Globalization, the COVID Pandemic, and the Viral Visions for Global Futures

This chapter explores contradictory dynamics of the recent, current, and future prospects of globalization revealed by the COVID pandemic of 2019–22. Situating the analysis in the COVID-19 pandemic world, it examines how the COVID-driven process shaped/shifted ideals about community, belonging, and security organized around the citizen/nation/state trio in a globalized international system. It contends that the COVID pandemic may have stirred or animated simultaneously centrifugal nationalisms within the Western world and the richer countries, resulting in neopopulist policies and protectionist measures. It also argues that these same policies, exposing the structural precarities around the world, particularly acutely in the Global South, will likely fuel centripetal migrations across the globe. In the end, however, the chapter argues, both dynamics will likely further globalization, for both are a priori bound up with (and within) the already globalized productive infrastructure, composed of digital and knowledge industries, manufacturing and transportation sectors, and trade and finance institutions. Ultimately, it suggests that globalization is here to stay, though taking on different forms as evinced during the COVID-19 pandemic.