Our walled world: the growing divisions across the globe

There is something perversely fitting that Trump has staked his presidency on that most medieval of civic symbols. For here is a man whose political raison d’etre seems predicated on sowing division, something walls have played a part in doing for at least 12,000 years.

From biblical Jericho to modern Mexico, the idea of constructing barriers to keep others out - or, in the case of the Berlin Wall, to keep people in - is as ancient as human civilisation. Only the people being shut out have changed, or have they?

“The funny thing about so many of the walls today is that they’re being built for the same purpose walls were constructed 2,000 years ago, which is to keep out emigrating Syrians,” claims David Frye, an American medieval historian and author of Walls: A History of Civilisation in Blood and Brick.

“The first border walls ever constructed were fortifications against invading Syrians. Today, we’re seeing the same thing in Turkey, Hungary, Bulgaria, and across southern Europe, because of mass emigration and fear of terrorism,” says Frye.

What he is actually referring to of course is that point back in 2015 when thousands of Middle Eastern and African refugees poured into Eastern Europe. Almost immediately Hungary began building its own 13-foot-high fence on its border with Serbia. Similarly, Bulgaria chose a fence to slow down refugees arriving from Turkey.

President Trump of course has been quick to jump on such examples, even if the threat presented by him over the border with Mexico is in great part an exaggerated fabrication.

Many critics point to the fact that his thinking is motivated more by racism and a near obsession with keeping his supporters happy at home than anything else.

For just as in the past so in the present“build a wall” is an evocative slogan for so many current political leaders across the world. The barrier itself meanwhile is a powerful visual symbol of action, albeit often illusionary.

“Walls are public relations exercises where governments demonstrate that they are actually doing something,” says Elisabeth Vallet, a scholar at the University of Quebec in Montreal. “They usually create more problems.”

Objectionable as Trump’s reasoning might be however, he and his supporters aren’t alone in believing a physical wall provides a means to secure a given region.

Currently there are estimated to be over 70 walls or fences around the world, a marked rise since the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

According to data collected by Elisabeth Vallet, there were seven border walls or fences in the world at the end of World War II and by the fall of the Berlin Wall this had risen to 15.

Then came the terrorist attacks on the US on Sept. 11, 2001 and things really began to change, bringing a dramatic proliferation of construction projects reflecting instability in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This of course is not the only reason why walls are going up, for today the world is divided in many ways as a new age of isolationism and economic nationalism settle across parts of the globe.

Today we are divided in so many ways, be it through politics, religion, race and wealth to name a few.

Indeed understanding what is behind these divisions is essential to our comprehension of what's going on in the world today. Walls and barriers are more than ever dividing communities, neighbourhoods, cities and countries reinforcing “us vs. them” antagonisms and creating a sense of separation, exclusion, danger, and limitation.

“A wall is so primitive,” says Jane Loeffler, an American historian and author of the Architecture of Diplomacy.

“You can dig under it, go over it, catapult yourself over it. A wall is more symbolic than a real defence. A wall is fear in three dimensions,” Loeffler maintains.

Some of course would argue to the contrary insisting that walls work. Many Israelis I’ve met over the years say the wall separating Israel from the West Bank stops Palestinian terrorist bombers and that’s all that matters.

Rarely, if ever, do the same people question the wall’s legality. How too can Israel insist on calling it a “security wall” when instead of just separating Israel from the West Bank, it separates Arab from Arab?

Indeed, how could people whose history is full of terrible ghettos now be building one themselves some might even ask?

As far as some Israelis are concerned, the crushing effects of the wall on the lives of millions of Palestinians is a small price to pay for the relative guarantee of their own personal security.

But to call it this way makes for a convenient defence of a policy they also know is little more than a land grab and indefensible in terms of international law.

“If you want security for your house, you build the wall in your own garden, not in your neighbour’s,” I once recall a Palestinian shopkeeper, telling me near East Jerusalem where the wall had cut his business off from the village customers who gave him a meagre income.

Researchers point to the fact that walls are interesting because they are physical and symbolic sites of inclusion and exclusion that mark the inside from the outside.

This inside/outside is the guiding distinction for international relations in that it marks the difference between domestic politics and international politics that is not only territorial but also social. ‘Inside’ denotes safety, law, and sovereignty, while ‘outside’ marks danger, violence, and anarchy.

Not surprisingly the answer to whether walls are in fact effective depends very much on whom you ask and what they are meant to do.

“Walls are not effective at stopping a modern military because planes and missiles go over them and tanks can smash right through,” says geographer Reece Jones author of Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move.

“Nor is a border barrier necessary to mark the territorial extent of the country. Walls are expensive and maps, boundary stones and GPS data work just as well for this purpose,” insists Jones.

It was another American president John F. Kennedy who once observed that: “A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” Kennedy was of course speaking of the Berlin wall at a time when what most world leaders were worried about was that something could spark thermonuclear war.

As history has shown however what politicians say about walls and what people want are often very different things.

The desire to break free of restrictions on movement or incarceration is deeply engrained in the human condition. Ask South Africans once forced to live in Bantustans or Palestinians today in Gaza.

Thirty years ago I was to witness for myself how powerful that desire can be as I watched the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

I well recall along with an American colleague sitting in a bar off West Berlin’s Kurfurstendamm district on November 9 1989 when news broke that those who had lived either side of the wall decided enough was enough and the time had come to end that division.

In the hours that followed thousands swarmed around Berlin’s checkpoints trying to cross the barrier that had separated East Germans from the world for the previous 28 years. Bewildered border guards could only look on helplessly as the Berlin wall was finally breached.

On Bornholmer Street, I watched as crowds sang, drank, hugged. No blue shirts of the East’s Free German Youth on the streets now: just free youth.

Chants of “Wir sind das Volk,” - “We are the people” - echoed around the streets, as did the sound of alpine horns.

In the hours that followed, “Ossies” and “Wessies”, East Germans and their western counterparts, would come together in one massive celebration.

Yet more than three decades after the Iron Curtain came down, right now across the world the proliferation of walls and barriers continues. Some of these many of us are barely aware of.

There is for example the 1,700-mile fence that India is near completing to curb immigration and smuggling on its border with Bangladesh. India also has a 450-mile barrier with Pakistan, a militarised “line of control” to keep out militants because of ongoing tensions between the neighbouring nations.

Closer to home Spain built its first modern barrier in 1995 with funding from the EU with the specific goal of keeping immigrants and refugees out from two of its southernmost cities, Ceuta and Melilla, that spill into the neighbouring north African country of Morocco.

Even closer to home brick-and-wire boundaries still dot the landscape of Belfast, remnants of the sectarian divisions there.

Only a few months ago President Trump was widely ridiculed for suggesting that Spain emulate his $5.7bn dream for the US-Mexico border and build a wall across the Sahara desert.

“The Sahara border can’t be bigger than our border with Mexico,” Trump is said to have told Spain’s foreign minister, Josep Borell, seemingly unaware that there already is a wall cordoning a corner of the Sahara.

At 1,700 miles the Morocco Western Sahara wall, known as the Berm, is only 250 miles shorter than the US-Mexican border.

Twelve times the length of the Berlin Wall and four times that of the West Bank wall, it is second in length only to the Great Wall of China, yet has remained practically invisible to the outside world.

An estimated 120,000 Moroccan troops keep busy manning this massive fortification of sand and stone walls alongside which runs one of the world’s longest continuous minefields.

Unlike other notorious barriers that regularly make the headlines, the existence of this “Wall of Shame” has been buried in the desert, along with the 40-year-old plight of the Sahrawi people who have fought for the right for self-determination for Western Sahara and to break free of Moroccan rule in what is often dubbed “Africa’s last colony”.

Be they fences, barriers, or gated communities, sadly we continue to live in an increasingly walled world. Today it’s not uncommon to hear those who study such constructions and the politicians who argue for and implement them talk of “forting up”.

At the Vatican last week, Pope Francis recalled the Berlin Wall as a symbol of “the painful division of Europe” and pleaded with Christians to steel themselves against the “temptation to erect new curtains.”

It was a well-intentioned if ironic observation given that high walls surround the Vatican the world’s smallest sovereign state. On that point at least Trump is right.

But as long as people continue to move then that temptation to “erect new curtains” will prevail.

That this will do little to stop the global movement of people goes without saying. As climate change and conflict impinge and devastate people’s lives it’s only to be expected that they will seek to move and cross borders in search of sanctuary, safety and better life.

If one thing is evident it’s that walls only work to divert, not prevent, the flow of people while simultaneously having a grave human cost.

As Donald Trump and other ‘wall builders’ would do well to well to recognise, using a wall to settle scores only reinforces rows.

Over a century ago the writer Franz Kafka declared the Great wall of China a failure of human imagination, pointing out in a short story that a wall cannot protect.

“The structure itself is in constant danger,” he wrote. “Human nature, which is fundamentally careless and by nature like the whirling dust, endures no restraint. It will soon begin to shake the restraints madly and tear up walls.”