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Isn't this argument goes not only against open borders but even modern large countries with no internal barriers in them. How small should your PaCCPs be? And what about effects of scale that historically allowed large countries to dominate smaller ones?
That is a sharp observation. I've written as though the mobility boundary was the whole story. What about the political boundary?
The Canadian fishery that collapsed was on the East coast. Presumably the fishermen could move to the West coast of Canada and pivot to different fish (Perhaps salmon instead of cod?). So Canada, with different fisheries on the East and West coast, lets us ponder what we think of political boundaries.
Imagine that geography and fish biology makes fishery regulation trickier and more expensive on the East coast. Let us fill in the details, first that politics is uniform across Canada, but mobility is restricted. This creates a perverse incentive. Fishermen on the West coast don't want restrictive catch laws and expensive inspections that they don't need. But what if the fishery on the East coast collapses? Won't the fishermen from the East move West, compete for jobs and drive down wages? No. In this hypothetical there is an internal mobility boundary different from the political boundary. Fishermen on the West coast can ruin things for fishermen on the East coast and not have to care.
Second branch of the hypothetical: Canada is a single, big unitary country with full internal mobility. There is a fight on the East coast, within the East coast fishing community, between those seeking catch restrictions so that there will be fish to catch next year and those with bills to pay this year. If stocks are higher on the West coast, the large size of the country dilutes the urgency of local concerns, the catch restrictions don't get imposed, the East coast fishery collapses. Later, an influx of East coast fishermen to the West coast, drives down wages, and drives up catches. The conflict between those looking to the future and those pressed by immediate concerns repeats, with the same outcome. Classic progressive collapse, first East, then West.
Third branch of the hypothetical: Canada is divided. (Perhaps the division is somehow fishing specific. I haven't thought how such a thing would play out in the long term.) Fishermen cannot change coast. But each coast decides its fishing policy independently.
I've thought of PaCCAP as the question of how big should the PaCCAP be, in the sense of comparing the second case with third. In both cases the mobility boundary and the political boundary coincide. The first hypothetical probes what happens if one has fewer and larger political units than mobility regions. It looks bad. There is obviously much scope to argue about the correct size for a PaCCAP, but the mobility boundary and the political boundary should always coincide.
I've been thinking about why defensive alliances fail to keep collections of small countries safe. We talk about fighting for King and Country. But why did Britain enter the Great War (1914-1918)? The country involved seems to be Serbia, or maybe Belgium, not England. I'm pondering that small countries have historically been unsuccessful in staying safe because the concept of a defensive alliance is ambiguous. Inventing new terminology I ask whether "defensive alliance" means "chaining alliance" or "isolating alliance".
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