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The JoongAng | Kim Myung-ja President, The Seoul Forum for International Affairs; President Emeritus, The Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies; Former Minister of Environment;
The pandemic has changed the world through changes in culture, art, and values as well as social changes, power shifts, economic and trade fluctuation. Athens, which lost 200,000 to 300,000 with Plague of Athens (presumed to be typhoid and typhus), was defeated in Peloponnesian League led by Sparta. (431-404 BC), written by Thucydides, who was exiled for treason against Sparta and survived the plague, is the first record of the plague in history.
The Roman Empire lost 25 percent of its population to the Antonine Plague (smallpox and measles, 165-180). The Pax Romana came to an end when the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antonius died with the plague on the battlefield. The subsequent St. Cyprian Plague (smallpox, 251-266) and Justinian Plague (pest, 541-542) was a catalyst for the fall of Roman Empire. In the end, the imperial era ruled by the emperor came to an end, and the feudal era in which a feudal lord emerged as monarch began due to the pandemic that swept ancient Europe.
The Fall of the Roman Empire due to the Great Plague
Medieval Plague Ended the Feudal Era
The Great Depression after the Second World War and the Pandemic
Is It Possible to Overcome the Perfect Storm?
During the Little Ice Age in the 1300s, the world suffered from bad crops, famines, and plagues. For three years from 1346, 30 to 60 percent of the European population were killed by the plague bacteria. The sharecropping system, which was already in a marginal situation, collapsed due to a rapid decrease in population and landlords went broke. Small peasants flew into cities and became small industrial workers. As the monks became extinct due to their communal life, Latin, the language of the intellectuals, declined and a nation state was created that spoke English, French, and German. From this point on, capitalist economic and political systems such as taxation, monetary system, and fiancé were formed, and Western European countries expand abroad in search of resources.
After Columbus landed on the New World in 1492, Europeans annihilated Native Americans in unintentional bacterial warfare. In 1529, Hernando Cortes of Spain took Tenochtitlan of the Aztec Empire with smallpox with a fatality rate of 70 to 90 percent. 1531, Spain’s Francisco Pizarro’s 168 soldier defeated the Inca’s 80,000 men.
In 1803, Napoleon sold the French colony of Louisiana to the United States for only $15 million. This was because the yellow fever virus, which was came along when Africans were loaded into slave ships and transported to the New World, killed 47,000 of Napoleon’s 50,000 troops, who declared himself to be the governor for life. Because of yellow fever, the territory of the United States doubled, and the era of the Western Frontier began.
The 1918 flue pandemic infected 500 million of 1.8 to 1.9 billion world population in a year and a half, killing 50 to 100 million. The flu virus, which originated at the barracks in Haskell County, Kansas, was transferred to Europe in 1918 with the full-fledged deployment. A theory has it that the flu had already circulated in Europe in 1917. In any case, with the trench warfare of the First World War (1914-1919) and the return of soldiers, the flu became a pandemic that caused the greatest loss of life in the shortest period of time.
What was like the world in the 1920s, when the First World War and the pandemic swept away? Warren Harding (1921-1923), who launched the campaign “Return to Normalcy,” was elected in the 1920 presidential election in the United States. The Harding administration implemented tax cut, and economy seemed to recover in 1923. At the same time, new technologies in the second half of the Second Industrial Revolution led to the growth of the electricity, automobile, and steel industries. Radio and TV connected country and promoted stock buying.
Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929), who became president after Harding’s sudden death, also kept the free market economic policy. The stock market was a credit trading system where stocks could be bought with only one tenth of the stock price, and became a speculative market run by debt. Even people learnt how to write because of investment in stocks. At the end of 1928, the world real economic indicator suddenly plummeted. On October 24, 1929, the Great Depression started in the United States and spread like wildfire around the world with the crash of the Wall Street stock market on “Black Thursday.” Hitler, engulfed by ideological madness took advantage of the economic collapse and came to power, and the United States escaped the Great Depression through the Second World War (1939-1945).
There is data in common between Great Depression of 1929 and the Pandemic of 2020. In both cases, 34 percent of the wealth belonged to the top 0.1 percent of the wealthy people in the United States, and it showed the largest gap between the rich and the poor. It was criticized that the corona pandemic revealed the limits of capitalism, the World Economic Forum in 2020 re-declared the “Stakeholder Capitalism” that it had advocated 50 years ago. It pointed out that enterprise must engage in economic activities for employees, customers, suppliers, local communities, and society in general in terms of value creation and sharing and restructure the economy and reform capitalism to overcome the pandemic crisis.
The containment policy and economic stimulus in response to the 2020 pandemic caused supply chain disruption and surge in national debt. The gap between countries, between the rich and the poor has widened, and populist policies have gone too far. Korea’s household debt ranks the first among 37 major countries and surpasses national GDP. In a situation where unprecedented “perfect storm” is coming both at home and abroad, the clue to escape the crisis is nowhere to be seen. At a time when international cooperation to overcome the pandemic panic is more urgent than ever, the war began in Europe by Russian invasion of Ukraine threw the world in confusion. Where is our world going?
