Global Free Movement - let's make it possible

Amid the misery about the failings of the EU, we would do well to turn the argument on its head and celebrate its triumphs. True, the Euro is a flawed project, with inadequate institutional and legal support. But it happened anyway, it is still alive and growing, and it has made living and doing business a lot easier for many citizens. The free market is an unqualified success, as have been many of the social reforms, despite repeated complaints from politicians looking to deflect blame for their own inadequacies. The expansion to the east was a project of historic proportions and significance, offering over 100 million people the reality of a more prosperous and fair life.

But perhaps the greatest achievement is the one that has come under pressure during 2015. The EU has a principle of free movement of its citizens. For a part of the union covered by the Schengen agreement, this goes further by making border controls perfunctory.

It is the freedom of movement, backed up by other freedoms such as removal of exchange controls, which is so marvelous and historically special. We are taught from an early age to love our countries, to respect our passports and to be suspicious of foreigners, yet here are twenty-eight nations taking concrete steps to pool their sovereignty, nations that have spent much of their existence at war with each other.

My wife and I have a wonderful luxury problem ahead of us during the next decade, when we finally leave the US. Holding British and Dutch passports, we can choose to live wherever we like within the EU. We occasionally talk of pros and cons of the various options, but what we must remember is how privileged we are to have these options at all.

But then I’d like to turn that argument on its head once again. While the opening of rights within the EU is a historical anomaly, is not the true anomaly that the movement of most global citizens is so restricted? The planet belongs to all of us, and national borders are man-made constructions, so why should the accidents of where we happen to be born and the citizenship of our parents have such a profound limiting factor to our lives?

Think about the great injustices of history, slavery, race laws, limitations to voting rights and so on. How did these happen, and why did they persist for so long?  We should recall that for most of the time that these practices were prevalent, people thought they were justified, even normal. It was the way things had been, and somehow right. Even when movements started out to abolish the practices, it took a long time for majorities to back what we now see as basic human rights.

Imagine the arguments that defenders of the status quo put forward in each of these cases, arguments strong enough to persuade more than just racists and bigots. I think I can make a good guess at what the arguments might have been.

Some arguments would be based on religion or history or some natural superiority. Examples would be that we have always had slaves and Jesus lived in a time of slaves. Then, the slaves don’t have any education and would not be able to live decent lives even if they were nominally free. This can extend to the thought that actually slavery benefits the slaves, because they have some sort of security and a roof over their head.

Over time, people would be able to see through these arguments as fundamentally unjust. It might take a generation or two, and there would be many conservatives who continued to hold such beliefs, but the power of such ideas would diminish as more and more came to see them for what they were.

At this point, the killer argument kicks in. We have to keep slavery, or whichever other injustice, because things would collapse if we didn’t. If women could vote, for example, somehow the order of society would be fundamentally changed and pillars would collapse and the economy would be ruined and there would be intolerable social upheaval. If slaves were freed, where could they live, how could we afford the transition, and what about the prospect of riots or even wars if former slaves rose up? Further, losing slaves would impact economic competitiveness and our way of life, at least locally if not globally. In summary, rectifying these situations would be a nice idea in theory, but it is just not practical, it is naïve.

Now fast forward to our current debate about Syrian refugees, and, by extension, the limits to migration around the world. Many people have not given a thought to the human injustice involved, just as many people would have never thought slavery was unjust until general society pointed it out. But for those who get beyond that, the practical argument holds great sway.

Jeffrey Sachs is quite a good liberal commentator, but in last week’s Guardian, the practical arguments were exactly those he used to restrict immigration. He saw a flow as essentially unlimited, and therefore unmanageable or at the very least unacceptable to public opinion.

Just as with slavery and the other blots on human history, isn’t it time to move beyond such thoughts? And actually, even the practical arguments are rather thin.

The most open societies have tended to be the most successful and peaceful ones. When we see that in the last forty years the US has grown faster than the EU and the EU faster than Japan, the Economist would like us to believe it is all about small government and flexible labour markets, but the dominant contributor has been the sheer size of the working age population. Japan is ageing and shrinking faster than anywhere else, the EU is ageing as well, but the US is growing – mainly thanks to those pesky Hispanics that some politicians would see sent home.

It has been the same through history. This morning, I looked up the history of passports on Wikipedia. Among other things, I learned that the first passport is recorded in the Hebrew bible, that the name came from the fact that ports were traditionally free zones while to “pass” the port required some authorization, and that passports first came into common use in sixteenth century, in England. I also found out that passports were largely ignored in the age of trains from 1860-1910, for practical reasons, but then came back into vogue after World War 1, for security reasons and to control emigration (people wanting to get out, not come in). Is it a coincidence that 1860-1910 was an age of global development, and the inter-war years saw depression?

The US is quite a good case study for free movement, since states have very different laws and people are free to move between states. There have been periods of massive flows, but systems find ways to cope with such changes and in the end there are counter-flows. Detroit grew while there was work, then shrunk, and now starts to grow again. The southwest is growing, but will be limited once water becomes so scarce that people will be asked to pay properly for it. New York continues to grow, but some find the place too noisy and the rents too high.

In the event of global free movement, initial flows might put strains on services, but in the end new equilibria would come about, and finally most people would rather stay close to where they were born and where they understand the culture. There would need to be some transitional rules, for sure. Countries would need to qualify for the global free movement zone, which would nudge their policies in a good direction: what better advertisement could there be for the west over somewhere like Russia, for example?

The EU shows it is feasible. The US shows that it is beneficial. Comparing prevailing arguments with historical ones like slavery and women’s rights shows that it is just. So why can’t we fight the reactionaries around the world with the wonderful prospect of free global movement, and design how it can be made a reality? Perhaps in fifty years time we will all be able to look back and see this as just one more removal of a natural injustice.