In their seminal 2012 study Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Daren Acemoglu and James A. Robinson identified the Bubonic Plague of 1346-1353 not only as one of the greatest calamities in human history. The Black Death – as the pandemic is also called – also acted as a critical juncture in European political history. While the 14th century pestilence encouraged the gradual abolition of feudalism in Western Europe, it led to the so-called Second Serfdom in most of Eastern Europe – not the least, in parts of today’s Ukraine.
OP-ED
Andreas Umland, Pavlo Klimkin: The coronavirus as a critical juncture
A medical staff gets out from a tent of a testing point for the COVID-19 coronavirus in central Moscow on May 2, 2020.
