Abstract
This chapter looks at how plagues changed the meaning of citizenship and political membership in three historical instances: Ancient Athens, Byzantium, and 14th-century Europe. History shows a link between commerce, population density and disease. It also shows that unmitigated openness in the pursuit of prosperity involves serious hazards. Each of these historical moments brought about new ways of understanding social cohesion and, moreover, they exposed a problem that remains today—when established cultural and political boundaries dissolve in pursuit of “global” aspirations, the dislocation creates opportunities disease to spread, for certain “elite” groups to prosper while the larger population remains frustrated, and for the modification of long-standing legal privileges in the name of meeting the crisis. History shows that globalism and the myth of global citizenship have always been and still remain incubators of plagues and political opportunism.
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