The outbreak of COVID-19 has significantly reshaped debates on the global order, democratic politics and the liberal mode of governing societies. Some have compared the virus to the “ultimate empty signifier”, which allowed difficult ideological groups to fill it with their own securitizations, creating in an instant a plethora of political otherings. For IR realists, the sudden collapse of cross-border movement and other privileges of the globalized liberal elite came as a vindication of their long-cherished argument: the nation state remains the key actor in international politics, and the post-national world had largely been a utopian liberal illusion. Right-wing nationalist populists have been saying the same thing but in a different language and were apt to make COVID-19 instrumental to their purposes. Thus, Viktor Orbán quickly linked it to the agenda of migration and used the state of exception as a pretext to further limit the democratic process in Hungary. However, as stude...

The outbreak of COVID-19 has significantly reshaped debates on the global order, democratic politics and the liberal mode of governing societies. Some have compared the virus to the “ultimate empty signifier”, which allowed difficult ideological groups to fill it with their own securitizations, creating in an instant a plethora of political otherings. For IR realists, the sudden collapse of cross-border movement and other privileges of the globalized liberal elite came as a vindication of their long-cherished argument: the nation state remains the key actor in international politics, and the post-national world had largely been a utopian liberal illusion. Right-wing nationalist populists have been saying the same thing but in a different language and were apt to make COVID-19 instrumental to their purposes. Thus, Viktor Orbán quickly linked it to the agenda of migration and used the state of exception as a pretext to further limit the democratic process in Hungary. However, as students of populism have also stressed, the populist response to the pandemic has been far from uniform. In a yet broader perspective, while some democratic governments enacted draconian measures in response to the pandemic, suspending basic individual freedoms, some dictatorships like Belarus experienced a sudden “flow of liberalism“, refusing to cut down on both economic activity and cross-border movement. This special issue focuses on comparing the liberal and illiberal reactions (both domestic and international) to the pandemic, looking into how it has affected the democratic and non-democratic forms of governance; examining where the responses have been similar or overlapping, i.e. where COVID-19 has practically blurred or erased the border between liberal and illiberal politics; looking into how different types of regimes and political groupings have borrowed new elements and styles of politics, e.g. in which circumstances populist or autocratic politicians suddenly seemed more liberal than their liberal and democratic counterparts; and investigating the ramifications of these changes for the liberal components of the globalized international order.

The aim of this article is to compare the effectiveness of two political systems: liberal democracy and illiberal democracy in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. The analysis is based on the theoretical assumptions of non-Marxian historical materialism. In the first part of the article, I present the concept of 'regulative credit" which has been introduced within the framework of this theory. In standard socio-political conditions, the growth of regulatory power is usually contested by citizens. However, in a situation of danger, when social order is undermined, citizens support the author-ities' extraordinary regulations. This social support, called regulative credit, lasts as long as the danger persists. In the next section, I briefly characterize liberal and illib-eral democracies. In liberal democracy, there is a balance between different branches of power, and citizens share a socio-political consciousness of an individualistic type. In illiberal democracy, the executive branch of power-though democratically chosen-has an advantage over the two other kinds of power, and citizens share a socio-political consciousness of a collectivist type. Those differences result in diverse reactions of the authorities to a situation of threat. The political authorities of an illiberal democracy usually react faster, in comparison with the political authorities in liberal democracies, that react slower. Also, the attitude of citizens toward the introduced restrictions vary. Societies of illiberal democracies are more self-disciplined and more willing to accept restrictions from above. Whereas societies of liberal democracies are more individualistic and less willing to accept limitations. In the fourth part of my paper, I analyze briefly the influence of the pandemic on globalization processes and on the relations between the EU and the nation states in Europe. In the summary (section five), I predict that the mass use of modern technologies to control social life and strengthening of the sovereignty of nation states will be the two most important effects of the pandemic.

The aim of this research was to explain how the coronavirus pandemic led to the rise of authoritarianism throughout the world. With regards to research methods, A document analysis method was used to obtain valid information and to analyze and describe the complex situation after the spread of COVID-19. A wide array of documents and scholarly articles were analyzed in order to obtain reliable and objective information. The research question of this paper is: How did the coronavirus pandemic affected the government performance and did it cause the rise of authoritarianism? Is there a causal link between the spread of the coronavirus pandemic and the rise of authoritarianism? This research revealed that the COVID -19 caused the unprecedented rise of government power in different parts of the world. In many countries the governments took advantage of the crisis and imposed a lot of restrictions on the people. Governments use the pandemic as a pretext to limit human rights. On the pretext of controlling the pandemic such fundamental human rights as freedom of speech and expression, freedom of assembly and association, the right to privacy, etc. are massively restricted. Since the outbreak of the pandemic civil space has been severely restricted and press freedom is a thing of the past in many countries. The state of emergency in various countries creates favorable conditions for the government to restrict human rights and impose total control over the society in order to prevent the outbreak of pandemic.

The outbreak of the global pandemic and its global outreach has challenged and shocked the international community. It has paralyzed the nations through upending the mainstream social, political, and economic activities of nations. The Covid-19 related restriction further suspended the normal affairs of states under an international environment of a health emergency. The pandemic crisis has clearly communicated to the international community that the digital world has arrived because the dependency on information technology has raised the significance of hi-tech communication networks in the world. This global crisis has endangered international society and the nations are struggling against the Covid-19 viral disease. No doubt, the whole international system has gradually learned to survive in the health crisis and the leaders from around the world are thinking of resuming normalization, but the actual question linked to the global governance in the post-corona world is unanswered....

The article seeks to explain that state authority has risen during the pandemic, which began due to the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic in the world. State authority has always shown that it will grow in times of crisis, because social order and security are more important to the state than anything else. In the study, the liberal, conservative, socialist views on the state authority were analyzed and the conservative and socialist understanding of the state came to the fore during the pandemic. Countries acting on their own against the pandemic all over the world, closing their borders and strengthening the control system have not only increased the state authority, but perhaps they have always attacked the supranational institutions, a global village or a cosmopolitan world view. The structure and work of the state proved how important it was in the fight against the outbreak. It seems clear that socioeconomic and employment problems will intensify during and after the outbreak, and restrictions on freedom will trigger social unrest and protests. In this case, it will be more important for the state to ensure social order and eliminate an insecure environment. In addition, how high the state authority will rise will depend on the duration of the pandemic.

Social systems that succumb to the pandemic will seek new footholds to hang on to, while those who overcome the pandemic will try to turn their successful deeds into permanent achievements of humanity. The upheaval triggered by the coronavirus will intensify the conflict between the socially advanced and the backward, the rising one and the one that has started to collapse. In developed capitalist countries, it has been the worry about losing social consent, which triggered public intervention in the outbreak. The failure of the USA in its efforts to globalize the world by military force and the financial crisis of 2008 triggered by this failure caused neoliberalism to begin to decline rapidly. The main factor behind neoliberalism's decline was, however, the unavoidable rise of Eurasia, based on statism and development by sharing, rather than the domestic developments in the homeland of neoliberalism. The coronavirus, which has led to a strong sensation of the common destiny of humanity, has brought about the biggest blow to neoliberalism on the ideological plane. The key to success in the combat against the pandemic is seen to be statism that is implemented under the guidance of science and accompanied by social solidarity. While the "invisible hand" remained desperate in the combat against COVID-19, it was the "visible hand" of the "nationstate" that brought success. The currents triggered by the coronavirus pandemic have created a very suitable ground to further limit hegemony. Taking advantage of this ground to consolidate world peace more securely will enable humanity to breathe more comfortably.

This article studies the major transformations resulting from the global Covid-19 pandemic and how to examine it from the point of view of social philosophy through two sub-themes. The first relates to understanding the state of collective panic in Spain, France, and Italy. It is logical that fear of the pandemic should not turn into a state of collective panic in societies living under technologically advanced political systems, except in cases where these societies lack the basic elements on which social ties are based. Therefore, how do we understand the fragility of these social ties in European countries where mass panic is threatening daily life? The second sub-theme is related to the gestures and features of creating a new geopolitical map that has benefitted from the geopolitical retreat of the West to consolidate other political and regional alliances, mainly the Chinese initiative to tender aid to Italy at a time when other European countries turned their backs on and clos...