Berlin Wall’s pertinent legacy as barriers back in fashion
In just a few weeks’ time, on Nov. 9, the world will mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Iron Curtain. This was a barrier that cleaved its way not just across one of Europe’s greatest cities, but represented an ideological fault line, the tectonic plate of post-war Europe. The year 1989 was the end of this post-Second World War order in Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Empire and communism but, three decades later, how has the European project progressed and just why are walls back in fashion?
The Berlin Wall, which was the most visual emblem of the Cold War in Europe, lasted 28 years. It was built to keep people in because East Germany was losing too many workers, many of whom were crossing over to West Berlin. In great secrecy, Operation Rose was mounted, with a barbed wire fence going up from midnight on Aug. 13, 1961. Berliners woke to find their capital divided.
Thirty years ago, as walls and checkpoints came tumbling down, one hoped they would never reappear. Yet the edge of the EU, where it has land borders to non-EU areas, is largely walled or fenced. Fortress Europe has acquired more than 1,000 kilometers of border walls in 10 countries since 1989, when there were just two walls to today’s 15. In 2015, Hungary built a fence firstly along its border with Serbia and then Croatia. Greece has a fence along its border with Turkey. At least Nicosia is left as perhaps the last European city with a dividing wall running through its heart. Yet the EU’s borders are the most deadly in the world, with two-thirds of all migrant-related deaths happening there, mostly at sea. Building walls is a global trend. The most notorious is Donald Trump’s wall along the world’s busiest border, the US-Mexican, should it be completed. Yet Trump was actually just following the trend, as many countries were doing this before it became his mission. At the end of the Second World War, only seven border walls existed. At the end of the Cold War, this had risen to 15, whereas today there are about 77. Every year some 14,000 people die trying to cross borders. The physical walls are often there to reassure, to give a sense of protection, although in reality they may do little, not least in an age of planes and missiles. Finland’s fence with Russia is hardly going to keep out the Russian army. The Middle East increasingly has its own share of border walls. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have theirs with Iraq, Israel has walls with every neighbor, including inside the West Bank and around Gaza. Both Egypt and Tunisia are building walls on their border with Libya.
Walls tend to divert migrant flows, not prevent them. Like water, migrants find another course. As an anti-terrorist device, they are also of questionable value, as well-resourced terrorist groups are unlikely to be thwarted. They are also hugely expensive. Walls also tend to blind us to the need to resolve the problems on the other side of the barrier — a heads-in-the-sand approach that rarely works.
All these wars and fences are products of our fears, both rational and irrational. They are rarely solutions and, often through bottling up the problems, make them worse in the long run. The Berlin Wall was a shortterm success but a long-term disaster. Thirty years on, it is time to remember this.