Crisis Response by Governments

Discussion

"So what wisdom does history offer for helping us to understand what it takes for governments to act boldly – and effectively – in response to a crisis?

The most common context in which governments carry out transformative and effective crisis responses is during war. Consider the United States during the Second World War. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, the US government instigated a seismic economic restructuring to put the country on a war footing. Despite fierce opposition from industry, there was a ban on the manufacture of private cars, and petrol was rationed to three gallons per week. The president Franklin D Roosevelt increased the top rate of federal income tax to 94 per cent by the end of the war, while the government borrowed heavily and spent more between 1942 and 1945 than in the previous 150 years. And all of this state intervention was happening in the homeland of free market capitalism. Moreover, the wartime crisis prompted the US to throw the political rulebook out the window and enter a military alliance with its ideological arch enemy, the USSR, to defeat their common enemy.

A second context in which governments take radical crisis action is in the wake of disasters. Following devastating floods in 1953, which killed almost 2,000 people, the Dutch government embarked on building a remarkably ambitious flood-defence system called the Delta Works, whose cost was the equivalent of 20 per cent of GDP at the time. No government today is doing anything close to this in response to the climate crisis – not even in the Netherlands, where one-quarter of the country is below sea level and flooding has been a critical threat for centuries.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides another example. In response to the public health emergency, Britain’s ruling Conservative Party introduced a series of radical policy measures that would be generally considered inconceivable by a centre-Right government: they shut schools and businesses, closed the borders, banned sports events and air travel, poured billions into vaccination programmes and even paid the salaries of millions of people for more than a year. It was absolutely clear to them that this was a problem that markets would be unable to solve.

A third category of rapid, transformative change is in the context of revolutions, which can generate upheavals that create dramatic openings in the political system. The Chinese Communist Party, for instance, introduced a radical land redistribution programme during the civil war in the late 1940s and following the revolution of 1949, confiscating agricultural property from wealthy landlords and putting it into the hands of millions of poor peasant farmers.

Similarly, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 provided an opportunity for Fidel Castro’s regime to launch the Cuban National Literacy Campaign. In early 1961, more than a quarter of a million volunteers were recruited – 100,000 under the age of 18, and more than half of them women – to teach 700,000 Cubans to read and write. It was one of the most successful mass education programmes in modern history: within a year, national illiteracy had been reduced from 24 per cent to just 4 per cent. Whatever your views on Castro’s Cuba, there is no doubt that revolutions can drive radical change.

These three contexts – war, disaster and revolution – help explain the overwhelming failure of governments to take sufficient action on a crisis such as climate change. The reality is that it is the wrong kind of crisis and doesn’t fit neatly into any of these three categories. It is not like a war, with a clearly identifiable external enemy. It is not taking place in the wake of a revolutionary moment that could inspire transformative action. And it doesn’t even resemble a crisis like the Dutch floods of 1953: in that case the government acted only after the disaster, having ignored years of warnings from water engineers (in fact, unrealised plans for the Delta Works already existed), whereas today we ideally need nations to act before more ecological disasters hit and we cross irreversible tipping points of change. Prevention rather than cure is the only safe option.

Does that mean there is little hope of governments taking urgent action in response to a crisis like the ecological emergency or other existential threats? Is human civilisation destined to break rather than successfully bend in the face of such critical challenges? Fortunately, there is a fourth crisis context that can jumpstart radical policy change: disruption.

By ‘disruption’ I am referring to a moment of system instability that provides opportunities for rapid transformation, which is created by a combination or nexus of three interlinked factors: some kind of crisis (though typically not as extreme as a war, revolution or cataclysmic disaster), which combines with disruptive social movements and visionary ideas. These three elements are brought together in a model I have developed called the Disruption Nexus (see graphic). Here is how it works.

(Diagram illustrating the Disruption Nexus by Roman Krznaric. Shows a Penrose triangle with angles labelled ‘Crisis,’ ‘Ideas,’ and ‘Movements,’ each enhancing the other. Text explains rapid, transformative change arises from crisis, disruptive movements, and visionary ideas together. Source: Roman Krznaric, History for Tomorrow (WH Allen, 2024).)

Let’s begin with the top corner of the triangular diagram labelled ‘crisis’. The model is based on a recognition that most crises – such as the 2008 financial meltdown or the recent droughts in Spain – are rarely in and of themselves sufficient to induce rapid and far-reaching policy change (unlike a war). Rather, the historical evidence suggests that a crisis is most likely to create substantive change if two other factors are simultaneously present: movements and ideas.

Social movements play a fundamental role in processes of historical change. Typically, they do this through amplifying crises that may be quietly simmering under the surface or that are ignored by dominant actors in society. As Naomi Klein writes in her book This Changes Everything (2014):

- Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one.

Her view – which I think is absolutely right – is that today’s global ecological movement needs to do exactly the same thing and actively generate a sense of crisis, so the political class recognises that ‘climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response’.

Multiple historical examples, which I have explored in detail in my book History for Tomorrow (and where you can find a full list of references), bear out this close relationship between disruptive movements and crisis.

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 in Britain provides a case in point. There was certainly a generalised sense of political crisis in the country in the early 1830s. Urban radicals were pressuring the government to widen the electoral franchise, and impoverished agricultural workers had risen up in the Captain Swing Riots. On top of this, antislavery activists were continuing their decades-long struggle: more than 700,000 people remained enslaved on British-owned sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Yet their largely reformist strategy – such as holding public meetings and distributing pamphlets – was still not enough to tip the balance against the powerful slave-owning lobby.

The turning point came in 1831 in an act of disruption and defiance that created shockwaves in Britain: the Jamaica slave revolt. More than 20,000 enslaved workers rose up in rebellion, setting fire to more than 200 plantations. The revolt was crushed but their actions sent a wave of panic through the British establishment, who concluded that if they did not grant emancipation then the colony could be lost. As the historian David Olusoga points out in Black and British (2016), the Jamaica rebellion was ‘the final factor that tipped the scales in favour of abolition’. In the absence of this disruptive movement, it might have taken decades longer for abolition to enter the statute books.

A historical illustration depicting a plantation building engulfed in flames with thick smoke rising. In the foreground, people are seen gathering and reacting. Surrounding the burning structure are fields, trees, houses, and other buildings. The image is labelled “Jamaica 1833.”

Another case concerns the granting of the vote to women in Finland in 1906. During the political crisis of the general strike of 1905 – an uprising against Russian imperialism in Finland – the Finnish women’s movement took advantage of the situation by taking to the streets along with trade unionists. The League of Working Women, part of the growing Social Democratic movement, staged more than 200 public protests for the right of all women to vote and run for office, mobilising tens of thousands of women in mass demonstrations. By magnifying the existing crisis, they were able to finally overcome the parliamentary opposition to female suffrage.

More recently, the mass popular uprisings in Berlin in November 1989 amplified the political crisis that had been brewing over previous months, with turmoil in the East German government and destabilising pro-democracy protests having taken place across the Eastern Bloc, partly fuelled by the reforms of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Their actions made history on 9 November when the Berlin Wall was finally breached and the system itself visibly came tumbling down.

In all the above cases, however, a third element alongside movements and crisis was required to bring about change: the presence of visionary ideas. In Capitalism and Freedom (1962), the economist Milton Friedman wrote that, while a crisis is an opportunity for change, ‘when that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around’. From a different perspective, Hannah Arendt argued that a crisis was a fruitful moment for questioning orthodoxies and established ideas as it brought about ‘the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgement’, such that ‘traditional verities seem no longer to apply’. Dominant old ideas are in a state of flux and uncertainty, and fresh ones are potentially ready to take their place. In these three historical examples, disruptive ideas around racial equality, women’s rights and democratic freedoms were vital inspiration for the success of transformational movements.

The 2008 financial crash illustrates what happens in the absence of unifying ideas. Two corners of the triangle were in place: the crisis of the crash itself and the Occupy Movement calling for change. What was missing, though, were the new economic ideas and models to challenge the failing system (exemplified by the Occupy slogan ‘Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing’). The result was that the traditional power brokers in the investment banks managed to get themselves bailed out and the old financial system remained intact. This would be less likely to happen today, when new economic models such as ‘doughnut economics’, degrowth and modern monetary theory have gained far more public prominence.

Is the disruption nexus a watertight theory of historical change? Absolutely not. There are no iron laws of history, no universal patterns that stand outside space and time. I’m a firm believer in the statistician George Box’s dictum that ‘all models are wrong, but some are useful’."

(https://aeon.co/essays/what-turns-a-crisis-into-a-moment-for-substantive-change)