The Peace of Westphalia, 1648. Seemingly random historical event that goes right to the heart of Covid, 2021.…

The Peace of Westphalia, 1648. Seemingly random historical event that goes right to the heart of Covid, 2021. This apportioning of territory after the Thirty Years War was in some ways the birth of what we call countries today. Why I think that matters.../1 https://t.co/HTwFV4PRWh

What the Wetsphalian carve-up shows is that the world was international, before it was national. This truce carved up the pre-existing Holy Roman Empire into distinct 'sovereign' territories. This is important, because we're in a pan-demic. Pan-, the prefix, means 'all'. /2

The way to defeat a pandemic is to act globally, for all of us to act. But we're not really doing that, we're acting nationally, like we can end a by-definition international event, nationally. We don't know how to act globally, because 1648 is a long time ago. Ideas matter. /3

We are international, by default. Our countries and borders are created by international agreements. We tend to think of this backwards, that countries came first, who then bandied together to create an 'international community'. Historically wrong. /4

Just as ring-fencing LGAs didn't work, because cities are interconnected, ring-fencing Covid action nationally won't work either. It's the libertarians again, whose economic markets act internationally, but who win elections with national borders. National borders that.../5

...are actually international agreements. They bang the drum about sovereignty, but sovereignty is only granted by international agreement. By other countries respecting borders and boundaries. We're going to need to remember that no matter how national we feel.../6

...the world still works as an international thing. Not by choice, but because that's the default. Look at Brexit, the great libertarian sovereign fantasy. The UK is breaking, because it didn't recognise that it only ever functioned by being intrinsically international. /7

Covid will teach us this again. It won't be over in any one place. It can only be over internationally. Not 'think local, act global'. We all act globally, all of the time. There are n alternatives, it's how the place functions. /end