One remarkable consequence of the global Chinese Virus pandemic is that even the most ardent globalists are suddenly rediscovering that there are such things as borders – and that they matter.
Mexico, which has relentlessly screeched blue murder about Trump’s determination to reinforce the US-Mexico border, suddenly announced that it wanted the border closed. Emmanuel Macron began seizing medical supplies en route to Britain. Jacinda Ardern announced that New Zealand’s borders were closed to non-residents.
All this, after years of singing from the hymn-sheet of a world without borders.
COVID-19 will transform, if not completely kill, globalisation as we have known it. The virus is itself a consequence of globalisation[…]It flew on the wings of globalisation, sailed down globalisation’s every canal, traversed all its highways.
Despite the globalists’ mantra that a globalised world needs global governance, globalist institutions like the WHO conspicuously dropped the ball over the Chinese Virus, preferring to parrot Beijing’s propaganda. Instead, now that a global crisis really has hit, it’s national governments that citizens have turned to.
First, the centre of every citizen’s sense of accountability for this virus is their national government. No one asks: what is the Indian Ocean Regional Association for co-operation doing about this? They ask: what is Canberra doing?
It is a global pandemic and therefore national governments will need to co-operate. But each nation has taken its own national measures. When the Morrison government first banned direct travel to Australia from China, Beijing was furious. Then a lot of countries did the same.
The poster-child of globalism, the EU, is performing notably badly.
The epicentre of the crisis now is Europe. COVID-19 has been badly managed in Italy and other European nations. This is partly because the bizarre rules of the European Union limit what each nation can do. The EU is talking of closing its borders. But European nations cannot close their own borders. Italy cannot close its borders, nor France nor Spain theirs.
Governments, for their part, need to remember that wealth creation is important. Rich countries can afford the robust national health systems needed in a pandemic.
The richer your national government, and the greater the sovereignty and real control it exercises, the better your chances of doing something effective[…]
The left in politics, and the left internationally, tends to take a nation’s wealth as a given, that it is always there. The COVID-19 crisis will starkly demonstrate the limits of our wealth as we pass through the acute phase. More than that, it will severely damage our economy with a big rise in unemployment. People will want jobs and they will look, not to the UN or the EU or climate change agreements, for those jobs. They will want their national government to create conditions that create jobs.
Unfortunately, too many governments are teetering on the edge of falling off the cliff of economic stimulus into full-blown “Modern Monetary Theory”. Valuable economic resources are being ploughed into gifting cash windfalls to people already on welfare.
But hopefully governments will also discover economic sovereignty. The rush to sell off the family farm and manufacturing to Beijing must be corrected.
For their part, though, citizens must be on their guard against governments that never let a good crisis go to waste.
Structurally, the crisis will see power flow to national capitals everywhere. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, repeatedly told his people this week that they were “at war” with COVID-19. That’s the giveaway. For there is one perennial winner in war. If a nation is not wholly destroyed, the national government always emerges stronger, with new powers and new dominance.
It’s the type of government that emerges from the crisis that counts. Will we allow ourselves, under the guise of “stimulus”, to cede the state permanent autocratic power? When WWII ended, Winston Churchill was voted out of office. He took it with the kind of grace few politicians today would show: “They have a perfect right to kick me out. That is democracy”.
The lesson Menzies took from World War II — the need to build a strong nation — may well be the lesson we take after the virus crisis has passed, whenever that might be[…]Strong, confident nations can co-operate well.
But first and foremost they are nations with national priorities, national personalities, national destinies. In times of crisis, like coronavirus, it is the nation that counts, not globalisation.
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