The dichotomy of democracy – autocracy through the prism of the covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

    2020 and 2021 can generally be classified as "Years eaten by locusts" (allusion to the title of Borislav Pekić's book "The Years Eaten by Locusts"). In the spirit of Durkheim, this period, especially the first period of the epidemic, from December 2019 to June 2020, could be called “the period of acute anomie”. The global exchange has come to a brutal halt, large numbers of people have been imprisoned for weeks, entire sectors of social life have been blocked, and socio-economic inequalities have become even more pronounced. This situation gave birth to a specific type of anomie, pandemic anomie [2] in which there was a new restructuring of the positions of China, and the West.
       Since the end of World War II, and especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, democratic Western regimes have dominated the international scene, imposing their economic and political model as the only correct and desirable one. However, their difficulty in finding the key to effective pandemic control has called into question their hegemony and the superiority of their model. Not only was their crisis management less effective, but it was not more democratic compared to so-called authoritarian countries.