A Post Covid-19 World Order

Amit Gupta discusses what changes may emerge in the world affected by the Covid–19 pandemic and their potential implications for India

- Amit Gupta

Nassim Nicholas Taleb became famous for writing about a black swan event— an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences— and the Covid-19 pandemic certainly fits that description. While Covid-19 was totally unexpected, and what Thomas Friedman has called in a different context (the terror attack of 9/11) a failure of imagination, we are now seeing a range of at times wild predictions about how the post- Covid-19 world order will look. These range from China’s loss of power within the international system to the death of globalisation.

The consequences of the pandemic will be felt in economic and military restructuring while at the same time giving a boost to certain aspects of globalisation. In economic terms, analyst Mohammed El Erian has suggested three consequences to the pandemic: the world moves from physical to virtual; companies and governments move from efficient to resilient, and countries move from an international to a national perspective.

The virtual world will only grow as individuals, corporations, governments, and academia recognise that much of the work that was done through a physical presence can be done just as effectively through virtual interaction. Virtual interaction is also having an unintended impact since by going online such meetings have met a wider audience who recognise that the way business was done was mostly inefficient or wasteful. American parents, for example, have been sitting in on their children’s online classes at universities and are reportedly underwhelmed by the quality of education that their children are getting and for which parents are paying exorbitant prices.