THE biggest lesson of this pandemic, which has been the biggest threat to humanity in this generation, is that the nation-state matters a lot, and its leadership as well. These two are the most important things that determine if a human being lives or not and, in a broader sense, whether he lives a satisfying life or a miserable one.

All the blah-blah about globalization, about being a global citizen have proven to be hogwash. The European Union even with its bloated expensive bureaucracy left its members twisting in the wind of the pandemic. It couldn’t even undertake a unified, coordinated campaign to fight the pandemic. The idea of a borderless Europe proved to be a naïve one as each EU nation decided for itself whether to close its borders or not.