Gianluca Ansalone, Professor of Geopolitics and Security
It has been said countless times: the world after Covid will never be the same. In truth, it is no longer the same, we, all of us – individuals and collectives – are no longer who we were before the pandemic. And this is not a novelty for history: in fact, diseases and disasters have always marked real watersheds in the course of events, breaking down systems (political, social and economic) to lay the foundations for new (and sometimes better ) buildings. This was the case with the epidemic that spread to Europe in the mid-fourteenth century: a scourge, that of the Black Death, which according to some estimates would have taken away even a quarter of the total population, playing the requiem of the old feudal architecture and opening the doors to the incipient Renaissance.
Obviously, this does not mean that crises (let alone the health ones) are to be considered useful in some way. The real point, admitting the sufferings and the individual and collective upheavals that they entail, consists in knowing how to read the chronology: in identifying the prodromes, in discovering and understanding the causes, especially when still in a nutshell. And this is not purely for a historiographical purpose but with a concrete, very concrete purpose: to avoid being caught unprepared when the next one is triggered.
What reflections make the experience of the Chinese virus unstoppable? Affaritaliani.it talks about it with Professor Gianluca Ansalone, Professor of Geopolitics and Security at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and the Biomedical Campus, as well as Author of the very recent essay “Geopolitics of contagion – the future of democracies and the new world order after Covid-19” (Rubbettino editions).
Professor Ansalone, what is the genesis of this book? What prompted you to write it?
The key emotion that drove me was the sense of urgency. I wanted to trace a trajectory of analysis, in an attempt to look up to the horizon to try to understand what awaits us. The good news is that in discussion there is only the “when”, not the “if”: because, from this tragic experience, we will get out of it.
What are the stages, the historical passages that created the conditions for how much we live today? Are there any cause-and-effect links?
The warning signs are located in the 90s, a decade that is “too happy and carefree” which for this reason I define as a “great distraction”. The West, at all levels (citizens and ruling class) wanted to take a sigh of relief after the great fear of the nuclear holocaust. There was a low level of awareness, so that even very serious facts such as the two kamikaze attacks at the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 or the sinking of the destroyer Cole off the coast of Yemen in October 2000 were read. (and derubricated) as blows of the tail of the past era. Like painful post-Cold War settlements. Here, this false belief has prevented us from being ready, reactive and aware in the face of the upheaval that, shortly thereafter, September 11th would have entailed. To get, in 2008, to the financial crisis triggered by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, up to today’s pandemic. In my opinion, these three epochal events must be read continuously. These are the traumatic passages of a world that is still seeking its configuration. In this sense, the twentieth century is not quite over yet.