AS we all contemplate the prospect of spending weeks longer in lockdown, many of us are wondering what our society will look like when it emerges from the crisis.

Many people have made the case for an optimistic view; that this experience will force us to stop undervaluing the kind of work that’s critical to our wellbeing, from caring and cleaning to people stocking the shelves and delivering food. Or that we will finally recognise that precarious housing is just as unacceptable as precarious incomes, raising tenants’ rights up the agenda and creating an opportunity to challenge the relentless growth of unaffordable prices in the private rented sector. Or that the obvious inability of free-market systems to function in a crisis will end the longstanding dominance of hard-right ideology, which has brought with it such inequality.

Yes, even a horrific crisis can lead to opportunities to change things for the better. But we also need to be alive to the threat that the opposite may happen. We need to understand that threat if we’re going to counter it.

Already around the world we’ve seen how some of the most authoritarian societies have used this crisis to entrench their own power and crack down on dissent. That’s been true in rich and poor countries alike, and while much of the media focuses on the threat to human rights from state control and surveillance in places like China, the danger is no less real in countries where political rhetoric rings with words like freedom and liberty.

The right-wing populists like America’s Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Hungary’s Viktor Orban have all shown themselves willing and eager to grab power even against their own constitutional traditions, to wield it against minorities in attempts to court reactionary support, and to deny the facts or scientific reality around them even when it will clearly cost untold lives. Their hostility to collective action in the common good shows itself in domestic politics, just as it does in the international sphere where their agenda against what they call “the globalists” is pursued with reckless abandon.

This week that agenda was furthered by Trump when he announced – to the astonishment and dismay of many – that he was halting all funding of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the middle of the most dangerous pandemic in living memory.

To Trump and much of his support base, the WHO represents everything they resent – a body relying on public funding instead of private ownership, the authority of scientific expertise over their own gut feelings, the goal of international co-operation instead of xenophobic isolation, and the ability of institutions to speak with a voice that’s independent of their political control.

No institution like the WHO should ever be immune from criticism, and indeed a number of public health professionals have challenged it from a position of knowledge and experience during this crisis and before. But while constructive criticism is valid and useful, it’s so much easier for Trump to use the WHO as a vehicle for his cynical brand of conspiracy theory.

This serves his interests in deflecting from his own woeful record of ignorant, complacent and dishonest statements about this pandemic (hardly out of character for him, of course) but also inculcates a suspicion and mistrust of any kind of global co-operation.

And that’s one of the key threats we need to be conscious of. Whether it comes to public health planning, disaster relief, establishing fairer trade rules, achieving international development to meet people’s basic needs around the world, holding multinational corporations accountable and making them pay their taxes, or tackling the longer term but more profound ecological threats we all face like climate change, deepening international co-operation is absolutely key to all our futures.

When nationalism becomes an insular, self-serving and xenophobic idea, it can only result in a collective failure to build a better world.

The movement for Scottish independence has never been entirely free from this tendency, but to a far lesser extent than Brexit, for example. For the most part, Scottish independence has been characterised by an outward-looking, internationalist vision. It has embraced an open approach to immigration, political pluralism and social diversity, and a science-led response to the environmental crisis. It has long been characterised by slogans like “Stop the world, we want to get on!” and a desire to join the international community, from the EU to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

We may find over the coming weeks and months that these political choices, between co-operative and progressive values or populist and anti-globalist ones, face us before the end of lockdown, social distancing and the other restrictions we’re all individually living with. But they will determine the kind of world that emerges, and our collective ability to make it a better one.

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