Spectre of Thucydides: Pandemic Catalyzes Deepening Regressive Trajectories

Abstract

Since late 2019, the world has sought—frantically at times—to appropriate policies for responding to the coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19). This has recontextualized the growing democratic vulnerability and creates new opportunities for regressive power-political tools such as meddling, disinformation, and collusion. The pandemic has further challenged the existing domestic order in democracies and autocracies, and, more fundamentally, the circulation-based modus operandi of the present world order. This concluding chapter reviews the central findings on the Thucydidean regressive process while also pointing out how epidemic diseases can further accelerate the overall regressive slide based on Thucydides description of the Plague of Athens. For the Thucydidean model presented in this work, the confusion and unpredictability brought about by irrational decomposition of political spaces create a ripe environment for diseases to spread. At the same time, for Thucydides, regression was a contagious process transmitting from polity to polity in a manner similar to the spread of a disease from human to human. The conceptual connection allows us to see how the pandemic security scenarios can add to the seriousness of the geopolitical regression scenario.