But what do you base this non-coorporativeness and isolation on? The signs of the times before the crisis? Like Brexit and Trump? Every man for himself hasn't been the case in all crisises historically, I believe. I could understand if it was somehow because of lack of will to understand history and why EU is a good idea, but there's a lot of people who wants to help other people out in these times.
Signs in Denmark:
Here in Denmark, the majority of danish people are very happy on how the government has helped us all out with a bail and directives on how to handle the situation. A lot of companies / closed research-labs have used their time indoors to come up with ideas on how they can benefit to help spread the disease. There's not even any economical advantage for some of them, it's mostly altruistic because they have time on their hands and nothing to do. A lot of people trying to advice other businesses through facebook-groups, etc. People are beginning to understand the effects of a collective hive-mind more if you ask me.
A lot of new ways to coorporate and inventions will come out of this I believe. Of course there's a huge short-term aftermath for some years, on how the EU recovers Italy, Spain and the pivotal powers like Germany and France. But why wouldnt this highlight that the EU countries need to coorporate in order to start up trade again and help the overall economy?
Maybe I'm just seeing different signs in Denmark because we are quite prepared. How is the atmosphere in Germany?
I base it on history. These close-knitted cooperations between countries and more peaceful times ALWAYS happened out of a foundation of an overabundance of ressources. What do you think will happen when ressources become sparse and the economy goes into a big recession - which is pretty likely? Just look how there is a lot of nasty play going on right now. Germany blocking transports to Switzerland. France doing something similar. Czechs stealing stuff that were meant for the italians, etc. You assume all of this from the point of view of things running relatively smooth - aka a good-case scenario. I go at it from a bad-case scenario. And in these everyone will be their own best friend first.
The state of having an abundance of ressources in our western nations is collapsing. It already was 2008, but we kept it artificially alive rather than allowing it to crash and burn and then rebuilding. And when things go rough - as you can see currently - countries are only looking at themselves first. In german we have a saying about this: "Your own ass always comes first". The only reason we still see cooperations right now is, because we still have enough ressources for the right now, but not much longer due to production drastically slowing down. The hundreds of thousands lay offs didn't happen yet, food didn't get sparse yet, no inflation due to governments pumping in a shitton money to keep the cashflow going yet. So people will use their free time sorta productively for the time being before the ripple effect kicks in.
Essentially you are assuming we are recovering from this virus relatively easily. We probably would have 20-30 years ago, but not in the current state our worlds economy is in thanks to the way our monetary system functions. There is a reason why several politicians (including Trump) are already talking about loosening the lockdowns up - not because they want people to die from the virus, but because the economy can't hold out much longer.
On the other hand I am approaching this from the perspective that things are just getting started to get rough. The virus isn't the cause, but the catalyst that speeds this development up.
Also to the point of Denmark. Denmark, such as Iceland (don't mistake their numbers, they are only that high because they are one of the few places that tested everyone), Singapore, South Korea, have the advantage of being more mobile and more quick to move and be active due to the smaller size. That's a known fact in the business world for a long time. The bigger the company, the slower it moves. Also the more people are involved the less productive the individual will be on average due to the need of extensive organisation. In short, when the right decisions are being made, it's easier to organise 15 rather than 100 people. Or 5 million rather than 80 million.
That's because the nature of those crises was based on states competing against one another to advance their interests during events before the information age. A deadly global virus many orders of magnitude more lethal than this one - or let's say an Asteroid tumbling towards earth in 12 years from now - would remove state competition since it would affect everyone. So while part of the world (each state) would retrench into its own culture and resources, we would still be more incentivized to cooperate with others because our fate would depend on it.
So with an economical recession as a ripple-effect of all these lockdowns, etc. - will not cause countries becoming more competitive for the reduced ressources they have? Hardly believable.
Spain getting pissed off with the EU too now:
As much as I agree with the EU being ridiculously useless right now, Spain really brought it upon themselves by ignoring the threat at first and continuing to keep public festivals for some juicy € with lots of tourists rather than cancelling them.
how precious.