The Death of Cosmopolitanism

[Celerity]

The coronavirus outbreak has emboldened defenders of the nation-state, in Europe and beyond.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/06/europe-borders-open-coronavirus-cosmopolitan/613267/



A couple I know who’d been living in Beijing—she’s American and he’s Australian—are marooned in Budapest, waiting for China to reopen its borders. A friend wrote me from Boston. She has both an American and an Irish passport, and is unsure whether she can enter France to see her partner, to whom she’s not married. Another friend, who is American, married her French partner this month before he returned to France because they didn’t know when he would be allowed back into America, or she into France. Cosmopolitanism—or travel, period—has become deeply confusing in the COVID-19 era. When the pandemic hit, borders began closing around the world. Now they are reopening gradually, but also arbitrarily, in ways that seem determined less by infection rates and more by politics, economics, and, for some countries, a need for tourists. To those of us who came of age after the end of the Cold War, these sudden and in many cases incoherent closures are not just irritating; they are crushing—a rapid and dramatic stricture of everything many of us had been lucky enough to take for granted: open borders and freedom of movement.

For decades, Europe has been the emotional center of this belief in a borderless world. European Union nationals can live, work, and study in any of the bloc’s 27 member states, while visitors can travel throughout the 26 countries in the Schengen Area without internal border controls. In much of this region, you use the same currency and can drive across a national frontier without knowing it; roaming on your cellphone is free. Europeans can (and do) live in one country and commute into another. Some towns lie along a border, and residents move unencumbered from one country into the other. All of this is relatively new—a product of the postwar world, when the core countries of Europe forged closer alliances to prevent the wars that had for so long marked and marred the Continent’s history. The loosening of borders spread even farther after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then again more than a decade later, when many countries in the former Eastern Bloc became part of the European Union. But the coronavirus outbreak has emboldened defenders of the nation-state, in Europe and beyond. This doesn’t affect just people who live and work across borders, or people like me, who feel at home in many countries. From now on, it will likely be harder to start a business or fall in love beyond national borders, and even harder to be a refugee or seek asylum.

Though these latest restrictions have come into force suddenly, during a health emergency, they have been a long time in the making. The coronavirus brings the latest in a series of attacks on the notion of open borders, especially in Europe. First came the refugee crisis in 2015, which gave oxygen to politicians across the Continent calling for curbs on migration. Then came Brexit and the election of Trump, both of which marked the symbolic turning-inward of countries that had previously been open to migrants, to cosmopolitanism. The virus has only furthered the feeling of retrenchment. I recently spoke with Mira Frischhut, a 27-year-old Austrian who lives in France. When Europe closed its borders to outsiders in March, in an effort to slow the outbreak, she was stuck in Colombia on vacation. It took numerous calls to the French and Austrian embassies to sort out which country would take her back; she eventually managed to get to France. “It was really this moment where I wasn’t European,” she told me. “It was two countries that said they weren’t responsible for me. It wasn’t two countries within the EU, but two countries, period.” This was something new. “I grew up as a European,” Frischhut said. “I moved to France at 18. I never experienced too many borders in Europe, so this was clearly a shock.”

Frischhut spent the next few weeks in France but recently traveled to Innsbruck, Austria, where she’s from, after France finally allowed residents to travel more than 100 kilometers, or about 60 miles, from home and opened some of its borders. Being back in Innsbruck, Frischhut noticed a host of other travel issues: The city is close to the German and Italian borders, but the rules vary. For a while, Austria permitted Germans to drive through Austria en route to Italy, but they had not been allowed to stop in the country. (Austria has since opened its borders to residents of all EU countries except the U.K., Sweden, and Portugal.) Those myriad, frequently confusing restrictions were by no means unique. My American friend with the Irish passport tried to find out whether she could enter France this month. The answer? Maybe. And what about the friend in the transatlantic relationship who married her French partner so they could be sure to see each other? Their travels, too, are in doubt: The United States has closed its borders to foreign nationals who have been to Europe or China in the previous 14 days. Spain opened its borders with France and Portugal this week. On June 15, Germany, Italy, and France began allowing in EU nationals without requiring them to quarantine for two weeks upon arrival, though France still requires arrivals from Britain to self-isolate for two weeks. Britain requires the majority of travelers to quarantine upon arrival as well.

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[Blues Heron]

1. Definitely not good for the Jet Set

Staying home is really the opposite of having a transatlantic relationship.