Reconstruction

Today, the mathematician in me is going to give way to his neighbour, the writer, although I don’t know whether it will be an essayist or a novelist. You be the judge.

The epidemic continues in Spain. From the Imperial College study of 30 March, which we commented on here a couple of days ago, it can be assumed that the confinement of 15 March slowed down, but did not stop, the pandemic. In the most optimistic of scenarios, the more restrictive containment measures enacted on 29 March should have caused the number of actual infected per day to begin to decline, and we may see in perhaps two, perhaps three weeks, that the trend of daily deaths is indeed downward. As we have already explained in this Blog, as long as the shortage of tests persists, the evolution of the number of infected detected will mean little.

The picture of the health emergency was joined yesterday by the employment data for the month of March. They were no less harsh for being expected, and show indeed the seriousness of the situation: it is the most difficult one faced, not by Spain or Europe, but by humanity as a whole in the last seven decades. The most difficult and the one that, as the months go by, will have the greatest potential to destabilise. It is no exaggeration to say that the world no longer is and no longer behaves as it did a month ago. It therefore seems necessary to open a reconstruction scenario soon. And I have no doubt that this will be the case: reconstruction is a word that we are already beginning to hear, and that will become commonplace in the coming days and weeks.

It is possible that in Spain, and in Europe, the health crisis of this first outbreak of Covid-19 will be effectively controlled by the end of May (perhaps somewhat later in areas where it is hitting hardest), but the virus will continue to move around the world and it will be necessary to apply tight control measures to avoid a resurgence of the epidemic. Until we have an effective vaccine, we will not be able to begin to consider returning to a life somewhat similar to the one we led at the first days of March. But that is not going to happen in the next few months: because of the strict and essential health control measures, a vaccine will not be available on a mass scale for at least a year, and that is assuming that it has already been discovered or will be discovered in the next few weeks.

This means that the enormous social and economic turbulence that confinement is causing and will cause will be followed by other, lesser but not negligible and more widespread turbulence, produced by the need to avoid outbreaks of the epidemic. Consider a country like Spain, which balances its trade accounts thanks to the tourism “industry”. We have received more than 60 million foreign visitors in 2019. How many in 2020? How many in 2021?

Reconstruction, is what we are going to have to do when we get the health crisis under control. Reconstruction does not mean rebuilding what we had in the same way. Reconstruction allows us to rectify. And that, in particular, requires a debate to assess what we want to do with public services, whether to bet on them or to weaken them in favour of what neoliberals call market efficiency; or whether we should continue dismantling factories in Spain and Europe to produce in China with much cheaper labour. There is no doubt that the current health crisis, and how and with what resources we are dealing with it, is providing us with invaluable information that will undoubtedly help us to reflect. In the reconstruction we can change things that help to improve what was there, but let’s not forget that if we don’t get it right in the reconstruction we can also make it worse.

Reconstruction in Spain, and reconstruction in Europe. I don’t know if our political leaders are aware that a period of reconstruction cannot be carried out with the partisan approaches that we were more or less used to a few months ago. Nor do I know whether European governments have yet realised that, in order to rebuild Europe, individual country interests cannot take precedence; is the European Union aware that it may not survive if it disappoints again as it did ten years ago?

The coalition government that required two general elections last year was not exactly designed to cope with the kind of reconstruction that Spain will require. Consider that the turbulence caused by the confinement will project its instability for years (not months, but years) to come, and add to this the turbulence that will be generated by measures to prevent resurgence. In Spain, there is already talk of a re-edition of the Moncloa Pacts, whereby the government, opposition, trade unions and employers, at the end of 1977, made a common front to face Spain’s disastrous economic situation at that delicate political moment. It seems to me that something more will be needed now. Perhaps we should be thinking about some kind of government of concentration, or unity, or whatever we want to call it, that would allow us to join forces. And I am not saying that the coalition government should be dissolved, but that it should be expanded: it is a question of adding, not subtracting. I know that this is unthinkable in the current political scenario, and that it sounds even surreal listening to the government and the opposition. And I’m sure many will wonder if I’m not dreaming. Maybe, but since I have mentioned surrealism, let me finish with Luis Buñuel’s phrase: “To dream while awake is as unpredictable, important and powerful as while asleep”.