Do authoritarian measures to tackle the coronavirus entail a Faustian pact?

So, what does this model mean for countries in the Middle East and North Africa, a region beset by socio-political turmoil? The last decade has defined the Arab World by its struggle for freedom, but this could radically transform as citizens shift their demand to security and protection from the virus, and could lead to them surrendering hard fought civil liberties for short term results, but at what cost?

Authoritarian source or solution?

The uncompromising authoritarian approach adopted by China was swiftly copied by other authoritarian regimes, in the UAE and Saudi Arabia most notably. Both regimes are well versed in lockdowns on public gatherings, monitoring movement and restricting civil liberties and at first glance the moves seem to have stymied the flow of cases.

However, like China, both countries have track records of using bogeymen to justify and legitimise an ongoing contraction of the public space. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have used the purported threat of terrorism to justify the state’s totalitarian control on the public sphere, and this casts doubt on the credibility of their actions. The UAE’s counterterrorism legislation labels ‘antagonising the state’ and ‘stirring panic’ as acts of terror, with severe penalties for regime maintenance purposes.

The laws have been used to curtail civil society and political dissent, and the response is virtually indistinguishable from the way China dealt with whistle-blowers early on in the breakout. China’s efforts to tackle the virus has offered hope, but the credibility of Chinese leaders is also in question. Their suppression of the truth and tight authoritarian grip on information in December exacerbated the crisis. As they lied, the virus spread around the globe resulting in significant case transmission and potentially more deaths than had they come clean earlier on.

As the crisis is global, international coordination is critical, and open access to information by states, scientists, and statisticians helps us better understand and prepare our response to the virus. It is essential to discern honest facts from fiction as authoritarians often instrumentalise crises in the information space for regime maintenance.

Big Brother and the prisoner’s dilemma

In the short-term, the most controversial measures appear to have been the most effective at turning the tide of the virus. Countries including the UK, as well as hardline states like Israel, have developed surveillance software to track and trace individuals. Countries across the world have implemented varying levels of strict lockdown policies that have confined people to their homes, as governments feared society was not responsible enough to act without authoritarian measures.

Liberal democracies face an impossible task; granting governments the right to bypass democratic hurdles to act swiftly has helped restrict the spread of the virus, but for how much longer and what will be the long-term cost?

Public panic and urgency to act often serve as the pretext for a radical reframing of the social contract by authoritarians. Panic ripens citizens into swiftly surrendering their civil rights in exchange for perceived security. In the past decade the term ‘terrorist’ was used by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt as a pretext to restrict attempts to fashion a new social contract during the Arab Spring as they moved to establish an authoritarian social contract based on security from the ‘terrorists’.

The COVID-19 pandemic offers a more potent version of such a threat. The panic offers authoritarians a real pretext to employ modern technology and new tools for mass surveillance and detention under the guise of forced quarantine to save lives. This pretext and these tools help construct new totalitarian states, and new ways of regime maintenance and security.

Disinformation campaigns by China have already begun as bots praise their authoritarian measures, whilst suppressing information on whistleblower and journalist Fang Bin, who disappeared under the guise of forced quarantine after releasing the first footage of dead bodies from Wuhan. Beijing is seemingly prepared to turn on anyone who challenges the state’s narrative. Abu Dhabi has followed suit, its tightly regulated and controlled social media landscape has seen its most popular influencer, comedian Khaled Al Ameri, turn to more serious matters, subtly reminding their citizens they would be penalised for spreading ‘fake news’ around Corona Virus.

To cover or recover?

COVID-19 is tearing through the Arab world and acts as an acid test as to how governments manage the crisis and their resilience. The pandemic will likely demonstrate the need for accountability measures, if governments mishandle the crisis, anti-corruption measures, to ensure natural resources are spent appropriately on ailing infrastructure before a crisis starts, and democratic freedoms, in order to ensure information is not suppressed or manipulated. The question is, are authoritarian regimes enacting measures to deal with the spread of the virus today, or preparing themselves for the backlash from their citizens tomorrow if they’re not?

Financially, the UAE followed China taking early measures to continue delivering public services and announcing huge budgets to tackle the crisis to counter act the short-term effects, but authoritarians elsewhere in the Arab World such as Mohammad bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, or Khalifa Haftar in Libya, do not have the same financial resources, or a well-endowed rentier state to deal with the long-term impact of the crisis.

Nevertheless, in the shadows of the pandemic, bin Salman has consolidated his grip on power, by ‘cleansing’ the kingdom’s religious elite, as well as the mass detaining political opponents, whilst facing a major economic crisis sparked by a trade war with Russia. In Egypt, el-Sisi promised an astronomical $6 billion to combat COVID-19 as the country appears overwhelmed with containing the public health crisis. In Libya, Hafter dressed his militia in face masks and sent them to disinfect airports in an optic measure to assure the public they are capable of fighting the virus and divert attention from the $23 billion he has accrued in debt for his war efforts, which would paralyse any financial attempts to prepare for the fight against the virus.

The response has to be inclusive not elitist

China’s swift authoritarian response may have got the virus under control and drastically reduced cases and deaths, but Beijing’s initial ignorance and disinformation caused COVID-19 to spread globally. And there have been other success stories of a more liberal kind: through proactive and efficient measures and a high state of readiness, China’s breakaway republic Taiwan was able to get the pandemic under control early, without authoritarianism, mass surveillance or arbitrary restrictions on individual movement.

There will inevitable be a pre and post-corona world, and the decisions taken during the crisis will leave a profound footprint for the future. The only viable way of managing the crisis is not a shrinking of the public space in favor of the state, but a widening of the public space in partnership with the state in order to meet the challenge. Adopting authoritarian measures in exchange for liberal rights may seem seductive at first, but authoritarian measures are the reason for the virus spreading into a pandemic in the first place. And once rights are lost, they may not be easily regained tomorrow. To quote from Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice ‘The spirits I summoned – I can’t get rid of them’.’