Recently, the European Commissioner for Crisis Management urged EU citizens to prepare individually for emergencies, speaking at an official press conference in Brussels. The recommendation was to maintain a basic stockpile of essential supplies sufficient to ensure at least 72 hours of self-sufficiency. According to the Commissioner, this guidance is issued in response to a broad spectrum of potential threats — ranging from military and cyber incidents to environmental and epidemiological risks. In parallel, proposals were voiced for the creation of a pan-European strategic reserve of critical equipment, including medical supplies, transportation and energy infrastructure, as well as protective resources against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats. These initiatives are presented as part of a broader strategy to bolster the EU’s resilience in the face of “multi-layered risks.”
Over the last twenty-five years — and especially over the past decade — we have witnessed the gradual rise of paradigms such as safetism, emergency control, preemptive disaster management, and calls for a focus on “preparedness for potential threats.” These trends warrant deeper political and economic reflection.
The policy response to the global emergency declared by WHO in 2020 demonstrated that emergency governance can bear transformative functions, serving as fertile ground for a shift from democratic governance toward elements of technocratic dictatorship. In 2020, we witnessed how key decision-making powers in EU countries shifted to small coordination groups, while parliaments were effectively sidelined. By empowering non-elected bodies, the emergency paradigm accelerated legislation without public debate and facilitated the construction of infrastructures that primarily served the political and economic interests of a narrow circle of actors.
In the context of a fifty-year trend of increasing entanglement between science, power, and business, the COVID-19 pandemic represented the culmination of how the illusion of scientific consensus can be constructed and used to legitimize controversial pandemic responses — from enforced lockdowns to unilateral medical protocols and other mandates, many of which proved harmful to public health.
As a journalistic investigation by Politico and Welt reported, a few organizations with ties to Bill Gates played a central role in shaping the global pandemic policy response. Pandemic preparedness — as a component of the preemptive control paradigm in global public health — has been actively promoted by Bill Gates over the past 25 years.
Evidently, the emergency situation was fueled and utilized as a transformative crisis for the global “Great Reset” of the socio-economic system, launched by world political leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos on June 3, 2020.
In this context, the “pandemic preparedness” approach, as one of the proactive control paradigms, provided the infrastructure for global synchronization of restrictive measures, including movement restrictions, confinement of populations, tracking and surveillance, as well as social reformatting under the pretext of a “global threat.” At the same time, the very definition of what constitutes a threat — and who gets to determine its degree — remains an area susceptible to abuse of power.
Potentially, a state of emergency allows the extension of unconstitutional mandates for an indefinite period. It enables restrictions on the movement of healthy people, the suspension of in-person education, the deployment of laboratories developing enhanced viruses (gain-of-function research), and the rollout of infrastructure for mass testing of new pharmaceuticals on populations under “emergency usage” protocols. The pandemic preparedness approach may also authorize the dismantling of economic sectors and social classes deemed unnecessary under new economic models. Additionally, it may serve as a tool for introducing a “new normal” aimed at social reformatting.
Thus, the “crisis” emerges not merely as a public health or disaster-related concern, but as a financially and economically productive scenario embedding emergency frameworks into a new economic model. Trillions in public spending and hundreds of millions in private investments have flowed into new technologies. Governments procured crisis-response technologies, stockpiled pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, and installed digital tracking and control systems.
Further concerns arise from the active promotion by the UN of the paradigms of “One Health”, “Health in All Policies” as a part of UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. These frameworks aim to expand the list of areas governed by the domain of “global public health.” By linking human, animal, and environmental health under a unified system of global regulation, such approaches risk paving the way for supranational control — primarily by transnational corporations — over national policymaking in the fields of healthcare, food security, and environmental oversight.
The aforementioned UN Agenda 2030 includes the Global Health Partnership (UHC2030), which declares its mission to be the linking of “universal threats and challenges” to health issues in order to promote “global governance for health.”
Upon closer inspection, however, this framework poses risks of reinforcing corporate control over public policy and global healthcare markets. Alongside the draft Pandemic Agreement of the WHO, these paradigms hold the potential to transform epidemiological surveillance into a system of global and local governance.
The UHC2030 Forum and its Steering Committee are reportedly controlled by the global banking industry and technocrats affiliated with left-leaning political parties. The managers and committee members include executives from various investment funds and the consulting corporations that serve them.
Significantly, under the “Health in All Policies” concept, all governments will be expected not merely to respond to adverse events that have already occurred but to take preventive measures against events that have not yet happened. Given that almost any aspect of society can be labeled a potential public health threat, this paradigm opens the door to gaining additional resources and powers to implement measures under the pretext of protecting the population. The list may include everything from urbanization and economic shocks to climate change and population growth. The places where we live, work, and play, our transportation systems, education, and virtually all other areas of life could be subject to design and regulation by UHC2030 stakeholders — many of whom have conflicts of interest.
Take the United Kingdom, for example. Today, nearly every aspect of life in the UK falls under the remit of the recently created UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), which claims the authority to respond “at pace and scale” to “public health events” that do not yet exist. “The threats we face in the future will be different — from new infectious diseases and environmental hazards to novel behavioral challenges,” the agency states. The UKHSA has also announced its intention to work with “committed partners” in the private sector to deliver “personalized behavioral approaches” aimed at changing people’s behavior.
This brings us to the role of behavioral and social sciences in crafting crisis communication strategies. During the COVID-19 pandemic, experts in psychology and marketing shaped core media messages and designed visuals for public campaigns aimed at increasing compliance by elevating levels of fear and anxiety among the population.
In short, the current militarization of crisis management and the institutionalization of emergency mechanisms should not be viewed solely as responses to genuine external threats. Rather, we are witnessing the emergence of a new mode of governance — one in which the state of emergency is employed as a pretext to advance unpopular political and economic transformations and to consolidate the power of unelected bureaucracies.
Aytan Gahramanova, PhD, a political scientist specializing in global processes, is the author of Inclusive Capitalism: Pandemic Preparedness and Green Transition as a Model of Global Governance.
