Construction site for a secondary border fence following the length of the primary border fence separating the US and Mexico in the San Diego in the US. Photo: Getty Images.
From the Great Wall of China to Hadrian’s Wall, walls and fences of all sorts have been used throughout history for defence and security, but not all of them have been physical.
So-called ‘maritime walls’, as well as ‘virtual walls’, are also increasingly being enforced which, today, includes border forces patrolling seas and oceans, such as in the Mediterranean Sea or off the coasts of Australia, and border control systems controlling the movement of people. Politically how do these types of barriers compare to physical ones?
You could argue that the Mediterranean Sea, and the European border forces operating within it, still act as a physical wall because they constitute a physical obstacle to migrants being able to move from the South across the Mediterranean Sea into Europe.
So I don’t see this maritime wall being much different to the physical walls that have been built to try to stop migrants – just like any other border patrol, the Italian navy is preventing NGO vessels carrying migrants, who have been stranded at sea from docking at Italian ports.
In this sense, you could argue that the Mediterranean Sea is a larger version of the Rio Grande between the US and Mexico which also incorporates physical barriers along its shores.
I think the more interesting walls that are being built today are virtual walls such as regulatory walls to trade, or with the internet, new barriers are being built to digital communication which affect your capacity to access information.
In the end, all these walls are manifestations of national sovereignty through which a government demonstrates it can ‘protect’ its citizens – whether they are successful in this objective or not.
The border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and the presence of enforcement mechanisms along the border, has become a key issue in the Brexit negotiations. How much of the debate over this is about the symbolism of the border against its economic implications?
The Irish border carries great symbolic importance because it reflects the reality of the separation of two sovereign states.
On the island of Ireland, the British and Irish governments have wanted to minimize this reality to the greatest extent possible. They even went as far as removing all types of barriers as part of the Good Friday Agreement.
This is the same sort of fiction the European Union created when it removed any physical manifestations of the existence of borders between those member states in its Schengen agreement on borderless travel.
By removing physical manifestations of the border, the UK was able to reduce some of the popular support for Irish unification as well as support for the IRA’s campaign of violence and terrorism to try to force the same outcome.
Brexit has thrown a huge spanner into this arrangement. If Brexit is going to mean the entire UK not being in the EU’s customs union then some sort of border would need to be reinstated.
The British government proposed to do all the checks behind the border somewhere. The EU’s view was, ‘Well, that’s nice for you to say, but this border will become the EU’s only land border with the UK, and you cannot guarantee that people won’t be able to smuggle things through.’
On the other hand, recreating a border of some sort, whether physical or not, would reignite the differentiation between the two nations – running counter to the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement.
The only solution available to Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been to put the border down the Irish Sea. While this means that Northern Ireland will no longer be an obstacle to the UK signing new, post-Brexit, free trade agreements with other countries, it has betrayed the Conservative Party’s unionist allies, for whom it’s essential that the UK’s borders include and not exclude them.
By the end of the Cold War there were just 15 walls and fences along borders around the world, but today, there are at least 70. How effective, do you think, building barriers are as a political and military strategy to defence and security issues given their financial – and human – cost?
Physical barriers can be an effective form of protection – or imprisonment.
The separation wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories has reduced the level of terrorist violence being perpetrated in Israel, but the cost has been the impoverishment of many Palestinians, and is another nail in the coffin of a two-state solution.
Yet many Israelis are saying that, maybe, being entirely separate is the best way to achieve peace between the two sides.
However, the walls around the Gaza Strip have not prevented, for various reasons, the Hamas government from developing rockets and firing them into Israel.
You could argue that the border between China and North Korea, which is severely patrolled, has been a tool of continued political control protecting the Kim Jong-un regime from collapse – as has its virtual border preventing internet penetration.
Similarly, the virtual border the Chinese government has created around its own internet, the ‘great firewall’, has been very effective both economically – allowing Chinese internet platforms to develop without the threat of competition – and also as a form of political control that helps the Chinese Communist Party retain its monopoly on power.
So walls in all of their shapes and forms can work. They are like sanctions – sanctions are easy to impose but difficult to remove. Walls are easy to build but they’re difficult to break down.
But my view would be that they still only work temporarily. In the end, walls serve their particular purpose for a particular period, like the Berlin Wall, they end up outliving their purpose.
You have to be alive to the fact that, whether that purpose was a good or bad purpose, there will be a moment when walls end up protecting the interests of an ever-narrower number of people inside the wall, while they cease serving, if they ever did, the interests of the growing number on both sides.
It’s ironic that the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was not the main marker of the end of the Cold War. It began earlier that year, with the intensification of people protesting in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
Once Hungarian troops dismantled the fence separating them from Austria in May 1989, thousands of Hungarian citizens simply walked out of their country, because by then, the wall between the East and West only existed in their minds.
Then, once East Germans also realized that Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet regime had lost its willingness to defend the Berlin Wall, it collapsed.
So it is interesting that we’re marking the end of the Cold War with this anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which of course, did divide two halves of one country, making its fall all the more poignant and powerful. But the end of the Cold War really began with the fall of the invisible wall in people’s minds.