian and for some reason that entailed writing on the title page of books: Bridget Anderson, my table, my bedroom, 9 Stow Park Avenue, Stow Hill, Newport, Gwent, South Wales, Wales, Great Britain, the United Kingdom, Europe, the world, the solar system, the Milky Way, the universe. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I hunkered down in my parents’ house in Newport, Gwent, South Wales (and so on) and I suspect I was not alone in being thrown back into that Russian doll-type imagination of how I inhabit the world. Notably, the microbiological was not on my list. COVID-19 is requiring us to take the microbiological seriously and it throws these scales into confusion through its movement across and between them.

The virus is ‘zoonotic’ – a pathogen that has jumped (moved) from a non-human animal to a human, and human movement across short and long distances is key to its transmission. Public health responses to the virus focused on controlling movement. From March 2020 onwards, many of us were required to confine ourselves to domestic spaces in order to contain the virus’ spread, retreating into the innermost Russian doll. This is replicated at/replicating the level of the national. Flight bans and quarantines were imposed by multiple states, and across the world there were brutal crackdowns on people on the move: boats crammed with people left to drift in the Mediterranean and on the high seas, mass confinements in dangerous camps, deportations and immigration bans and abandonments. As Ailsa Winton writes of Guatemalans stranded in Mexico: ‘What else to do with these disposable bodies when they can no longer be discarded in the usual receptacles (detention centres, migrant shelters, countries of origin), other than to just toss them on the side of the road.’

Movement, it seems, is bad for our health and looking to the future there are already plans for harsher border regimes. States including Italy, Germany, Chile, the UK and the US have suggested ‘immunity passports’ as a way of exiting lockdown, exempting holders from mobility restrictions. Such an approach has been deemed impractical, unethical and discriminatory, and as incentivizing infection, but this does not mean it will not be adopted.