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Pandemopolitics. How a public health problem become a geopolitical and

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Pandemopolitics. How a public health problem

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Viorel Mionel, Silviu Neguț & Oana Mionel

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EURASIAN GEOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS
2020, VOL. 61, NOS. 4–5, 389–403
https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2020.1828125

Pandemopolitics. How a public health problem become a

geopolitical and geoeconomic issue
a a b
Viorel Mionel , Silviu Neguț and Oana Mionel
a
Department of Tourism and Geography, Faculty of Business and Tourism, The Bucharest University
of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania; bDepartment of Economics and International Business, Faculty
of International Business Administration, “Dimitrie Cantemir” Christian University, Bucharest, Romania

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This study examines how the delay and blocking of studies on Received 3 September 2020
the origin of the virus and, at the same time, the effects they Accepted 21 September 2020
have caused or, as the case may be, reactivated have led KEYWORDS
several Western states to associate the virus with China Pandemopolitics; pandemic;
(“Chinese virus”), demonstrating that the new international SARS-CoV-2; geopolitics;
reality has taken the form of geopolitical and geoeconomic geoeconomics
tensions. The article also argues that the way in which the
states involved have chosen to position themselves in relation
to the pandemic, the effects that SARS-CoV-2 has on the
population, as well as the reactivation of older geopolitical
and geoeconomic aspects define the emergence of a new
type of international politics: pandemopolitics. The main argu­
ment in favor of pandemopolitics is that without this global
public health problem, geopolitical and geoeconomic games
would not have had such a strong impact on humanity, and
their magnitude is due exclusively to pandemopolitics.

Introduction
Pandemopolitics is a current phenomenon. It is the fruit of the recent international
context. That context which, although divided into various political forms, has been
well masked for decades – since the fall of communist regimes – by the multiple
layers of interdependencies between states, unitarily and optimistically called glo­
balization. Europe and the USA, with their liberal and illiberal democracies, the
somewhat less socially egalitarian China, with its socialist market economy but still
politically communist, and Russia with its democratic mask but in reality
a democrature, and so, not to list them all, they were nothing but an inhomoge­
neous whole. The only thing that united them throughout this period was their
petty economic interests. Everyone has tried to take advantage of globalization,
where a cheap product has meant much-desired abundance and turned a blind eye

CONTACT Viorel Mionel viorel.mionel@rei.ase.ro Department of Tourism and Geography, Faculty of

Business and Tourism, The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the
article.
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
390 V. MIONEL ET AL.

to obvious social injustices: overworked employees, underpaid workers, and chil­

dren working for a few pennies.
This is the fertile soil in which pandemopolitics has been molded and which
affects not only the states, but, especially, the poorest populations (Mayer and
Lewis 2020, 17), whether they live in rich or less rich states (Creţan and Light
2020). In both the United States and France the highest mortality rates were
recorded in the poorest cities and neighborhoods, heavily populated with
marginalized and socially segregated people of color.
Pandemopolitics is the global process that, mediated by the emergence and
spread of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, affects the demographics of the planet and
induces a state of geopolitical and geoeconomic tension meant to accentuate
the hidden international fractures of globalization. The three aspects of the
semantics of pandemopolitics are: pan – an element of composition which
means “all” or “whole” and which serves to form nouns; demo –
a compositional element with the meaning “people” and in extenso “popula­
tion”; and politics – a strategy used to achieve goals. Not infrequently the prefix
“pan” has been used in explaining the spatial dimensions of some extended
phenomena and processes: pan-ideas, pan-region, pandemic, etc. The term
politics was also used in the broadest sense, being attributed to, among other
things, also in the spirit of expressing the geographical dimension, prefixes such
as “krato” and “geo”.
In this analysis, pandemopolitics deals with the relationship between pan +
demo and geo + politics, in this case it analyzes the events generated by the
SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in terms of geopolitical causes and effects. Consistent
with the report of the financial consulting company EY entitled 2020
Geostrategic Outlook, this paper highlights the geopolitical and geoeconomic
elements amplified by COVID-19 from the perspective of three of the four forces
identified by the report’s authors as having a transformative impact on the
current international landscape: globalization, technology and demography
(Shames et al. 2020).
The way in which the great powers have decided to act and position them­
selves internationally in the face of the pandemic is strongly geopolitical along
areas of divergence which have persisted for a long time, such as geoeconomics
(the USA, EU and Australia vs China) and diplomatic frictions (Taiwan and India
vs China). The information analyzed here shows, as McTague (2020) observed,
that the second wave of the pandemic will be a geopolitical one, an aspect that
perfectly agrees with the pandemopolitical principles argued in this paper.
Without this public health problem called SARS-CoV-2, international political
movements would not have had such a strong impact on humanity, and the
amplitude of current geopolitical and geoeconomic games is due exclusively to
pandemopolitics.
This article is empirical in nature and began as a chronology of the most
important events related to the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic. The
 EURASIAN GEOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS 391

sources are mostly media based, but for a balanced collection of information we
consulted media sources from a variety of geographical areas (US, Europe,
China, India, Indonesia, Middle East and others). Also, media sources were
correlated with academic analyses when a more pragmatic definition of the
concepts used was imposed. This commentary explores the causes and effects
of the pandemic on geopolitical and geoeconomic relations, a process that we
have called pandemopolitics.

Background: Taiwan ignites the spark

16 April 2020 was the turning point in the evolution of relations between the
West and China. This is the date on which the latter blocked any research on the
origin of the new coronavirus by banning its own researchers from publishing
articles on the subject. Two prestigious Chinese universities have published on
their websites the content of information coming “from above” that “academic
work on tracking the origin of the virus must be strictly and carefully managed”
(Gan, Hu, and Watson 2020). Subsequently, the information was deleted from
the websites of the universities.
Blocking the truth was the earthquake that created the pandemopolitical
shock wave and it is not known exactly where and when it will stop. According
to an article published by the Associated Press, the wave was amplified by the
fact that since the beginning of January 2020 there were thousands of hospita­
lizations across China – between January 14th and 20th approximately 3000 –
but these hospitalizations were not officially registered as infections with the
new coronavirus. President Xi Jinping only publicly admitted the epidemiologi­
cal issue after six days. China’s attempts to hide the scale of the epidemic were
also seen in the way it tried to get Dr. Li Wenliang to say publicly that he had
spread false information when he drew attention to the fact that he is facing
a strange disease (Belluz 2020).
The evidence that has begun to emerge completes the picture of China’s lack
of transparency and its global influencial power. In January 2020, according to
a Der Spiegel analysis, the Chinese president personally called the director of the
World Health Organization (WHO), the Ethiopian Tedros Ghebreyesus, to ask
him not to announce that SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted from person to person and
not trigger a global alarm (Gebauer 2020).
Another moment of amplification of the shock wave was when Taiwan
decided to publish the e-mail through which, since December 2019, it drew
the attention of the WHO to the contagious nature of the disease. However, the
WHO ignored the warning, saying that “there is no evidence” that this was the
case. The WHO, in agreement with China, has tried to delay the truth and the
potential scale of the epidemic.
Moreover, a report by The Henry Jackson Society claims that China’s handling
of the outbreak and lack of transparency in the immediate transmission of
392 V. MIONEL ET AL.

information to the WHO have led to violations of articles by the International

Health Regualtion, which it signed. Violation of international obligations has
allowed the outbreak to spread rapidly around the world (Henderson et al.
2020). The foundation of China’s international credibility was beginning to
falter, and diplomatic tensions were arising. The tsunami or the second wave
of the pandemic followed “not pathological in nature, but economic, political,
and military” (McTague 2020).

Geopolitical aspects
“America first . . . ” to blame China

After the Taiwanese e-mail publication, Donald Trump moved first. He accused
China of hiding the truth and of complicity with the WHO, thus cutting its
contribution of US$893 million, of which US$656 million is voluntary.
Dissatisfied with the effects of the WHO funding cut and worried about the
internal scale of the disease, President Trump, insisting the origin of the virus
was the Wuhan laboratory, firmly stated that a big mistake was made in China:
“There was a fool there” (Smart Radio, May 8, 2020). And while it might be
believed that the President of the United States would not be more impulsive,
another accusation arose. President Trump said the coronavirus pandemic was
a bigger “attack” on the United States than the one on Pearl Harbor and the
World Trade Center in 2001 (BBC News, May 7, 2020). In other words, we can
understand that: China is attacking the USA and such a serious accusation will
not go unheeded.

. . . and Europe after

After Taiwan and the USA, it was France’s turn to be outraged by China’s
behavior. The Chinese ambassador to Paris hinted in a letter on the embassy’s
website that France had not acted effectively to protect its elderly population,
while praising Beijing’s achievements. After repeatedly suggesting that his
country was more effective than France in protecting the population, as he
has a developed sense of community and civility “lacking in Western democ­
racies” (Girard 2020), the Chinese ambassador was summoned to be criticized
by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs. It is no less true that, as Renaud Girard
rightly points out, the Asian state has become the arsonist who teaches morality
lessons to the great burned. Shortly after the Foreign Minister’s approach,
Emmanuel Macron concluded that it would be naive to believe that the new
coronavirus crisis in China has been well managed (Financial Intelligence,
April 16, 2020).
Further east, in Germany, spirits first ignited in the media. Bild’s editor’s attack
on China came as a result of the Chinese embassy in Berlin’s reproaches to the
 EURASIAN GEOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS 393

publication, which questioned the management of the epidemic. It was

the second time that China, through its ambassadors, had acted incisively. But
it wasn’t the last. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson and
several Conservative parliamentarians joined the global critics of China. In
response, the Chinese ambassador to the UK warned Britain not to start a new
“Cold War” with China based on its comparison with the USSR: “It is unfortunate
that some politicians in Britain are mentality stuck in the Cold War and compare
China to the USSR, campaigning for a new Cold War” (Digi 24, May 7, 2020). The
invocation of the new “Cold War” concept was also used in the case of China-US
relations by the Chinese Foreign Minister.

Australia: “Western offshoot” that sets the tone for the international
investigation

Even further east, angry that Australia supported the US cause of an indepen­
dent investigation into the true cause of the spread of the coronavirus in
Wuhan, separate from the WHO, China threatened a trade boycott (McGuirk
2020). Some Australian businessmen were so worried that they advised the
authorities to ease relations. But Australia, a true “Western offshoot” as Chang
(2014) calls it, insists that finding the truth is necessary for the world to learn the
right lessons for future pandemics. The concern of Australian entrepreneurs
relates to the fact that more than one third of Australian exports go to China.
Increased market information reveals that China is reactive, for example in the
case of the more drastic inspection measures introduced on iron ore imports.
However, Australia is China’s largest source of iron ore, accounting for over
62.2% of total Chinese imports (Smith and Tillett 2020). Several experts in the
field embrace the hypothesis that, through such tactics, China is trying to block
Australian exports and favor those from other countries. China has not only
begun to blame anyone who challenges its epidemic management, but is also
beginning to act in the commercial and intelligence spheres.
Gradually, the number of states challenging the honesty of Chinese data both
at the beginning and during the domestic epidemic has grown. Subsequently,
not only the Bild newspaper, but also Germany became very skeptical, with
Angela Merkel expressly asking China to be as transparent as possible (CNA,
April 20, 2020). Austria, Sweden and Germany joined Australia’s call for an
independent inquiry.
The President of the European Commission also called for an impartial
investigation in which China should participate openly, honestly and construc­
tively (Amaro 2020). But instead of normalizing the situation, it further com­
plicates it. An article in the Chinese media, authored by the Ambassadors of
the 27 member states and the EU Ambassador to China, Nicolas Chapuis (Böge
and Gutschker 2020), further fueled tensions between the two sides. The China
Daily article was written to mark 45 years of EU-China diplomatic relations and
394 V. MIONEL ET AL.

to identify various areas of potential cooperation, but the Chinese censorship

machine removed the reference to SARS-CoV-2 breaking out in China. At the
same time, while the EU Foreign Service (EEAS) publicly reprimanded the
ambassador for allowing the article to be cut, the story in question says a lot
about how complicated and inextricable EU-China relations are at the
moment.

The cornered dragon’s answer

In response to the above events, China’s “firm counterattack” (Seow and Teng
2020) on the international chessboard took two major forms. The first is geo­
political, and the second is geoeconomic. From a geopolitical point of view,
China has launched the rhetoric of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 elsewhere. In their
opinion, American soldiers participating in war games in Wuhan in
October 2019 were responsible for the spread of the virus (Myers 2020).
Information published in the French journal Le Parisien prompted China to
continue to accuse the West, especially the USA, in order to support its inno­
cence (Opoczynski 2020). Also, responding to all those who suspect that the
origin of the virus is in the Wuhan laboratories, the director of the most
important laboratory for the study of coronaviruses stateed: “Just as everyone
else, we did not know that the virus existed (. . .) So how could it escape from our
lab?” (CGTN, May 23, 2020).
As if all this did not complicate international relations enough, other frozen or
latent geopolitical aspects erupted. In Xinjiang, Chinese authorities are accused
of pursuing a draconian birth control policy, with forced sterilization of Uighur
women (Zens 2020). Also, the national security law imposed on Hong Kong was
oppressive not only on the city, but formed a component of Chinese-American
competition. The politicized nature of the independence of Taiwan is another
factor (Zhang and Savag 2020), whose President said she could not agree to
become part of China on a “one country, two systems” basis, a principle that has
become obsolete in the case of Hong Kong. The rejection of China’s claims to
sovereignty over the island has led to an intensification of Chinese military
exercises and air raids near Taiwan (Lee and Blanchard 2020). Hong Kong and
Taiwan, among others, are battlefields borders or key battlefields between the
world’s two strongest economies.
Against a background of increasing tensions between their soldiers on their
disputed border, China and India are escalating a conflict that further burdens
the pandemopolitical atmosphere. Lintner (2020) believes that here we can also
speak of a “Cold War”, but one in which India and the USA are in the same boat.
Moreover, he says, when the Chinese President ordered the army to be pre­
pared for the worst scenario of defending the country’s sovereignty, Xi Jinping
also wanted to send a veiled belligerent message to India. In the context of the
very close trading relationship between the two, the likelihood of the conflict
 EURASIAN GEOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS 395

does not seem very plausible. However, the US is by far India’s most important
trading partner and a natural ally in the context of the new pandemopolitical
reality which, as shown below, will make use of all the geoeconomic strategies
needed to counter China.
We cannot say the same thing in the case of Japan. When diplomatically
courted to join the Western group condemning China over Hong Kong’s
national security policy, Japan refused. Looking to the future in terms of its
geographical position and economic ties with its neighbor, Japan has chosen to
focus more on its relationship with China, thus disappointing the West, which
had proposed a joint statement to criticize China (Kaneko and Doyle 2020). It is
very possible that economic relations will be the key to their decision here as
well. Japan accounts for over 19% of Chinese imports, from which it imports
subassemblies and components for its main industries such as the automotive
and IT sectors. At the same time, many of its companies operate in China, where
they have invested heavily in recent decades (Latorre and Hoso 2016). For
example, until the relocation of its own companies to other destinations,
which it supported with US$2.2 billion (Reynolds and Urabe 2020), it limited
itself to stating that it is “concerned” about what is happening in Hong Kong.

Geoeconomic consequences
Almost as a conclusion to the complicated moments we are going through, an
influential manager of the European press touches upon open wounds in his
article published in Business Insider: Europe must decide between an alliance
with imperfect US democracy or perfect dictatorship in China (Döpfner 2020).
The choice is not just about the economy, but about freedom and human
dignity. It one of the many times that European media has openly attacked
China, given that more and more voices in European politics called for
a distancing from China on the part of Europe. They feared the model of the
American administration, under President Trump, which threatens to break
global industrial supply chains and prepare new tariffs to charge China for
poor pandemic management. For example, the United States has begun its
repatriation policy with China with the production of generic drugs and phar­
maceutical ingredients needed to treat COVID-19.
Not being intimidated, it seems that the European Union is shyly starting to
adopt the American model of imposing customs duties on Chinese companies
(Grobe 2020). France has noticed its enormous vulnerability in the pharmaceu­
tical field. With over 80% of medicines produced in Asia, France also remains
dependent on the Asian states. Thus, it aims, in a partnership of pharmaceutical
companies with politicians, to move its pharmaceutical industry mainly back in
France or at least in Europe. An article in France 24 argued that 30% of French
pharmaceutical companies’ output should be produced in France in order not
to depend on other states, while remaining in the research and development
396 V. MIONEL ET AL.

race. Otherwise, the alternative is bleak, and France will lose the economic battle
and at the same time weaken its sovereignty because “tomorrow’s champions
will be the owners of medical data” (Laidi 2020). Similarly, Boris Johnson has
highlighted the need for the UK to be less reliant on China (Wright and Fisher
2020).
Observing the Western tactics of repatriation and/or relocation of production
facilities, as well as the imposition of customs duties, China has acted in
a geoeconomic manner as it has an advantage in terms of manufacturing
industry. Both in terms of pandemopolitics and the fight against SARS-CoV-2,
there is a confrontation between two different systems, says the renowned
Chinese general and academic Qiao Liang: it is about the Western ultra-
technological society versus the one that has the advantage of the manufactur­
ing industry (Gayard 2020). Beyond the obvious propaganda dimension of
Qiao’s assessments, there is another profound message, which must be ana­
lyzed very seriously by Western states that have noticed their vulnerabilities in
the manufacturing area now, and it has been rhetorically formulated: “In case of
epidemic or war, can a country without a manufacturing industry be considered
a strong country?” (apud Unteanu 2020).
In the light of this it is worth noting that Honda Motors recorded a reduction
in production due to the lack of parts manufactured in China. Apple, BMW and
Hyundai were in the same situation (Bholey 2020), to give just a few examples.
China has become the world’s production center and the most important part of
the global supply chain. More than 20% of global trade in manufactured goods
originates in China (UNCTAD 2020).
These examples and others give Qiao the courage to open the eyes of
Europeans to the difficulties they will face in their attempt to break away from
China. The process involves many aspects. First of all, says Qiao, resuming local
manufacturing is not easy because:

if you want to resume manufacturing, you have to be mentally prepared for it or

experience the same difficulties and dramas as China and get an equal wage for the
work done because products and labor should be at the same price as Chinese ones
(otherwise the products will no longer be competitive with those made in China). This
is tantamount to giving up currency hegemony and the power to set commodity prices
and falling from the top of the food chain; or continue to be there, so that the income
of your workers is seven times higher than that of the Chinese, which makes your
product less competitive and your businesses less profitable. (cited by Unteanu 2020).

And while the views expressed by the Chinese general do not express the
official position of the Chinese government, they probably do not differ much.
However, despite Members of the European Parliament seeking to move
Europe away from China, such a sudden move will be much more expen­
sive for European countries than for the United States, and China is not
sitting idly by. In addition, in 2018 alone, the top 30 German corporations
listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange earned almost €200 billion (15% of
 EURASIAN GEOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS 397

revenues) from commercial activity in China. Two decades ago, China barely
played a geoeconomic role in Germany, which is hardly the case today
when exports have risen to more than €96 billion (Heide et al. 2019). The
other pillar of the EU, France, is as closely linked to China as Germany, with
exports of more than €43 billion. €13 billion euros worth of agreements
were signed between France and China in 2019 alone, targeting investment
in strategic areas. Other EU and non-EU states are in the German-French
situation.
The diplomatic distrust toward China expressed by the world’s states has
moved to the business world. The NATO Secretary General warned that in the
context of the current pandemic and the highly volatile economic environment,
the Euro-Atlantic states must be vigilant, as China could try to make acquisitions
in strategic sectors (Rapoza 2020). Thus, the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia
and India have tightened their foreign direct investment (FDI) legislation, espe­
cially in the IT field, for fear of hostile takeovers of companies with financial
problems hunted by Chinese companies. In addition, India and Australia are
strengthening their economic cooperation amid tensions in their relationship
with China. Ores are a key sector here, representing a particularly problematic
aspect in Australian-Chinese trade cooperation as discussed, but important for
Indian-Australian trade, particularly the rare-earth elements needed to manu­
facture high technology products (Chaudhury 2020). Such cooperation will
become more frequent because it is obvious that the Chinese state wants to
become a world leader in IT as well, and the coronavirus pandemic is a good
time to develop this, and its opponents will seek to counteract it geoeconomi­
cally and geopolitically as much as possible through strategic partnerships. Joint
Indian-Japanese military exercises in the Indian Ocean, which are part of
a broader partnership involving the US and Australia (Bali 2020), will be more
frequent and are an example in this regard.
China’s plans to take control of as many global strategic areas as possible are
not new, and as a recent analysis shows:

According to a plan called China 2025, Beijing has allocated billions of dollars in grants
to its research companies, but it has also made acquisitions of foreign companies in
order to gain supremacy in technology, especially compared to the USA, with which it
is in permanent competition. There is not only the establishment of future technolo­
gical standards at stake now, but also the dominance of markets, profits and the
political influence that derives from them (Radio Europa Liberă, May 7, 2020).

The struggle for global technological supremacy and the hunt for Western
companies are just two of the many forms exemplifying the ongoing geoeco­
nomic tension since mid-2018 when the US and China engaged in a trade war.
Another is the medical competition invoked above in the case of France and the
UK, but this time with an emphasis on obtaining a vaccine. The first vaccine!
Whoever succeeds in developing the first vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 will not
398 V. MIONEL ET AL.

only be able to immunize its population but will also gain a substantial place in
world geopolitics, validating its status as a central world force (Champion 2020).

Discussion: inextricable relationships

Pandemopolitics will go down in history not only as a result of the geopolitical
events caused by the pandemic, but also due to diverse geoeconomic strate­
gies. Pandemopolitics is the perfect example of what Luttwak (1990) tried to
portray by appreciating that the logic of conflict is nothing but the grammar of
trade. The COVID-19 crisis, like other major historical events, is a turning point in
the evolution of the global society. It is the third major global event of the 21st
century in chronological order, after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001
and the financial crisis of 2008–9. However, as Summers (2020) argues, it will be
by far the most important one. Consistent with this, pandemopolitics has led the
Financial Times to conclude that the current era of globalization is in danger: it is
not dead, but it seems to be in poor health. All the evidence suggests that
pandemopolitics is forcing the world to rethink globalization (Bholey 2020).
The need for a major overhaul in Western business, social security and intelli­
gence is more than obvious. When the paradigm of the current globalization needs
to be changed in order to meet new international needs, it must not be a strategic
but a tactical one. As we have evidenced by the information analyzed here, the
changes are and must be driven by geoeconomic, financial and intelligent reposi­
tioning of production units. Given these conditions, governments need to focus
more on what they can do now and less on what they want to do (McTague 2020),
because what they want is far beyond the capacity of even the strongest states in
terms of geopolitical action because of the inextricable links between them.
A consequence of pandemopolitics is the crisis which has afflicted at least
three of the most important international organizations: the World Heath
Organization (WHO), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United
Nations (UN). The WHO has been widely criticized for failing to effectively
manage the pandemic and for its “feuding” with China (Vișniec 2020), delaying
the announcement of the coronavirus outbreak and the international alert,
which was influenced by Beijing’s political agenda. There are other factors, to
some extent supported by Germany through the voice of the Minister of Health
(Larger 2020), such as withdrawing the USA and their financial contribution
from the organization, which represent a sign that the WHO is facing multiple
dysfunctions. The withdrawal of the United States exacerbates the fight against
the pandemic. The role of the WHO as a means of stopping pandemics has
become problematic, with the journal Nature noting that public health experts
fear that diseases such as polio and malaria may be revived (Maxmen 2020).
The pressure on the WHO is even greater with regard to the vaccine against
the new coronavirus. More than 100 diverse states want a resolution guarantee­
ing that the vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 will be declared a public good for all
 EURASIAN GEOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS 399

humanity (Vișniec 2020), but the pandemic has divided the international com­
munity even more, and the WHO is no exception. It is in the middle of the US-
China dispute, which Pilling (2020) is not shy to call an “ugly battle”. The US
decision to buy almost the entire global supply of Remdesivir (Barnes 2020),
virtually the only drug that has been shown to be effective in treating COVID-19,
casts great doubt on hopes that an effective vaccine could be declared
a universal good in the near future.
The older “ugly (trade) battle” between the US and China has been acceler­
ated by the pandemic, and it hit the WTO hard. Its role as an arbitrator in
commercial disputes is practically suspended, and the law of the strongest
prevails – as it can be seen in the case of Remdesivir. The need for the WTO is
verified currently given the questions around globalization. The first symptom
that the WTO is not doing well is the resignation of the Director General.
Virtually none of the leaders of the three international institutions have been
able to help the international environment and promote policies to limit the
effects of the pandemic.
According to Vișniec (2020), the UN is not in a better state of health either, and
the Secretary-General admits that the lack of global coordination is an aggravat­
ing factor in the pandemic. In addition, for more than a decade, the Security
Council has often been blocked by Russia’s stubbornness over the Syrian crisis,
and now it is the turn of the US-China rivalry to take its place. Pandemopolitics has
taken this rivalry to a level that makes global governance dysfunctional and leads
journalists from The Economist (June 18, 2020) to ask: “who runs the world?”. The
Security Council has been unable to provide a ceasefire resolution during the fight
against COVID-19, with diplomats and states entering a period of global instabil­
ity, in dangerous and unknown territory that increasingly resembles a new “Cold
War”. The evidence presented here show that there are “disagreements which just
spill over from one issue to another”, as one diplomat stated (quoted by AFP,
May 31, 2020) alluding to the situation in Hong Kong which is very dangerous for
the current global architecture.

Conclusion
The situation with these three major international organizations raises alarm
about the pandemopolitical effects that throw the international community into
a state of anarchy similar to the one before the First World War. But, unlike then,
now the network of relations between states, of any kind, is difficult to unravel.
As a result, the governance structure of some of the most important interna­
tional organizations, as well as some agreements, need to be reformed because
they no longer meet the demands of the present.
Black clouds are gathering over the global economy, with stock market declines,
stormy oil prices, bankruptcies and unemployment. All this is related to the con­
tinuous increase in COVID-19 cases, tensions between the great powers and, above
400 V. MIONEL ET AL.

all, the uncertainty in the global economy. With few exceptions, the evolution of the
global economy will worsen according to the data from the International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank and other such institutions. As such, we argue that pande­
mopolitics is forcing the world to rethink globalization. Western states and compa­
nies cooperate well against the background of China’s aggression and lack of
predictability to move production to countries in Southeast Asia, Europe or Latin
America. As a consequence, the labor market is coming out of the pandemic in
a deplorable state, which will prevail for some time. The World Labor Organization
points out that more than 80% of illegal workers are already severely affected, and
geographical relocation will exacerbate this.
The evidence discussed here suggest that humanity has entered a new
geopolitical cycle in which China’s centrality cannot be ignored. Its centrality
does not exclude the role of other actors such as the USA, the EU or Russia, but it
will strengthen the process that has been emerging for some time, namely that
of a multipolar world increasingly dominated by China, who will not be shy to
use all geopolitical and geoeconomic levers to discourage its competitors.
Then, COVID-19 will leave deep marks on the psychology of the masses, who
will be increasingly tempted to believe that the pandemic is a biological
weapon. The sentiment will be maintained by troll farms that continue to spread
false rumors or by populists who are temporarily in charge of states, be they
great powers, while SARS-CoV-2 will make more and more victims among the
gullible poor. At the same time, China’s incisiveness gives rise to unexpected
and conjunctural alliances, while the discovery of a possible vaccine, under the
given conditions, will be a universal good only insofar as the state that perfects
it will want to make its global importance and influence visible.
The confrontational nature of pandemopolitics occurs between the major
players, but, as Brzezinski (2016) rightly remarks, it often features the pawns as
protagonists, in this case Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia and others. It has also
reactivated long-frozen conflicts through its tangential effect, such as that
involving India and China. And it brings obsolete geopolitical concepts forward
such as: “Cold War” (though it is true that this phrase had also been used to
describe the tensions between the West and Russia in the 2014 Crimean
dispute), “geostrategic point/area” (eg. Hong Kong, Taiwan or the Himalayan
area disputed by China and India), “sphere of influence” and “geostrategic
alliances” (USA-Australia-India-Japan).
In conclusion, if the above conclusions can be accepted, let us say, reluc­
tantly, that what cannot be disputed is that without this public health problem
called SARS-CoV-2, the geopolitical and geoeconomic movements we are wit­
nessing would not have had a such a strong impact on humanity. The amplitude
of current geopolitical and geoeconomic games is due exclusively to the
pandemopolitics that amplify the trend of dying globalization.
 EURASIAN GEOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS 401

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID
Viorel Mionel http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8636-5710
Silviu Neguț http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6038-2608
Oana Mionel http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9883-9570

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