The resurgence of civic duties

One of the things that we saw in the pandemic was a flourishing of civic duty. Now, what are civic duties? Civic duties are essentially the ways in which citizens agree to abide by the rules and to contribute to the life of a national society. The pandemic, and particularly the period of lockdowns which began around March 2020, were a period in which governments, for the first time in several years, decades even, really rediscovered a language of civic duty — a language in which they asked, called and expected citizens to do things.

One of the first things that you realize is that civic duty in one country is not the same as civic duty in another. In our project, the CO-DUTIES project, which we have been studying at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, we have compared responses to lockdown in Norway, France and the UK. These are three liberal democratic societies, but they are all three slightly different versions of a liberal democratic society. We have a very traditional social democratic model in Norway. We have the less fair variant — the liberal, strongly liberal, variant — in the UK. Then we have in France the much more traditional Republican model. We want to understand how in those societies, first of all, governments framed what they were asking of citizens in different ways. In France, it was very much strongly framed as a duty to the country, to the patrimoine. In Norway, it was framed as what Norwegians refer to as dugnad, or the concept of social volunteering, which is a very strong tradition embedded in society.

Now, one of the fascinating things about studying people's response to lockdown during the pandemic is that it breaks open one of the most interesting questions about liberal democracy, liberal democratic societies more broadly. And that is how they manage this tension between what is required in order for society to function, that's the collective will, as it were, of a society — and what individuals themselves are required to do in order to fulfill that. It was not possible, as was often described of China at the time — and people looked to, for example, the Chinese experience of lockdowns and saw that as very authoritarian. In Western Europe, for example, that was not an option: governments were not, in fact, able to ensure that citizens obeyed the law. This is, of course, the reason why we have speed cameras. We have laws about speeding, but to enforce them, we need to incentivize how individuals react, incentivize them to not be fined. It was a little bit the same in the pandemic. Governments ultimately ended up negotiating with citizens, and they did this, and we can track how they did this through the ways in which they changed what they were asking for. Initially, all of society was required to stay at home. Increasingly, that became a series of tiers of society, the rule of six. In different settings, different people were asked to do different things, and this became gradually more and more individualized over time. This is really a classic example, to my mind, of how liberal democratic societies work.

One of the fascinating things about the pandemic was that very often governments turned to a model of the good citizen in order to encourage individuals to adhere to the public health regulations that were being established. But being a good citizen doesn't always mean obeying the law.

There are probably very few people who would wish to go back to the pandemic, to what it was like then, but I think there's also very few people who would not recognize that in some ways the pandemic brought us certain things, a certain clarity of understanding that there are important elements of our lives, our relationships, our commitments to others that we value, and that perhaps over recent decades we haven't quite had the social or the political language or vocabulary to give full expression to.

Another reason to look back to the pandemic and try to understand how it was that we, as societies, responded is to, in a way, also be better able to look forward to some of the challenges that we are likely, and our children are likely, to confront in the future.

One of the things that we see, when we lift our head up and look outside of Europe or North America in assessing our response to the pandemic and, to some extent, giving ourselves a scorecard on how we did, is the recognition that in other societies and countries the capacity of individuals to live up to their own sense of civic duty, or associative duty to their family, to care for relatives, or even their humanitarian duty to look after those to whom they feel they have an obligation, was dramatically compromised by the extent to which we in wealthier Western societies ensured that we had the right — this time the right, not the duty — to take advantage of the vaccines that were produced and financed during the pandemic. The uneven distribution of vaccines during the pandemic, the differential impact, the uneven impact this placed upon societies around the world, is in many ways perhaps the fundamental lesson we need to learn about duties, which is that they operate differently at different scales. We need not only in the modern era to look after our families. We need not only to look after our fellow citizens.

I think one misconception about the notion of duty is that it is always necessarily predicated upon some prior right. The reality is that people aspire to fulfill duties in many ways every day of their lives, whether it's through offering care, whether it's through voting, whether it's through fulfilling what it takes for them to be active members of a society, and we do this willingly.