Leaders around the world have restricted nonessential travel to varying degrees, following a centuries-old playbook dating back to at least the Black Death of the 14th century
Close the Pentagon: Rethinking National Security for a Positive Sum World. “THIS IS WHY WE NEED BORDERS!” President Donald Trump tweeted on Monday morning. He offered no additional context, but it’s safe to assume the “this” in his tweet was the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
In recent months, his administration has taken progressive action to strengthen borders and travel controls in response to the virus. Trump isn’t alone: Leaders around the world have restricted nonessential travel to varying degrees, some sealing off their borders entirely, to help curb the spread of the coronavirus.They’re following a playbook centuries old, dating back to at least the Black Death of the 14th century. In fact, countering disease was one of the main justifications for early border controls at a time when boundaries between countries were marked more byIn the past, these measures might have worked. But the history of disease-driven border lockdowns has some sobering lessons. One is that border controls tended to long outlast whatever crisis they were supposed to prevent, at the expense of trade and free movement. And they’re also very much a relic of their times. More recent disease eradication efforts, and the broad path of the coronavirus itself, show that prolonged border controls are more an expression of xenophobic policy than an enduring solution to an infectious threat. Today, there’s far more to gain through international cooperation than by keeping borders locked down. A closer look at how governments successfully sealed off their countries in the past to prevent disease is enough to show that the scale of international travel and porousness of borders today is incompatible with such fixes long term, and that similar impulses today will take us only further from real solutions. During the Black Death, the city-states of Italy used expanded border controls as part of their efforts to keep the plague at bay. Florence imposed fines on visitors from plague-affected cities and issued passes to travelers deemed healthy enough to move freely. In 1348, Venice began preventing ships in the harbor from docking for 30 days to see whether those on board came down with the plague. Venetian colonies and others followed suit. By 1383, Marseilles, France, had extended the isolation period to 40 days, leading to the to the term “quarantine” . Italian states used of armed patrol ships, observation posts and horse patrols to enforce disease controls that lasted until the 1850s.designed to blunt the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
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