Border walls…

This from the Guardian a while back, which I missed, is good. Kevin O’Rourke, professor of economic history at Oxford notes that:

…there seems to be a common assumption that the absence of checks on goods crossing frontiers is the default state of the world and that the existence of border controls is a weird aberration.
The assumption is false. As even a cursory glance at border arrangements across the globe reveals, border controls are entirely normal: it is their absence that is the aberration. Physical borders are to be found even along those frontiers that have been pointed out by Brexiters as examples to follow, most notably those between Norway and Sweden, Canada and the United States, and Switzerland and France.

And, a key point:

The only region of the world where you will find sovereign states coexisting without border checks on the trade between them is the EU. There is nothing accidental about this, since eliminating borders was the great project of the EU. It did so by eliminating the reasons why modern states find it necessary to inspect goods crossing international frontiers: in particular, different tariffs on imports from the rest of the world, implying an incentive for criminals to smuggle goods from countries where tariffs are low to countries where they are high; and different rules on what can be legally bought and sold, implying an incentive for criminals to smuggle goods from countries where they can be legally sold to countries where they are prohibited.

Everything else is fluff. All this is the reason why there are delays on the Turkish/Bulgarian border amounting to many hours sometimes for trucks despite the fact that the former state has access to (though not full membership of) of EU customs union.

And O’Rourke notes a particularly ironic aspect of all this – how that assumption has been internalised by Brexit proponents.

Those taking it for granted include, it would appear, many Brexiters. And so they argue that the UK should be able to do whatever it wants on trade and regulation without this having implications for borders; that the UK will never introduce a border with Ireland; that if UK decisions lead to borders, this will be because the EU “chooses” to “reintroduce” them; that the EU, not the UK, will be to blame.

Granted some of those making that case do so for reasons of expedience, but not all. In some respects this is one more example of wanting to have ones cake and eating it, but there’s little question that a rude awakening awaits those in that frame of mind.