Cordon sanitaire () — or
quarantine line — is a
French phrase that, literally translated, means "sanitary cordon". Though in French it originally denoted a barrier implemented to stop the spread of
disease, it has often been used in English in a
metaphorical sense to refer to attempts to prevent the spread of an
ideology deemed unwanted or dangerous, such as the
containment policy adopted by
George F. Kennan against the
Soviet Union.
Diplomacy
French Prime Minister
Georges Clemenceau is credited with the first use of the phrase as a metaphor for ideological containment. In March 1919, he urged the newly independent
border states (also called
limitrophe states) that had seceded from
Russian Empire and
Soviet Russia to form a defensive union and thus quarantine the spread of
communism to Western Europe; he called such an alliance a
cordon sanitaire. This is still probably the most famous use of the phrase, though it is sometimes used more generally to describe a set of
buffer states that form a barrier against a larger, ideologically hostile state. According to historian
André Fontaine, Clemenceau's
cordon sanitaire marked the real beginning of the
Cold War: thus, it would have started in 1919 and not in 1947 as most historians contend it did.
Electoral politics
Beginning in the late 1980s, the term was introduced into the discourse on
parliamentary politics by
Belgian commentators. At that time, the......
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