We can no longer escape from the necessity of borders

When I was a boy in the 1960s, very old people used to talk about the joys of travel before the First World War. You could go from London to St Petersburg without a passport, they recalled. One could understand their nostalgia. Even in the peaceful Sixties, and even when a traveller was entering allied countries, the formalities of entry were tedious (often including strict currency controls). As for the hostile countries of the Communist bloc, entering and moving round them was such a struggle that most people avoided that half of Europe altogether.

With the end of the Cold War, and the EEC moving towards becoming the EU, this changed again. Freedom of travel expanded. The Schengen Agreement of 1985 (in which Britain and Ireland did not take part) stopped border controls for participating states. In the 1990s, even the former Soviet Union opened up. St Petersburg reclaimed its original name. Although you did still need a passport, you could get there very easily.

These developments were welcome. Personally, I liked getting my passport stamped as often as possible and enjoyed the bit at the border when a chap in the silly uniform of one country hands over to a chap in the silly uniform of another country, but even I could see it was civilised that people could move freely without – as it still says on our passports – “let or hindrance”.

More recently, things went awry. The strains of mass migration, which include increased threats of imported terrorism, proved too great. Schengen still exists and its range is still, in theory, expanding, but there have been more and more instances of border controls being temporarily reintroduced within it. Visas for Russia have become onerous once again.

Here, Brexit is about to protect Britain’s own borders more strictly. The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is striving to prescribe the categories of immigrant entry. She also seeks to overcome the situation by which those in Channel boats trying to enter Britain illegally cannot, despite their illegality, be turned away.

And now we have Covid-19; and with it, coming into force early today for those arriving from France, we have quarantine.

This is sad, and highly inconvenient. For more than half a century, a holiday in France or Spain has come to have the status of a birth-right among millions of British people. A significant proportion of our fellow-citizens even own houses in such countries. There have been downsides, of course – the attritions on environments and indigenous cultures caused by too many visitors – but on the whole the phenomenon has been benign. It has broadened minds, distributed wealth and allowed millions of workers happy recreation of which their ancestors could only dream.

Now a disease, and the political tensions which its arrival has involved, have meant more let and hindrance. Quarantine – a word originally referring to the 40-day plague isolation imposed on ships docked in Venice in the 14th century – is indeed a medieval concept. Unfortunately, it does have real, modern application, though 40 days have come down to 14.

These changes are having a massive psychological effect on the Western way of life. You need to be over 50 to have adult memories of when the world was a much less open place and travel was an almost automatic problem. If a young British man attended a riotous stag party in Tallinn or Prague 25 years ago, he had the exhilarating sense that he was exercising a previously unthinkable freedom. Twenty years later, such ease had come to seem the natural order of things. It is only recently that we have been reminded it is not.

Our growing lack of ease reflects reality. People who refuse to recognise this are like people who complain about locks on doors. Yes, it would be nicer to live in a world in which no door needed to be locked, but such a world does not exist.

Nations, by definition, must have borders. Whenever borders are not properly defined and policed, they become the object of dispute. Border disputes are a famously neat way of starting wars. If international affairs are well run, borders are not prominent: each nation recognises the rights of each. But borders always matter, because they define legality. We all need to live under the rule of law, and so we need to know what law, whose it is and who will enforce it. Fuzz it up, and you get trouble.

Globalisation has fuzzed it up. The post-Cold War vision of a world open to trade and widespread democracy was admirable. The post-Cold War loss of a sense of threat was disastrous. The “End of History” brought about the end of vigilance. So it was with the brewing of Islamist extremism in the West which led to 9/11.

So it was with global finance too. At the time of the 2008/9 financial crisis, I remember Mervyn King, then Governor of the Bank of England, telling me with bitter perceptiveness, “The trouble with these global banks is that they are global in life, but national in death.” Our nation had to pay out back home for gigantic errors made across five continents.

So it is with mass immigration. Those UKippy types who believe that a sophisticated country like ours could thrive without quite high levels of immigrants bringing in their skills are fantasists. But so are those human-rights lawyers who see immigration control as racism and want our borders thrown open. No welfare system could survive such a thing, and nor could civil peace. The human-rights lawyers invoke a grandiose, global idea of law. It could have been specifically designed to undermine the only form of law that can work – one that has a clear jurisdiction.

In her speech accepting Joe Biden’s invitation to be his Democrat vice-presidential candidate this week, Kamala Harris praised the “DREAMers”. She was deploying the collective propaganda noun (derived from Congress’s DREAM Act of 2001) to describe illegal immigrants to the United States who entered as minors. No doubt she is right that they have great aspirations, but is it right to laud people who entered your country on the basis of unlawfulness? What message does it send to the millions who try to enter legally? What does it do to the “cultural lawfulness” upon which free societies must depend?

So it is with infectious diseases. There are fewer clearer examples of a situation in which only a government can act and where it might decide it must act fast and alone. The improvement in modern medicine is a great benefit of the globalisation of knowledge. The fast spread of Covid-19, however, is also the direct result of globalisation.

If the Chinese engineering of a virus in a lab, or inattention to animal diseases which can spread to human beings – we still do not know which it was – had happened 40 years ago, the illness would have reached the wider world far more slowly. China was then a poor, isolated country. In 2020, however, all that was needed to spread illness and death worldwide was for a few infected persons to jump on one of Wuhan’s many daily intercontinental flights without its government telling the world what was happening. If we don’t protect our borders, we cannot protect the people who live within them. The cost of pretending otherwise keeps growing.