Many countries believe they are 'special':
Jay Doubleyou: exceptionalism today
During the last two years, many countries have definitely felt they are 'special':
Jay Doubleyou: sweden and coronavirus
Including the UK, with these comments from spring 2020:
Coronavirus has exposed the myth of British exceptionalism | Fintan O’Toole | The Guardian
Cruel Britannia: Coronavirus lays waste to British exceptionalism – POLITICO
This comment is from the New York Times from last month:
Britannia, With Fewer RulesWhat England’s push to get back to business as usual says about the national character.
By David Segal
Published Jan. 29, 2022
Published Jan. 29, 2022
Then there is England’s sense of exceptionalism. In its more benign version, observers pin this to a civic pride that stems from the country’s role in exalting individual rights and denouncing tyranny. Here is where Magna Carta is invoked, along with the works of writers like John Locke, John Stuart Mill, George Orwell and others.
The less benign version of English exceptionalism is a history rooted in the country’s one-time role as the greatest colonizer ever. At its height, early in the 20th century, the government and executives in London and around the country controlled about one-quarter of the world’s population, more than 400 million people.
In “Empireland,” the author Sathnam Sanghera linked England’s colonial past to its triumphalism as it managed, and mismanaged, the pandemic. He points out that Mr. Johnson promised a “world-beating” testing program and later a “world-beating” test and trace system, neither of which materialized.
Last March, Mr. Johnson crowed about the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine — the “Oxford vaccine” as he likes to call it — and praised “the vast dispersal of British ideas, and British values, puffed around the world like the seeds of some giant pollinating tree.”
This is a new articulation of Global Britain, one that isn’t actually garrisoned in countries around the world so much as fertilizing them from a distance.
“Every stage of the crisis has been characterized by the idea that Britain is a special case,” Mr. Sanghera wrote.
It was special, and sometimes for the best of reasons. When the vaccines debuted in the United States, millions of people chased them online. In Britain, the vaccine chased you. One day, a notification showed up on your phone, from the National Health Service, asking which day and vaccination center was convenient. The entire process was easier than buying an iPad online.
But England was often special in the worst way. For stretches of the pandemic it had the highest death rate in Europe. In March 2020, when Mr. Johnson contracted Covid after seeming to defy recommended precautions, The Irish Times described Mr. Johnson’s leadership as “another example of British exceptionalism backfiring in grand style, some might say, and a bad omen for Brexit, the U.K.’s other social distancing project.”
To date, England’s efforts to prevent death from Covid-19 have been more successful than those of the United States, on a per-capita basis, but lag most of Europe. In Germany, there have been 141 deaths per 100,000, in Spain 197. In England, the per capita death rate is 240.
Not the worst, and far from the best. The historian and podcaster Dan Snow argues that this showing flows from the U.K.’s faith in the power of vaccines, which is of a piece with England’s love of — and gift for creating — life-altering technology.
“The vaccine was a kind of tech optimism, it was the moonshot,” he said. “Like the U.S., we’re a country open to transformative technology and that makes sense because this is where the industrial revolution began. We start by fiddling around with looms and textiles and eventually there’s a man on the moon.”
This faith in the power of English minds to dig the country out of any mess is a variation on the theme of exceptionalism. Put another way, the English are different. Expecting them to trod the same path as the rest of Europe is folly.
Or as Mr. Snow put it, “The boring, social democratic solution of ‘Let’s slow down transmission, sit apart from each other, let’s not do whatever we want’ — to English ears, that all sounds a bit Dutch.”
In “Empireland,” the author Sathnam Sanghera linked England’s colonial past to its triumphalism as it managed, and mismanaged, the pandemic. He points out that Mr. Johnson promised a “world-beating” testing program and later a “world-beating” test and trace system, neither of which materialized.
Last March, Mr. Johnson crowed about the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine — the “Oxford vaccine” as he likes to call it — and praised “the vast dispersal of British ideas, and British values, puffed around the world like the seeds of some giant pollinating tree.”
This is a new articulation of Global Britain, one that isn’t actually garrisoned in countries around the world so much as fertilizing them from a distance.
“Every stage of the crisis has been characterized by the idea that Britain is a special case,” Mr. Sanghera wrote.
It was special, and sometimes for the best of reasons. When the vaccines debuted in the United States, millions of people chased them online. In Britain, the vaccine chased you. One day, a notification showed up on your phone, from the National Health Service, asking which day and vaccination center was convenient. The entire process was easier than buying an iPad online.
But England was often special in the worst way. For stretches of the pandemic it had the highest death rate in Europe. In March 2020, when Mr. Johnson contracted Covid after seeming to defy recommended precautions, The Irish Times described Mr. Johnson’s leadership as “another example of British exceptionalism backfiring in grand style, some might say, and a bad omen for Brexit, the U.K.’s other social distancing project.”
To date, England’s efforts to prevent death from Covid-19 have been more successful than those of the United States, on a per-capita basis, but lag most of Europe. In Germany, there have been 141 deaths per 100,000, in Spain 197. In England, the per capita death rate is 240.
Not the worst, and far from the best. The historian and podcaster Dan Snow argues that this showing flows from the U.K.’s faith in the power of vaccines, which is of a piece with England’s love of — and gift for creating — life-altering technology.
“The vaccine was a kind of tech optimism, it was the moonshot,” he said. “Like the U.S., we’re a country open to transformative technology and that makes sense because this is where the industrial revolution began. We start by fiddling around with looms and textiles and eventually there’s a man on the moon.”
This faith in the power of English minds to dig the country out of any mess is a variation on the theme of exceptionalism. Put another way, the English are different. Expecting them to trod the same path as the rest of Europe is folly.
Or as Mr. Snow put it, “The boring, social democratic solution of ‘Let’s slow down transmission, sit apart from each other, let’s not do whatever we want’ — to English ears, that all sounds a bit Dutch.”
Britannia, With Fewer Rules - The New York Times
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