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Anthropology of Europe After the Pandemic

What has the Covid-19 pandemic done to the construction of Europe? We are three anthropologists who have compared European societies with non-European societies: Siberia, Central America and China. For some years now, we have been studying the recompositions of European societies through our field research and our teaching on European anthropology chairs in Paris and Louvain. In this note, we wish to set out our observations and hypotheses on this recomposition over the past half-century, and on its acceleration by the Covid pandemic in three areas: public health, military defense and agriculture.

Public health: coordinating vaccination

The Covid-19 pandemic, while giving rise to exceptional coordination between European authorities and pharmaceutical companies to make available to the citizens of Europe a large quantity and quality of vaccines, also gave rise to an increase in online anti-vaccine movements and a resurgence of vaccine hesitancy. We propose to understand this trend not through psychological factors, such as distrust of vaccines or lack of understanding of public health policies, but through ethnographic and historical data on the transformations of vaccination in Europe.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the vaccination of the entire population against childhood diseases (polio, measles, rubella) was intended to reduce child mortality in Europe, a central concern for international health authorities. The eradication of poliomyelitis was one of these authorities’ stated objectives, not least because President F.D. Roosevelt had been a victim of this disease, but also because it caused severe handicaps in the children on whom reconstruction was to be based. Europe during the Cold War was the scene of a competition between the Salk vaccine, distributed orally on a voluntary basis and therefore more compatible with the American economy, and the Sabin vaccine, injected collectively in a state campaign, favored by the free availability of the vaccine patent. In socialist countries, the state provided vaccines and promoted vaccination in a paternalistic way (particularly in hospitals and schools), denying access to public goods (schools, sports) to unvaccinated people, whereas in liberal countries, pharmaceutical companies and journalists played a more important role in the vaccine debate.

In Eastern Europe, the success of vaccination meant that many members of the socialist intelligentsia, particularly the families of hospital workers, quietly and imperceptibly began to refuse vaccination for themselves and their children as a form of privilege, and sometimes dissent. The level of refusal to vaccinate increased dramatically in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the socialist system. A similar phenomenon occurred, albeit to a lesser extent, in North America and Western Europe where the welfare state was gradually dismantled.

In our view, public distrust of vaccinations against Covid-19 and other emerging infectious diseases such as influenza can be explained by the withdrawal of the social state, which had built public confidence on vaccinations against childhood diseases. Today’s anti-vaccination movements on social networks reveal a desire on the part of citizens to be “good parents” by accumulating as much information as possible on the risks and benefits of vaccines, whereas this assessment was previously entrusted to the State. This distrust on the part of the general public is matched by the dismay of medical staff, who feel themselves to be neglected by the state, and who sometimes spread frightening stories about the consequences of vaccines. In these messages circulating on social networks, the state is portrayed as an authoritarian actor, or even an enemy, against whom citizens want to regain a form of power over their lives. In extreme cases, the state itself can spread anti-vaccination messages, as when Putin’s regime accuses the USA of distributing dangerous vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer) after failing to sufficiently vaccinate its population with the Sputnik vaccine.

We don’t comment here on vaccination statistics, which vary from one European country to another, but we do analyze the structure of vaccine hesitancy based on observations on social networks. In particular, we have noted that it is not necessary to disseminate openly anti-vaccination messages or false information on the side effects of vaccines to increase this hesitancy. Sometimes it’s enough to circulate articles expressing a form of skepticism, which spread more successfully in the networks of people with a high level of education. However, when the pressure exerted by an external agent (political elites or corporations) intensifies, doubt about vaccines turns into a mass moral panic, affecting vulnerable ethnic or social groups. In 2015, in the city of Zhanaozen (Kazakhstan), hundreds of children (mainly girls) from poor Kazakh families were admitted to hospital with strange symptoms (partial paralysis of limbs). According to psychiatrists, it was a case of moral panic caused by a massive dissociative disorder known as “F44”. The children’s parents blamed the vaccines: coming from very poor regions of Mongolia and China, they felt like foreigners surrounded by hostile elites. According to them, the strange symptoms were due to the fact that vaccination was a secret plan to sterilize the poor population.

Based on the study of vaccine hesitancy in the socialist world and the consultation of archival documents in the liberal world, we propose to distinguish a range of affects that lead social groups to refuse the vaccination policies put in place after the Second World War: political dissent, scientific doubt and moral panic. Articulating the sociological study of vaccine hesitancy with a historical look at the link between vaccination and socialism after the Second World War, and the dissociation of this link after the collapse of the Soviet Union, allows us to note that while vaccinating one’s children is a means for the citizens of a social state to produce collective immunity against a designated enemy, vaccinating against a new disease when the enemy is unknown and unpredictable is more difficult. We therefore need to analyze the military logic underlying public health.

Military defense: preparing for attack

The Covid-19 pandemic inscribed in European public opinion a notion that had already been widely internalized in the USA after September 11, 2001, and in Asia after the SARS crisis, according to which contemporary societies must prepare for a pandemic virus in the same way as they prepare for a terrorist attack. This idea is based on the following observation: a new virus can emerge invisibly from exploding animal reservoirs across the planet (due to deforestation, climate change and factory farming, which encourages the concentration, vulnerability and long-distance transport of farm animals) in the same way that a terrorist attack can occur anywhere at any time, producing damage through the disruption of flows of people and goods rather than through the immediate number of deaths.

Journalists, often fascinated by pandemic viruses since SARS, have played on the analogies between virus-carrying animals (wild birds, bats) and terrorist groups (particularly in the Islamist movement, but their forms of action are also borrowed from Russian anarchists or the Tamil Tigers), describing pandemics as the effect of “nature’s revenge”.

The notion of preparedness has a history that goes back to the Second World War, with the committees of experts set up by the US federal administration to prepare the United States for a nuclear attack by the USSR. Even back then, it was said: “the question is not when it will happen, but: are we prepared?” We can even go back to Roosevelt’s pre-war Democratic administration, which drew up plans of cities potentially under attack from German aircraft, or to Albert Thomas’s cabinet in France during the First World War, which compiled statistics on war factories to provide a stock of armaments. Preparing for an unpredictable attack is not a capitalist logic of producing vaccines or weapons for profit, as conspiracy theories would have us believe, but a social-democratic logic aimed at imagining with the whole of society an event disrupting its vital infrastructures, in order to reduce its catastrophic consequences.

The war in Ukraine has made this logic of preparedness even more prevalent. The same criticisms of the lack of anticipation of a pandemic from China and a war from Russia have been levelled at their leaders by European public opinion. These criticisms highlight the relevance of the comparison between a pandemic and a war, a comparison that has been the subject of much debate, not least because of the seemingly absurd nature of a declaration of war against a virus that has no intention and behaves in no way like an enemy. War, like a pandemic, ushers in an unpredictable historical sequence in which alliances can break down at any moment and tip over into a cycle of violence, just as a pandemic reveals the disruption of a planetary system transformed by human activity since the Anthropocene.

We have compared the rumors circulating about the laboratory accidents that caused the pandemic in China and Russia’s entry into Ukraine. We do not seek to attest to the truth of these rumors (even though, according to the scientists we consulted, it is fairly likely that SARS-Cov2 came out of a laboratory in Wuhan, and unlikely that avian flu and swine fever came out of a laboratory in Kharkiv). Instead, we seek to identify the imaginary of nature mobilized by these events and the way it is manipulated by the state. We note that these controversies over laboratory biosafety have been widely publicized in the context of actual or potential war between states (Trump accusing China of manufacturing SARS-Cov2, Putin accusing the USA of manufacturing “genetic weapons” aimed specifically at the Russians), This conspiracy theory attracts a great deal of immediate attention, but these accusations are quickly relayed by rumors about food safety (European citizens wonder whether they can still go to Chinese restaurants or supermarkets, Russian citizens wonder whether they will find needles in cucumbers imported from Ukraine). Health and military issues are thus subordinated by citizens to questions of food sovereignty.

Agriculture: ensuring generational renewal to build food sovereignty

The European Parliament’s ending term of office was marked by the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One of its major achievements was the Green Deal aimed at ensuring Europe’s food sovereignty while committing it to the ecological transition. A survey carried out this spring by BVA Xsight 2024 in the twenty-seven countries of the Union shows that health and war top the list of European concerns, and that the third most important concern is purchasing power. But this concern for the satisfaction of primary needs such as food does not seem to take into account the major transformations affecting agricultural production systems. Recent events have highlighted the fragility of our global food systems and the need to strengthen their resilience in the event of health, geopolitical, climatic and environmental crises: in 2020, the risks of disruption in supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic; in 2021, the endangerment of international trade when the Evergreen blocked the Suez Canal; since February 2022, tensions on food markets in Eastern Europe; in winter 2023, farmers’ protests across Europe… Added to these political events are extreme climatic episodes: floods in summer 2021, mega-fires and extreme drought in summer 2022.

The demographic haemorrhage suffered by the agricultural professions for several decades is a major challenge for the Old Continent. The age structure of European farmers is such that for every farmer under 35, there are more than six farmers over 65. Two processes are taking place simultaneously: a reduction in the number of farms, and the end of the logic of intergenerational farm transmission. As a result of productivity growth in agriculture, the sector’s low profitability, and improved employment opportunities in other sectors of the economy, the number of farms in the European Union is falling, and farm area is increasing. Young farmers are more likely than their elders to engage in larger holdings and specialized arable or livestock farming, and less so in mixed farming activities and permanent crops, confirming the trend towards greater specialization of farming activities among young farmers, driven by yield obligations. Added to this equation is the issue of farm succession. In addition to its dependence on chemicals and mechanization, conventional farming is traditionally characterized by the link between family and farm, and by the succession of a farm lease. Today, however, the practice of handing down farming from father to son is no longer taken for granted, and is putting farming families to the test. In France, two-thirds of farmers have no known successor. In the agricultural context, inheritance concerns both material and economic assets (land and property) and symbolic and cultural assets (knowledge, beliefs, values and farming practices). This transmission of knowledge and tools depends not only on family configurations, but also on institutional, regulatory and economic constraints.

The decline in family farm transfers and the increase in farm size are contributing to the concentration of production tools. In addition to the problems of succession and farm takeovers, there is the challenge of greening agriculture. However, Europe’s agricultural landscape is caught between two paradigms that nurture different, even opposing, visions of the world, legally and symbolically reflected in the CAP and the Farm to Fork Strategy. These frames of reference serve as normative tools for agriculture, and are experienced by farmers  as being imposed from outside. Recent electoral results, such as the high score of the far-right Peasants’ Party in the Dutch parliamentary elections, show that Europe’s ecological policy has played a role in the rise of populism, in the absence of farmers’ buy-in to the European greening project and its integration into their demographic transition. With no agricultural heritage (either in terms of infrastructure or practices), new entrants to the profession are mostly occupying micro-niches, and are therefore not breaking with a conventional agricultural heritage, while “alternative” farms are multiplying on the bangs of “conventional” agriculture.

Conclusion

As anthropologists who have conducted interviews and observations in European societies by comparison with other societies also facing global transformations, it is not up to us to make recommendations, but rather to highlight a certain number of convergences in these societies that can give European institutions a foothold. If we note that the challenges for European societies lie in public health infrastructures, military security techniques and agricultural organizations for food production, we need to understand what it means for these societies to prepare for the planetary challenges of the future, in particular global warming and pandemics. If the social state on which the European model was built has been exhausted, isn’t it crucial to rebuild a model that catalyses local and regional initiatives to meet these challenges, while meeting the primary needs of health, security and food? Only then will we be able to invent something like a European culture.