Thread by @ProfPaulPoast

Are we entering a post-#COVID19 era in international politics?

In the same way that we talk about "Cold War" versus "Post-Cold War" eras, will future research need to talk about "Pre-Covid19" versus "Post-Covid19" eras?

I don't think so. Here's why.

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To start, a bit of context.

International relations scholars and analysts often divide history into different time periods when conducting analysis.

For example:

- Interwar Period
- Cold War
- Post-Cold War

A classic example of this is the 1995 @Journal_IS paper by Gowa and Farber

jstor.org/stable/2539231…

They show that the relationship between democracy and conflict onset is conditional on the era being analyzed

Why? Why would results from analysis be different pre- versus post-1945?

The former time period was marked by global domination of several large empires, while the latter time period was marked by global US-Soviet rivalry.

Another key "break year" is 1989 (or sometimes 1990, or sometimes 1991): the end of the "Cold War" and the beginning of the "unipolar moment"

foreignaffairs.com/articles/1990-…

nalysts refer to this break with phrases like "Since the end of the Cold War" or "After the Cold War"

jstor.org/stable/2538981…

favorite example of a paper that treated the "End of the Cold War" as a "break" is this @apsrjournal paper by @laiabalcells & @SKalyvas

cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Without going into the details, the key is to notice their results table is divided between Cold War and Post-Cold War time periods (with notable differences between the periods).

Having provided all that context, lets return to the question: will scholars end up doing the same with the year 2020? Will a paper published in, say, 2035, divide 1990-2020 from 2021 to 2034?

The obvious reason to say "yes" is #COVID19 and its potential to reshape global politics.

This has been a point made a host of scholars in a variety of venues, ranging from...

...the latest issue of @ForeignAffairs and exemplified by this piece by @FukuyamaFrancis...

foreignaffairs.com/articles/world…

...to @FHeisbourg in @SurvivalEditors...

tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

...to @ColinKahl & @ArianaBerengaut in @WarOnTheRocks.

warontherocks.com/2020/04/afters…

Each of the above pieces raises different points, but common ideas are

(1) the pandemic revealed flaws in the democratic systems of government underpinning the "Liberal International Order".

(2) the pandemic created an opportunity for 🇨🇳 to seize global leadership from 🇺🇸

But there are reasons to say "no"

The "return to great power politics", the "end of US unipolarity", and the "New Cold War" were constant themes BEFORE #COVID19.

See, for example, Robert D. Kaplan in @ForeignPolicy back at the beginning of 2019...

foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/07/a-n…

...or this @security_wonk piece from mid-2019...

globalsecurityreview.com/the-early-stag…

... or this piece by Katherine C Epstein (@Rutgers_Camden) in @WSJ (which offers a useful historical corrective on how to think about US-China rivalry)...

wsj.com/articles/to-un…

...or, of course, @realDonaldTrump's own National Security Strategy...

...or you could consider what then Secretary of State @JohnKerry remarked way back in 2013: "We live in a world more like the 18th and 19th centuries"

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

You get the point.

Even on the economic side, it's not clear that #COVID19 caused a "change" so much as, at best, an acceleration of an existing trend in "deglobalization".

See, for example, @D_A_Irwin in @voxeu, who argues that this trend started with the 2008 global financial crisis

voxeu.org/article/pandem…

A similar point was made by @rodrikdani in @ProSyn

project-syndicate.org/commentary/thr…

In short, the trends being highlighted by #COVID19 were already in place *prior* to #COVID19.

For these reasons, I don't think 2020 will be a new "break point" to go along with 1990 or 1945 or 1914.

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