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Changing Democracies in an Unequal World
1. Introduction The Covid 19 pandemic has, among other things, fueled an international debate on whether the world will be different, more equal, or if it will stay the same after this crisis. It has raised questions on the role of the State, on the weight of the political sphere in an era when political power seemed to be steadily losing the battle with the economic power. It has put globalization to question due to the risks derived from frequent travels and open borders on the one hand and from the restructuring of the strategies of international alliances on the other. It has implicitly evidenced that countries are not only made by individuals fiercely competing with each other on the basis of their own individual merits but that they are societies, made of people who form a community that will have more chances of overcoming a crisis if the state and its political institutions manage to organize and mediate the response to their legitimate (in this case actually vital) interests. For the time being we can see that, in certain countries (in Europe for example) the state has had to intervene more than it had been considered acceptable by neocon ideology. Whereas in the US it has made contradictions explode. Literally: we’ve seen armed white men protesting against any form of lockdown. What was being confronted there was a mislead idea of individual freedom vs public health. Profit against human lives