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Sujit Kumar, a worker from Bihar stranded in Bathinda, Punjab, had not eaten in four days when a volunteer from Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN) spoke with him on April 3.

Two tribal women from Jharkhand had been told they would be paid Rs.9,000 a month to work in an incense factory in Bengaluru. They were beaten up, paid Rs.200 and made to work for 15 hours a day. One woman was even raped inside the factory premises twice. Civil groups managed to rescue and secure their passage home.

Sanoj was part of a group of 15 people who had been living on the pavement post-lockdown. They had difficulty accessing food and received no help from the police in finding shelter. Fortunately, a SWAN volunteer chanced upon the group and helped it.

Several such stories of suffering and rescue have been chronicled by SWAN, a network of volunteers who banded together very quickly in the early days of the lockdown to help thousands of migrant workers in distress. The network has released reports with information and data that could prove valuable in shaping labour policies.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a janata curfew on March 22 in a bid to curb the spread of COVID-19 infections, there was a hint that the country would soon have to enter a complete lockdown. However, the announcement shockingly came just three days later and the authorities gave a four-hour deadline to begin a complete shutdown.

It is well documented that millions of people were left confused. The working class was, and continues to be, among those worst affected by the lockdown. The country was witness to heart-wrenching images of men, women and children walking long distances to reach their villages, seeking food and shelter, with some dying en route.

At the time, the unfolding migrant worker tragedy had no impact on the Centre or the State governments. Until early May, little help was given. The failure of the state was so glaring that it was left to civil society organisations, trade unions and ordinary citizens to provide immediate help, even if it was something as minimal as giving just Rs.200 to buy groceries.

On March 27, under the banner of SWAN, a group of academics, social workers, students, union members and concerned citizens spread across the country and began helping workers from various States who were stranded, hungry and shelterless and in need of money to return to their villages.

Over two months, SWAN used an extensive web of humanitarian organisations, trade unions and social workers to help 35,000 migrant workers reach home. This was a drop in the ocean no doubt, given that lakhs of migrant workers were stranded all over the country.

But the point is not about numbers and how many lives were saved but how a group of empathetic and knowledgeable people came together to deploy an effective solution at a time when the government, with all its resources, did not get its act together and even refused to acknowledge the existence of such a crisis.

Furthermore, SWANs efforts were not limited to helping the migrant workers reach home. The data collected and analysed by a division of volunteers have been published as three comprehensive reports, which were released at intervals during the lockdown.

Each one is a substantial resource that provides moving accounts by migrants, insights into the crisis, and statistical and data analysis. The reports also include recommendations on handling such a crisis.

A disclaimer says that the exercise was never meant to be a research project but was only aimed at providing immediate help to those badly in need of it.

Yet, because the scale of the tragedy was staggering, the reports findings went a step beyond being just a record of the initial days of the lockdown.

The reports were deliberately published during the lockdown so that policy makers could take cognisance of the plight of migrant workers. Unfortunaley, they were not given much consideration.

Speaking to Frontline about SWANs genesis and its future plans, Bengaluru-based Rajendran Narayanan, one of the main convenors of SWAN and assistant professor at Azim Premji University, said that the entire operation was a collaborative effort by several organisations, collectives, students and even a few committed bureaucrats.

According to him, SWAN as an entity grew organically for a specific purpose for a specific period of time. Its journey began when Sanjay Sahni, a social worker with the Samaj Parivartan Shakti Sangathan (SPSS) in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, received distress calls during the early days of the lockdown from a group of 50 migrant workers from Bihar who were stranded in Mangaluru, Karnataka.

Sahni, who had worked with Narayanan, contacted him and sought his help.

A few well-wishers sent money to the workers so they could just subsistbuy food, medicines, recharge phones, etc. Word probably got around and soon calls were coming from various sources in different States. Sahni realised the scale was huge and very quickly a group of us realised we had to put together a system to address the crisis, said Narayanan.

According to him, the system was built on the concept of providing assistance by primarily linking stranded workers with local organisations.

Volunteers set up a helpline that took details of the callers problems. These would be verified by the local link, which would then provide help such as food and government facilities for shelter and later, journey home.

Each callers information was put on a spread sheet so that the network could track the person and ensure they were safe.

By March 30-April 1 we had a system in place. A team was looking into finances, another manning helplines, teams [were looking] into verification of information, logistics, technology, social media, etc. Volunteers worked on a shift system so that someone was available at all hours. It was a mind-numbing and emotional experience, said Narayanan.

He added: All of it was done purely on a voluntary basis. I tapped into the Azim Premji University alumni [network] for help and the response was amazing. SWAN had approximately 120 volunteers during the peak of the crisis.

Explaining the operation, Narayanan said that there were people working with SWAN in every troubled State. As the crisis grew, teams were responsible for zones across the country.

Yet, the reality was that cash in hand was the need of the hour. Reaching out to friends, work associates, anyone who would help, SWAN was able to collect funds that were distributed among stranded migrant workers, he said.

Responding to word-of-mouth appeals, people donated small and large amounts. The finance team provided directions to the donor on where to send the money; most of the time it was directly to the person in distress.

There were cases where the bank would charge a penalty as the account did not have the minimum balance; to reactivate it, an automatic debit would take place.

Over two months, we disbursed approximately Rs.50 lakh, which is a reasonable amount, said Narayanan.

SWANs reports include several letters to the Ministry of Home Affairs and the State governments of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh, indicating its efforts to bring the crisis to the notice of the authorities. Other than Karnataka, the response from the States was poor. In fact, the Maharashtra government was particularly hostile, said Narayanan.

Narayanan, who is actively involved in the Right to Food and Right to Work campaigns, said that the lack of social protection measures and safety nets was glaring.

Interestingly, he said, poorer States such as Bihar and Odisha helped their people, while richer States such as Maharashtra and Gujarat shut their doors on those who kept their economies alive.

There are an estimated 10 crore migrant workers in the country, according to available data, although migrant workers do not enjoy formal recognition.

Also, the warehouses of the Food Corporation of India now have 2.5 times the buffer stock norms, and there is no reason why rations should not be universalised, Narayanan said.

According to him, it was a good time to empower the panchayat and form a federation at that level. They are the only ones who know how many members of the village have left and where the workers have gone. Unfortunately, the Central government has reduced federalism to monopolising decisions and socialising losses.

Anoushka Kale, a graduate from Azim Premji University and SWAN volunteer based in Pune, said that the experience was an eye-opener. She was fielding 30-40 calls a day in the early days of the crisis. The conversations were mostlyabout securing food. But I felt speaking to a person in distress humanised them. They may have been desperate but they spoke with dignity and respect.

The SWAN reports are small repositories of data and a documentation of the migrant crisis. Each one also provides a set of recommendations, including creating a safety net for migrant workers and specifics such as depositing Rs.7,000 into each workers accounts until they gain employment again.

The network released its first report, titled 21 Days and Counting: COVID-19 Lockdown, Migrant Workers, and the Inadequacy of Welfare Measures in India, on April 15.

In the introduction, the report said: The first three weeks of the lockdown have been utterly distressing for stranded workers and goes far beyond mere pareshaani as the PM put it. Despite the immense hardships that millions of stranded workers continue to endure, there was still no announcement on economic relief measures for them. Unless a combination of universal rations and money transfers are implemented in letter and spirit, India is staring at alarming levels of destitution and despair.

The first report deals largely with immediate problems such food and starvation issues. Here are some glimpses of data tabulated from the distress calls in the first report: 50 per cent of workers had rations left for less than one day; 96 per cent had not received rations from the government and 70 per cent had not received any cooked food; and 89 per cent had not been paid by their employers at all during the lockdown.

The numbers are alarming both in absolute and in relative terms. Half of those who have reached us would not be able to eat the next day without immediate intervention, the report said.

With 78 million tonnes of grains in FCI warehouses, its a now-or-never situation. Governments have had two weeks to ensure a robust ration supply network, doorstep delivery, etc., to reduce hunger. However, figures indicate very few have benefited even in the third week of lockdown.

The second report, titled 32 days and counting, is an extension of the first and was released on May 1. By then, SWAN had helped 16,863 people. The report describes the various appeals made to the establishment to release support, including a petition filed by SWAN in the Supreme Court. The petition was dismissed on the grounds that the Central governments programmes were adequately covering migrant distress.

The chapters titled Rate of hunger and distress exceeding the rate of ReliefOverview and Neither one nation nor one ration card, migrants fall between contain relevant and topical matter within the pandemic context.

Statistics in the second report showed that 32 days after the lockdown began, four out of five workers who reached out did not have access to government rations while 68 per cent did not have access to cooked food.

With no cash relief, 64 per cent of the migrant workers had less than Rs.100 left with them. With no change since April 14, about 78 per cent of people have Rs.300 or less left with them. As on April 26, only about 6 per cent of all those who have reached out to us have received their full wages during the lockdown. About 78 per cent have not been paid at all. More than 99 per cent of the self-employed have had no earnings during this period. These include street vendors and rickshaw pullers.

The third report, titled To leave or not to leave? Lockdown, migrant workers and their journeys home, looks at the fourth phase of the lockdown and gives detailed accounts of workers trying to get home.

The report said that 67 per cent (of 1,963) migrants were still in the same place when the lockdown was announced; only 33 per cent had left. Some 44 per cent of those who left took buses and 39 per cent managed to get on a Shramik Special train. About 11 per cent travelled by trucks, lorries and other such modes of transport, while 6 per cent made the perilous journey on foot.

The first-person accounts and case studies in this report are gripping. The stories speak of starvation, police brutality, physical abuse and government apathy, revealing the colossal tragedy of the migrant exodus.

Read this article:
The SWAN reports: Records of heroism by migrant workers - Frontline

The head of Germanys most populous state North Rhine Westphalia (NRW) visited the migrant camp Moria on the Greek island of Lesbos on Tuesday. After speaking to organizations working there, Armin Laschet called on the whole EU to "wake up" and said that he had listened to those in despair in the camps.

Armin Laschet, from the conservative CDU (Christian Democratic Union)party, is the head of Germany's most populous state North RhineWestphalia and has been touted as one of the future candidates totake over from German Chancellor Angela Merkel when she leaves officeat the next elections.

OnTuesday August 4, Laschet visited migrant camps on the Greek islandof Lesbos and spoke to those working for aid organizations in thecamps. He told the news agency dpa that visiting the camps was likelistening to "screams of desperation".

'Wake up Europe!'

Laschetcalled upon the European Union to "wake up" and said thatGermany's holding of the rotating EU presidency offered the chanceto find some "lasting solutions" to the migrant crisis. He saidthat Europe needed to help the Greek government and not leave theGreek people, the migrants themselves or those that run the camps andwork in them alone.

Likeseveral other German states, NRW has already taken in smallcontingents of unaccompanied children and vulnerable people from theGreek camps as well as boasting one of the greatest number of asylumseekers in Germany in 2019. According to German government statisticsfor the end of 2019, North Rhine Westphalia had a foreign populationof just over 15%, although not all of those people are asylumseekers, refugees or even recent migrants.Assessing the situation

OnAugust 3, Laschet met with Greek Prime Minister KyriakosMitsotakis, as well as the country's foreign minister NikosDendias. In a press release on NRW's state website, Laschet saidthat his Greek visit was to help him gain a personal understanding on thesituation in the migrant camps on Lesbos.

Followingthat meeting, Laschet stated that Europe needed to "work togetherto protect its external borders and provide humanitarian help forrefugees who arrive on the Greek islands." He said although themigrants had arrived on Greek soil they had essentially stepped on to "European soil, and so any solution to their problems had to be viaEurope too."

AlthoughLaschet called off his visit to the main camp in Moria, due to security concerns, he did visita smaller camp at Kara Tepe in Mytilene on Lesbos. This camp is thehome to those most in need of protection, including victims oftorture, people with disabilities, pregnant women, old and illpeople.During his visit, accordingto his press statement, Laschet also plans to meet with teams fromFrontex and the mayor of Mytilene before leaving the island. Whilston the island, Laschet reiterated his state's intention to take inmore children in need of protection and their closest family members "in the coming weeks."

He saidthat although Germany was also busy fighting the COVID-19 pandemic inthe camps in Greece the virus had "another meaning entirely."Laschet noted that many of the camps' inhabitants were unable to leavethe camps freely because of the virus and that made many migrantsfeel they were living in a hopeless situation with "noperspective."

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Leading German politician visits Greek migrant camp and tells the EU to 'wake up' - InfoMigrants

A failure by the UK to reach a new agreement with France on how to deal with migrant crossings could lead to numbers reaching crisis levels, an ex-Border Force chief has warned.

It comes after a record number of crossings to Britain in a single day last week, and followsa Government minister branding the number of incidents unacceptably high.

Tony Smith, the former head of UK Border Force said the UK and France need to agree a treaty with a joint patrol whereby migrants picked up in the Channel can be returned to France to have asylum claims considered there.

He told the PA news agency: What Im advocating is that we need to try as best we can to replicate the juxtaposed controls for legitimate applicants in the same way as for illegitimate applicants.

If they want to come to the UK they need to make their case on the French side, and if they are found in the waterways or even make it as far as Dover we say Im sorry but you go back there and thats where you will be interviewed and processed, on the French side.

Last month Home Secretary Priti Patel sought to level blame at her French counterparts, telling the Commons Home Affairs Committee of the unacceptable numbers of people making the perilous journey in small boats.

On Saturday Immigration compliance minister Chris Philp called on France to be stronger on intercepting vessels at sea and directing the return of boats which are trying to get to the UK.

At least 202 migrants managed to cross to Britain on Thursday in a surge of 20 boats, a single-day record.

Asked how hopeful he is of the Home Office being able to reach a new deal with France, Mr Smith said: I wouldnt like to call it as to whether or not they can make the breakthrough.

All I would say is weve done it before and the numbers then were far greater.

I think there are potentially opportunities but there will have to be some kind of a quid pro quo which would satisfy the French that this was a measure that was designed to help both parties, not just a one-way street where the UK essentially is able to blockade anybody coming over from France.

He said the current approach is putting peoples lives at risk and fuelling the smuggling supply chains.

The number of migrants in small boats intercepted by Border Force on Friday fell to 96, but Mr Smith said if daily numbers were to continue in the high hundreds youre going to start getting up to the numbers that actually were indeed a crisis almost 20 years ago.

He added: I do worry that if we cant get a new agreement with the French on returns were not going to be able to stop this and we could see numbers of the scale of which weve seen in years gone by.

The rest is here:
Call for UK treaty with France on migrant crossings to avoid 'crisis' numbers - expressandstar.com

The UK is on the brink of losing the highly skilled and experienced migrant workers currently propping up the care sector. If the government does not make changes to its new points-based immigration system a major crisis could emerge. These key workers cannot be replaced by digital innovations, while UK workers are increasingly reluctant to enter into what is a low-paid and extremely stressful profession.

It is estimated that the care sector requires 520,000 additional workers before 2035 to support the UKs ageing population. The sector currently relies on migrant workers. Most migrant care workers are set to be excluded from the governments points-based immigration system, unveiled in July, because the pay is so low.

From 2021, new rules will require a minimum pay threshold of 20,480. This will effectively prevent migrant care workers and home carers from entering the UK because average pay for care workers is 16,500 per year. Low pay means that, regardless of their ability to accrue transferable points, care workers will not be eligible for visas.

Additionally, the work done by care workers and home carers does not meet the skills threshold for the new Health and Care Visa. This visa will fast track migrants in the healthcare sector, offering reduced application fees and exempting them from the Immigration Health Surcharge (624 per year from October 2020). But the new visa is only for doctors, nurses and other health professionals not care workers. Excluding care workers could potentially be disastrous.

For the past decade, approximately one in six or 83,000 of the 1.5m home care and care workers in England have been non-UK nationals. While the proportion of migrants has been stable, their countries of origin have changed. Most migrant care workers came from outside the EU until 2012, when the current minimum pay threshold of 30,000 was introduced. After 2012, EU migrants took up care work jobs because this minimum pay threshold did not apply to free movement.

Brexit will end free movement for EU care workers at the same time as the new salary threshold is applied to migrants. Currently, the sector has an 8% vacancy rate. Where will desperately needed new workers come from? Leading health bodies, care workers and home carers themselves are deeply worried about this change.

Migrant care workers are typically overqualified. Many have professional healthcare qualifications in nursing, or prior experience in the sector. Care work does not offer adequate remuneration to reflect their skills. It involves depressed wages, long hours and difficult work conditions that discourage British workers. Migrants can endure these conditions when they are able to invest their earnings in property, business and family betterment back home (where many will hope to retire).

For British workers, on the other hand, care works low wages rarely lead to better prospects. Many find themselves pushed towards the care sector when they cannot find other work. Often this push comes at a point where they have little security in their housing and personal lives. Adding to their insecurity, around one-quarter of care work is now delivered through zero-hours contracts.

With under-staffing, longer hours or truncated visits, even care workers working steady hours find themselves overwhelmed and exhausted. Research shows that staff shortages and longer hours lead to increased fatigue, irritability, and demotivation for workers and these conditions can lead to potentially dangerous mistakes.

But if migrants are blocked from taking these roles then UK residents will be expected to plug the gaps. In April, the health minister, Matt Hancock, began a recruitment drive for the sector, targeting 20-39 year-olds. Previous recruitment drives have done little to alleviate the sectors chronic labour shortages. Despite a 20% increase in advertised care roles in the first quarter of 2020, applications decreased by 17.8%. Previous drives havent affected the sectors 30% turnover rate which has risen from 23% in 2012. Data on recruitment and retention tell us these are not desirable jobs.

Current care workers report highly exploitative conditions including a lack of adequate sleeping and sanitary facilities. Precarious conditions and low pay have meant some care workers have had to use foodbanks and claim benefits. Meanwhile, in the COVID-19 pandemic, female careworkers and home carers have had the highest death rates of all occupations for women.

Jobs in the rest of the healthcare sector are being transformed. The NHS has furthered its digital first approach during the pandemic, spurred on by social distancing requirements, through NHSX its new digital branch, which was formed in April 2019. With annual investment of more than 1bn, NHSX claims to be the largest digital health and social care transformation programme in the world. But the video/telephone/email consultations that are proving effective for other patient and staff groups will be slow to come to care work. Though these technologies can lower costs in other health settings, the feeding, cleaning and personal care which comprises care work cannot be digitised.

Devaluing care and labelling care workers unskilled has created a sense of alienation and hopeless frustration for British care workers. Long hours, low pay, intensely physical and emotionally demanding work can undermine the ability of carers to care either for themselves or others. Improvements to pay and working conditions are long overdue. But it is a change in the new immigration scheme that is needed most, if the emerging crisis is to be averted.

Huge sections of the UK community rely entirely on these un-cared for workers. A coerced and reluctant workforce will most definitely affect the quality of care the sector delivers.

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New points-based immigration system will lead to care crisis - The Conversation UK

Coal heavers wear sandwich boards to protest against low wages in 1921. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

No word is invoked more to characterize the current era than crisis. The term has been wielded incessantly in 2020already the most tumultuous year since 1968 and still only half overto designate a series of new and ongoing plights. It has named the impeachment crisis and the constitutional crisis many thought it revealed, themselves signs of the crisis of polarization in U.S. politics. Crisis nearly always describes the coronavirus pandemic and the economic turmoil it has unleashed. Journalists speak of a crisis of police violence against Black people in the United States, a slow-burn tragedy that sparked a crisis of civil unrest after the killing of George Floyd. And Americans move nervously toward a presidential election whose results, regardless of the outcome, will be thrown into doubt by accusations of foreign meddling or partisan hijacking. A crisis of legitimacy, perhaps even a crisis of emergency powers, looms on the horizon.

Yet these problems, as awful and intractable as they are, add layers to an already familiar crisis atmosphere: There is also the environmental crisis, the health care crisis, the energy crisis, the housing crisis, the drug crisis, the debt crisis, the migrant crisis, the education crisis, and the marriage crisis. There is even a loneliness crisis.

None of these problems can be isolated; each extends into other domains embroiled in their own dysfunction, with the result that the world feels entangled in overlapping and intersecting crises.

How is it, then, that the term crisis should apply across so many fieldsforeign affairs, domestic politics, climate, culture, economics, to name only a few? Does crisis have any meaning, beyond just a catch-all term for trouble? Is there any logic, or novelty, to the constant proclamations of crisis?

Historians are well suited to address such questions, given their training in alertness to context, eye for continuity and change, and ornery eagerness to question the terms of debate. Perhaps no part of the historians guild is better placed to ponder the meaning of crisis than historians of Germany, a nation whose atrocities and traumas, and willingness to grapple with their meaning, are unsurpassed in modern times. Above all, it is Weimar Germanypoised between the catastrophe of World War I and the even greater calamity of Nazism and the Holocaustthat has been portrayed as the quintessential society in crisis.

Weimar is much invoked nowadays, by pundits and experts alike. This commonly involves the search for parallels between that time and today, as though such correspondences might predict humanitys future. Will democracy collapse? Will fascism return? Are protesters toppling statues a totalitarian political movement, as Tucker Carlson claimed? Is Trumpism?

What research by historians of Germany suggests, however, is that the deepest similarity between Weimar and today is not in any particular danger; rather, it is in the outsized role that fear, apocalyptic expectation, and longings for salvation play in the populations political imagination.

Research on Weimar Germany also illuminates the role of ideology and activism within this crisis-consciousness. In a 2009 article on Suicide and Crisis in Weimar Berlin, the historian Moritz Fllmer explored how political actors at the time cited cases of suicide to support their partisan agendas. For the Nazis, suicides highlighted how ordinary Germans suffered from the nations humiliation under the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Communists invoked suicides as proof of capitalisms dehumanizing impact on workers. According to liberals and Social Democrats, suicides attested to the deleterious effect of an authoritarian school system. And traditional conservatives appealed to suicides as a sign of the breakdown of religion and family life. The only consensus was that suicides confirmed the corruptions of a system that forced its inhabitants to kill themselves.

How could suicides supply proof for such disparate conclusions? Because all sides cherry-picked cases and shoehorned them into pet views about what Weimars crisis was and what it demanded. As Fllmer put it, Right-wing authors emphasized the need for decision in an existential, all-or-nothing situation; Communists predicted the imminent downfall of capitalism as the prerequisite for a proletarian revolution; Social Democrats and liberals used the notion of crisis to opt for reform in a spirit of democratic humanism. For all these voices, the present was dire but the future yielded many opportunities, provided it was ushered in soon.

Such ideological crisis-consciousness, spun from panic about the present and the call to save the future from certain doom, is the strongest link joining todays world to the Weimar pastand not just to that past but to several centuries of modern life marked by convulsive change. The world has truly been here before.

A comparative history of crisis offers not a crystal ball into the future but a powerful lens into both the concepts meaning and its function today. There are three lessons in particular that ought to be learned.

The preeminent scholar of crisis is Reinhart Koselleck, one of the great historians of the past century, who died in 2006. Kosellecks first book was a blockbuster 1959 work on the 18th-century Republic of Letters called Critique and Crisis, which rebuked Enlightenment thinkers for criticizing the absolutist state based on unrealistic expectations of what politics could accomplish.

The Enlightenments Utopian constructs of the future, Koselleck argued, damned the present to the trash heap of history; in so doing, they destabilized European society and provoked the political crisis that led to the French Revolutiona cataclysm driven by idealistic demands for virtue and unspoiled democracy whose unfulfilled, and perhaps unfulfillable, promise has been shaping political events ever since.

The fingerprints of Kosellecks Weimar youth are all over the book. His first political experience, he once recalled, was watching partisans of the radical left and right bash each other in the schoolyard during Germanys 1932 presidential election. In Kosellecks view, the utopianism of communists and Nazi Brownshirts was traceable to the rigid moralization of politics of 18th-century critics like Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the belief that today is rotten, that history can be engineered for the better, that the unmerry facts of political lifecompeting interests, plural perspectives, shady compromisesmight pass away as a pure society is created on Earth.

Kosellecks most ambitious project was a collaborative, multivolume lexicon mapping the conceptual shifts that took place with the advent of modernity. He dubbed this the Sattelzeit (saddle age), a bridging period, from roughly 1750 to 1850, when words like revolution and citizen took on new, complex meanings in line with the enormous social and political changes underway in the West.

Koselleck wrote the entry on crisis himself. He began with the words Greek originsfrom a verb meaning to judge or decide, it had long implied stark choices, including a medical usage, enshrined by the ancient physician Galen, for the decisive moment in an illness that determines if the patient will live or die. But Koselleck went beyond the etymology of crisis to trace its birth as modernitys fundamental mode of interpreting historical time.

For Koselleck, the turning point came in the years around 1770, when the concepts residual meaning from Galen combined with a post-theological notion of history as the stage for final judgment. If society is sick, it must be healed and savedor else. Rousseaus Emile (1762) was the first text to deploy crisis in the fully modern sense, joining a diagnosis of current ills and a prognosis for the future within a philosophy of history that views the present as a moment pregnant with change and ripe for action.

Crisis in this sense fires the imagination. It takes hold of old experiences, Koselleck wrote, and transforms them metaphorically in ways that create altogether new expectations. We are reaching a crisis that will culminate in either slavery or liberty, Rousseaus fellow Enlightenment philosophe Denis Diderot declared in 1771. These are the times that try mens souls, proclaimed Thomas Paine a few years later, in a pamphlet series urging American independence aptly titled The Crisis.

In the 19th century, crisis became a key term in economics. For liberals, it named the trough in capitalisms boom-and-bust cycles; shorn of its eschatological dimensions, crisis became an agent of creative destructiona bringer of progress.

For Marxists, on the other hand, economic crises were not bumps on the road to innovation; rather, they were the inevitable journey to a terminal crisis, following intensifying busts, that would bury capitalism forever and usher in a socialist utopia. But the reliance on the idea of crisis remained, despite the terms semantic wobble between acute circumstance and epochal shift.

In the 20th century, crisis-talk sprawled everywhere. So haphazard was invocation of crisis, so omnipresent was its appearance in headlines and novel compounds (crisis of self-confidence, crisis expert, mini-crisis, etc.), that it threatened to lose even the modicum of meaning it once had as imposing an unavoidable choice between alternatives. In an age of crisis, Koselleck suggested, crisis itself had ended up in crisishollowed out to fit the exigencies of whatever perturbs people at a particular moment.

The dark side of modernity, its propensity to produce seismic fractures, was taken up by the German historian Detlev Peukert in his influential 1987 book, The Weimar Republic. For Peukert, Weimar was an extreme casea society in which successive upheavals generated a deep-seated sense of unease and disorientation, an awareness that the conditions underlying everyday life and experience were in flux. Nazism was merely a drastic answer to an all-embracing crisis that refused to yield to conventional remedies.

What Adolf Hitlers Germany demonstrates, Peukert argued, is how cascading turmoil can tip over into catastrophe when coupled with the modern states technological and bureaucratic powers to intervene. The Great Depression, parliamentary gridlock, the traumatic legacies of World War I, and meteoric social and cultural change fueled a crisis-ridden popular mood that swung between enthusiasm and anxiety, hopes of national reawakening and fears of national extinction.

Though Peukert presented Weimars crisis as an objective condition, his emotional languagehis talk of unease, anxiety, fear, and hopehelps readers see that it was more than just an external fact. Crisis also lives in peoples heads, bounded by the horizons of dream and dread.

In 2010, Rdiger Graf, another historian of Weimar Germany working in the wake of Koselleck and Peukert, argued that no one can ever construct a necessary causal chain linking external events to the experience of those events as a crisis.

No economic indicator, for example, decides how a society or government will respond. What steers the imagination are normative ideals about politics and society, a vision of history, and expectations and desires. What demands explanation is the feeling of crisis itself.

Most people naturally resist this idea: Declaring a crisis, they think, is the only reasonable response to facts they decry. But even a pandemic is first and foremost a crisis at the level of interpretation, not blunt fact. A disease becomes a crisis not because it kills widely but because it seizes the mind in a certain way.

Adam Gopnik captured the interpretive dimension of the coronavirus crisis in a moving account of New Yorks recent lockdown. Plagues happen only to people, Gopnik observed in the New Yorker. Animals can suffer from mass infections, of course, but they experience them as one more bad blow from an unpredictable and predatory natural environment. Only people put mental brackets around a phenomenon like the coronavirus pandemic and attempt to give it a name and some historical perspective, some sense of precedence and possibility.

It is not that hardship does not really exist; it surely doesand just as surely can it wax and wane. Crisis, however, is the product of a narrative that exceeds any particular data point of pain. No matter how bad, disorderly, and turbulent events and processes at a certain time are, Graf argued, they become a crisis only by relating them to a past development and projecting two different paths into the future, thereby defining the present as the critical moment of decision. In other words, crisis springs from the story that tells you what the pain means, what can be done, and what (or who) is responsible.

Talk of crisis can be a justifiable reaction to grave conditions. But because there is no narrative-free way to relate the present to past and future, crisis should be seen in narrative terms, as a strategy to cope with present trouble by imagining that trouble within a story leading to plausibleyet morally or existentially contrastingfutures. Crisis stories are always speculative interpretations of lived experience, inextricably interwoven with the storytellers principles and purposes.

Because crisis in its true sense is a stage in a dramatic plot, in which the present teeters on the brink of ruin, the identification is not neutral. Human agency is implied in the proclamation of crisis; it presumes that something still can and must be done. As Graf noted, it is difficult to find any prominent author, politician, intellectual, or journalist in Weimar Germany who publicly used the notion of crisis in a pessimistic or even fatalistic sense.

This is the true meaning of the clich never let a crisis go to waste. It is not that crises happen and then must be exploited. Rather, it is that a sense of the cure is already built into the determination of the disease. With timely activism, the looming catastrophe that opens up the present as a time of decision can be averted. Crisis does not paralyzeit empowers.

This is also why railing against those who would politicize a crisis misses the point. It is only because people are already politicized that they can assess the moment and declare it critical. The darker ones view of the present and the more exalted ones hopes for the future, the more justifiable radicalism seems. Clucking at opponents politicization of a crisis often means only that you cast the crisis in different terms and demand different solutions. Sometimes it means you do not share their sense of emergency to begin with.

The coronavirus pandemic has loosed a flood of calls to openly politicize it or to at least recognize the political choices entailed by the diseases uneven impact on societies and demographics. COVID-19, we are told, has exposed myriad needsfor expertise in government, for better public health infrastructure, for sovereignty and borders, for tough measures against China, for more democratic government, for racial justiceneeds that the current emergency can finally awaken humanity to address.

Such calls are almost honest. Crisis does have a revelatory power. What it reveals, however, are not just societal needs but the speakers ideology too, which constructs the crisis as an opportunity for change.

As Fllmer observed, Weimar Berlins suicides were deciphered through an ideological lens that linked those deaths to crisis in order to advance solutions that were no less ideological. While suicides were real enough, the crisis remained an imaginative construct. Fllmer pointed out that, from 1929 to 1932, as unemployment soared and the gears of government ground to a halt, the suicide rate rose by only 11.9 percent. A definite uptick but certainly not enough to serve as dramatic evidence for a desperate state of mind.

Then as now, the utility of crisis lies in the dramatization of the present for those with an agenda to change it. Its significance is in the stories we tell to mobilize ourselves and others.

Can grasping the meaning of crisis inform political thinking today, at a time when crisis has literally gone viral? For Koselleck, the problem with crisis, in particular for academics, was its growing imprecision. When we assess its role in public discourse, however, the trouble is not so much the terms vagueness as its reliable function as a catalyst of action, an accelerant of fear and expectationanother log on the fire.

The law of crisis is that crisis-talk fuels itself: Every time a choice is pitched as life-or-death, or an institution is pronounced in crisis, panic and partisanship and zero-sum thinking gain ground. Use of crisis mirrors your ideological commitments. If you want to raise the temperature, then breathlessly framing your cause as a crisis will do the trick. Crisis-talk is the gas pedal, not the brakes.

If you want to lower the temperature, then resist the impulse to reflexively label every problem a crisis. Keeping crisis-talk in check preserves the words potency for the time when the true watershed arrives. The difficulty faced by those who would declare 2020, with much justification, a year of crisis is that the word has been overused for generations. Not just COVID-19 but a host of deadly maladiesAlzheimers, malaria, AIDS, diabetes, tuberculosis, heart disease, cancerare regularly cast in crisis terms. Every election is declared the most important in our lifetime. When everything is a crisis, nothing can be.

Using crisis with care may also make solving some problems easier, since avoiding the term helps enlarge the middle ground and with it the room for political maneuver. Crisis can create unrealistic expectations of unity while, ironically, hindering a societys ability to work together. Often enough, it invites demagoguery and makes people impatient with pluralism and dissent and the necessary but sometimes sordid deal-making of party politics. Compromise and cooperation work best in non-crisis mode.

But there is a trade-off to swearing off crisis-talk: Doing so also means surrendering power to enrage voters and open wallets. And sometimes rage and mobilization are appropriate; sometimes societies do stand at the crossroads.

Crisis, when understood as a state of emergency, can even pose a threat to liberty and representative government because of the perceived need it creates to curtail rights and centralize power. The Roman Republic enacted a temporary dictatorship during times of military danger. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the American Civil War. Hitler and Benito Mussolini came to power in an atmosphere of crisis and used emergency powers to further dismantle constitutional government. Franklin D. Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. Restricting freedoms in moments of extremis may save open societiesbut the decision itself is a political one and prone to abuse.

More recently, authoritarians on the left and rightincluding Venezuelas Nicols Maduro and Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdoganhave declared crises in order to seize greater power and silence critics. In March, as coronavirus cases surged elsewhere in Europe, Hungarys Viktor Orban pushed through an emergency law that would permit him to rule by decree. In Brazil, the coronavirus is sowing instability that critics fear the nations scandal-plagued president, Jair Bolsonaro, could use as a pretext for a military takeover.

Crisis bends in an illiberal direction for a more insidious reason as well. David Moshfegh, another historian of Germany, assigns Koselleck to his students. I ask them whether they think crisis is a positive or a negative word, Moshfegh told me. More than 90 percent each year say it is negative and explain it as meaning something stressful and abnormal.

In Moshfeghs view, crisis is nowadays approached in the spirit of crisis management, which aims to go through a crisis and re-create stability and normality without having to make any big fundamental changes. To be sure, there are still people for whom crisis offers hope for fundamental change. Black Lives Matter, which seeks to channel rage against police violence into a broad crusade against systemic oppression, comes to mind. But Moshfegh is correct that rampant use of crisis also gives voice to a pervasive unease, a deep sense that a great many things are not as they should be, a craving not for apocalypse or utopia but for things to be normal.

In this sense, authoritarian reaction is crisis management writ largethe urge, in a time of chaos, to re-create a bygone stability and normality while avoiding big social change. Fascism in the Hitlerian sense was revolutionary, promising a heroic thousand-year empire for the Nordic Man. But the garden-variety authoritarianisms of today promise something more prosaic: security, predictability, order, traditionin short, normalityin a topsy-turvy world.

In a 2017 Hungarian Review essay on the crisis of Europe, Orban pointed to a generalized restlessness, anxiety, and tension that, he claimed, testified to [l]arge masses of people [who] want something radically different than what is being proposed and done by the traditional elites. Orban offered himself as a tribune of this populist discontent. His response has been to create an overtly illiberal Hungary shielded from the disruptions of free elections, a free press, and open bordersa new normal.

Today, crisis risks priming populations, in the United States and around the world, for authoritarian temptation, though what lures most people is less fascist revolution than autocratic stabilization. Faced with the anxiety of total crisis, it is easy to embrace, even normalize, those who promise to manage, by authoritarian means, the volatility and bewilderment of modern life.

It is worth remembering that what killed the Weimar Republic, Germanys first liberal democracy, was not an objective predicament but the fear and desperation of runaway crisis-consciousness, which led a majority of Germans to abandon the democratic center for illiberal ideologies of the radical right and left. Those who would again destroy democracy must first ride the mood of crisis. Every time you abstain from loose crisis-talk, you take a bit of wind out of their sails.

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When Everything Is a Crisis, Nothing Is - Foreign Policy