Students of politics have something to learn when they look back at Canada and other countries closing their borders to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The major lesson is that state sovereignty is still real,” academic Sanjay Jeram told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview.

Jeram is the chair of the undergraduate program of the political science department of SFU. He is also a senior lecturer.

“A major component of state sovereignty is strong control over one's borders, the ability to control entry and exit without outside pressure,” Jeram noted.

Jeram said that this can be seen as well in the European continent, where freedom of travel across borders between countries has been embraced.

In the wake of the rapidly spreading novel coronavirus, European countries have imposed varying border controls to protect their own citizens from the pandemic.

Jeram noted that with the current global health crisis, one can see that the European Union is “not as supranational as we might think”.

“All we have is still an intergovernmental organization,” Jeram said.

Some have claimed that globalization has rendered nation-states irrelevant in the world stage.

However, Russian scholar Leonid Grinin has maintained that the “national state will for a long time remain the leading player in the world arena, as in the foreseeable future only the state will be capable of solving a number of questions”.

Grinin made the assertion in a 2008 version of his paper titled ‘State Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization: Will it Survive?’

The paper came out amid the 2008 global financial crisis, which saw governments in the U.S. and other countries coming to the rescue with bail-out packages.

As Grinin observed, “sovereignty may even increase in some aspects, as the current world crisis shows once more that the fate of national economies to a great extent depends on the strength of the states and on the abilities of their leaderships”.

“Even those who were previously ready to bury the state claim today that governments should take the most active and expensive measures to save economics, financial system etc.,” Grinin wrote.

The scholar continued: “Thus, it is quite probable that the nearest future may reveal a certain ‘renaissance’ of the state role and activity in the world arena. In some countries sovereign powers that had previously been (sometimes thoughtlessly) given away to supranational organizations, unions, and global capital may be returned.”

According to SFU’s Jeram, the simple story of economic globalization is that countries have, over time, specialized in the production of certain goods.

It was seen as an “efficient process” that tied the world through a global supply chain.

With the pandemic’s disruption of this chain, as shown by shortages in Canada and other countries of products like masks and protective equipment, Jeram anticipates a rethink by a number of nations of what they consider as essential production within their borders.

“I think contingency planning will be something that states are going to do in the aftermath of this,” Jeram said.

However, Jeram does not see any change in supply chains for non-essential or luxury goods.