LONDON — As Israel recorded zero daily
COVID-19 deaths for
the first time in 10 months last week, grave-diggers in next-door Gaza reported
rising workloads and hospitals said they were near to collapse.
اضافة اعلان
A similar dynamic, on a cataclysmically larger scale, now
unfolds around the world. In the United States and Britain, and later this year
in much of mainland Europe, vaccines bring real hope of greater normality. In
India, mass cremations burn, with the actual death toll far exceeding official
numbers.
Summer 2021, it is now clear, is very much the “mid” not
“post”-
COVID world. The pandemic will shape not just the rest of 2021 but
perhaps well beyond. Yet simultaneously the world is moving on, the
post-pandemic dynamics of global geopolitics, economics and society already
taking shape.
Individuals, institutions and nations are only starting to
understand what that means.
COVID-19’s effects range from a Manhattan real
estate slump to a collapse in worldwide travel to nations seeing vaccine
manufacturing as a new global arms race.
Mixed with that – sometimes speeded by the pandemic,
sometimes concealed – are shifts that were already taking place. They include a
move to a more multipolar world, in which the United States must contend with a
seismically stronger China, a Russia that views the world through a prism of
confrontation, and multiple mid-size powers asserting their own way.
It is a world that is more divided and divisive yet also
apathetic. The pandemic has highlighted and often worsened brutal global and
domestic wealth gaps.
Injustice
Perhaps because of the sheer scale of these problems and
injustices, they can feel almost impossible to engage with. Even in the Indian
press, truly detailed coverage of what is currently unfolding — let alone the
causes — is limited in the extreme.
In almost every country, conventional political engagement
appears in freefall, and the most animated are those who engage on the
extremes. Black Lives Matter, climate change and anti-lockdown protests all
bring attention to particular areas of dissent, but they produce an environment
that drowns out many other matters.
Big issues often feel just too distant and polarized for
many to engage with.
Across much of the developed and parts of the developing
world, lockdowns have seen middle-class families hunker down to work from home
and keep paying their mortgages, while immigrants and the young have lost
opportunities and brought them their deliveries.
Even amongst those at the real coalface — medics dealing
with pandemic surges, those delivering vital technology, logistics and services
— the temptation to look away is massive. The pandemic has seen the
often-positive development of many choosing simply to focus on themselves and
those closest to them — but that may also come with costs.
For all the challenges of the pandemic, it may just
reinforce the position of those in power. The Biden administration, having won
its election, now looks set to be a much more transformative force that many of
its supporters had expected, even as it is torn between multiple objectives
from social justice to China and climate change.
Entrenching power
In Russia, China and other autocratic states, powerful
forces clearly already believe a new age of authoritarianism is underway.
China’s Uyghurs, Russia’s opposition and Hong Kong’s pro-democracy campaigners
have all been victims of crackdowns, overshadowed by the outbreak.
The risk of 2016-style shocks like Trump and Brexit — or
more seismic — has not gone away. Presidential elections in France next year
could yet see Emmanuel Macron lose to the far right – while in a move unseen
since the 1970s, 20 former French generals signed a letter calling for a coup
d’état if Macron fails to tackle “Islamist hordes from the suburbs”.
A new French Revolution likely remains within the category
of “fringe risk”, at least for now. If history is any guide, there is at least
a possibility that the post-pandemic world instead brings greater opportunity,
mobility and positive change — although COVID-19 has killed many fewer than the
Black Death, and the dynamics may equally be very different.
At worst, the impact of the pandemic on unemployment might
be dwarfed over the coming decade by the effects of automation, artificial
intelligence and a wider revolution in technology. That already makes a small
number of tech firms the arbiters of everything from managing online
disinformation to the fate of space exploration and small retailers.
The post-pandemic world might be further away than we would
like, but it is being shaped right now.
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