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COVID in Europe: the end of the European Union?
The start of a long unravelling.
After-effects
While people are focused on the current numbers and spread of the coronavirus, it is worth considering the world that will emerge after it.
If we assume that vaccination efforts are successful and there are no more highly infectious variants, the West’s fight against the pandemic may be officially over by the end of 2021 — to mid-2022. However, the long term effects of it will likely be with us far into the future.
It is these after effects which could be remembered in the history books far more than the initial health crisis.
The modern world is highly complex and interconnected. The interdependence of our global system means that large scale shocks, such as the coronavirus, produce after-effects.
Sometimes called the ‘Butterfly effect,’ in the study of complex systems, they are known as ‘second-order’ and ‘third-order effects.’ Often, these are highly utterly unpredictable and seem completely unrelated at first but become clear when they are looked back upon by historians.
The 2020’s will be defined by these rippling after-effects, just as the major events of the 2010’s, the Arab Spring, the rise of national populism, can be traced…
