Political Potency and the Impotency of European Sovereignism: Pandemic and Technocracy

Abstract

The covid-19 pandemic and the parallel economic and social crisis mark both a decline of neoliberal globalisation and a return of public intervention. As many have stated, the economic policy triptych of the past decades – the opening of markets, withdrawal of the state and privatisation – has substantially disappeared from the agendas of governments around the world. The ‘political’, in a sense, is back. But in what sense? Can we talk about a real paradigm shift? The return of the political that we are witnessing manifests itself in the permanence and persistence of the neoliberal anthropology of the masses, which is the legacy of globalism, of the Maastricht order and of its idea of civilisation (even more than its political economy dogmas).