What becomes of our way of life if the geopolitical cards don’t fall in our favour?

Belligerent: a military parade in China. Picture: Reuters / Andy Wong

And so we come to the endgame of the pandemic that has beset the world in the early years of the 2020s. We haven’t experienced quite the same terror and toll of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, but we’ve had the extended pain of hopes raised and dashed repeatedly. And it’s all been set within a broader context of rising global tensions.

I wonder how the Spanish flu would have been viewed by history had it broken out immediately prior to World War I. I’m sure it would have been regarded as a trigger, as a deadly portent of the calamitous events about to unfold. And yet perhaps because it followed the Great War, its terror quickly receded in our collective consciousness – especially in Australia where our war dead outnumbered flu victims by four to one.

This time around there is no greater preceding calamity; the pandemic and all its associated ills are viewed within the context of the peace and prosperity that Australia enjoyed in the years leading up to its arrival.

One of the questions this raises is how the pandemic might change our fate in the coming years. Would the prospect of troubles with China and Russia have arisen anyway? Or does a pandemic naturally unleash thinking that challenges power structures within Australia and beyond?

I see parallels between Covid and the Spanish flu in changing social behaviour, too. The suffragette movement was gathering momentum prior to World War I, and the idea of a privileged upper class supported by a deferential workforce “in service”, in the Downton Abbey mould, could never have extended much beyond the Great War. Something had to give. Both a middle class, and the women’s movement, had to emerge. And while there were early versions of support for the destitute (such as the Salvation Army, founded in 1865), it wasn’t until after World War II that social welfare was embraced as a responsibility of the state, prompting the need for even greater levels of taxation. All of this required a grand narrative, a vision, of a better way of life. We are in desperate need of another grand narrative now – an engaging Australian story that starts with self-confident optimism and talks about the pathways to a safe, prosperous nation in what will be a turbulent decade.

The pandemic doesn’t cap off a bad run, as the Spanish flu did. It could well be that it unleashes new challenges. Viewed within this context, 2022 is a pivotal year. If I am right and the post-pandemic world is mightily different to the pre-pandemic world, the first evidence will surely surface in the next 12 months. There are already signs of structural shifts in our geopolitical situation. And there continue to be great changes in the way many of us are working. Plus, I think we have switched our everyday orientation. We are more home-based, family-focused and predisposed to efficient digital interaction. It’s all so different to the out-and-about, just-in-time pre-pandemic world.

I am confident that we Australians will recover well, with all our characteristic vim, vigour and post-colonial self-confidence – and that we will indeed reinvent our way of life to deliver an even better, fairer and more prosperous version of our nation.

What I am less sure about are the broader geopolitical settings, largely beyond our immediate control, that in previous times always fell in our favour. And what becomes of our way of life, our prosperity, our self-confidence if in the future the geopolitical cards don’t fall in our favour?