2017 might be the Year of the Wall

THE new year could be, among other things, the Year of the Wall. President- elect Donald Trump is likely to be under pressure to honor his campaign promise to build a wall (or at least a fence) between the United States and Mexico along every inch of their 1,933-mile shared border. Few of his plans have drawn quite so much criticism, but history suggests that there is a certain method behind his apparent madness.

We live in an age of walls. In the 1990s pundits regularly celebrated the end of walls (along with the end of history), insisting that the fall of the Iron Curtain marked a new age of low borders and high interconnection. In many ways, they were right: cross-border flows of goods, people, capital and information have exploded across the last quarter-century.

However, in other ways they were wrong. The long-term historical pattern is that rich, developed societies build walls to bar people from poor, underdeveloped ones, either channeling trade and migration into controllable corridors or cutting them off altogether. During the Cold War, the rulers of the Soviet Empire turned this on its head, building walls to stop the subjects of their own relatively poor, underdeveloped societies from migrating to, trading with or learning from the rich, developed West — which, at least in theory, welcomed them. But since 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, we have gone back to business as usual, with the wealthy once again building new barricades to keep the poor off their property. Rich, developed Israel has put up a secu- rity barrier to separate it from the poor, underdeveloped Palestinian territories; several European countries have built fences to separate themselves from Middle Eastern migrants; and now, of course, the United States plans to tie together the bits of wall it has already built to create a continuous curtain separating itself from Mexico.

A complement

That none of this behavior is new suggests that those who build walls and those who want to breach them might learn something useful from looking at the long history of barriermaking. This applies particularly to the most famous case of all, the Great Wall of China.

For many years, archaeologists traced wall-building all the way back to 9300 BC, when villagers at Jericho, located in what is now the West Bank, put up a wall to protect their oasis home from raiders. It is now clear that the original excavators actually mistook a series of over the course of many centuries, B.C., however, the town of Mersin 3100 B.C. Uruk in southern Iraq had a wall 5 miles long, studded with strong towers. Around 2200 B.C., King Sharkalisharri of Akkad genuine frontier barrier, roughly 50 miles long. This was intended to fence off his territory from semi- nomadic Amorite raiders. Sharkalisharri even called it “The Repeller of Amorites.”

Advocates of integration normally condemn modern wall- Whether ancient China or modern Europe, managing a frontier is a delicate business. building, but long-term history makes one point very clear: Far from being the polar opposite of openness, walls are complemen goods, people, capital and information accelerate, rich and poor societies become more entangled. Plenty of people welcome the entanglement; others even seek it out. But it has always disconcerted and threatened those ensnared by it, creating losers as well as winners. People in rich and poor societies alike have, unsurprisingly, looked for ways to control and manage entanglement — which is where walls come in.

The premodern golden age of walls, which began roughly 2,000 years ago, was also the premodern golden age of globalization. The Romans in Europe and the Han in China each created empires with 50 million- 60 million subjects and with economic networks that stretched across Eurasia. And yet Roman emperors (especially, but not only, Hadrian) built walls to keep out barbarians, and China’s what we now call the Great Wall.

It is no coincidence that the high points of open borders and closed barriers tend to coincide. Even the most avid globalizers rarely want to globalize everything. They have generally recognized that the free movement of people is the most destabilizing part of the package. They have, accordingly, favored barriers in this regard while advocating openness in others. But this was always easier said than done.

Such was the case with China’s Great Wall. By general agreement this is one of the wonders of the world, even if the old story that it can be seen from outer space is untrue. Neil Armstrong thought he had seen it from the surface of the moon in 1969 but was actually looking at a cloud formation. ( China’s government conceded this only in 2003, when Yang admitted that he had looked hard Nonetheless, the wall’s greatness was well-established in Western thought by 1972, when President Richard Nixon visited it and announced “This is a great wall and it had to be built by a great people.”

A surprising verdict

This verdict would have surprised the people who actually built the wall. China’s emperors normally saw walls as admissions that they could not manage their northern frontiers properly in the face of fast-moving nomadic horsemen from the Mongolian steppes. The Chinese learned early on that managing a long, open frontier is a complicated business, because the reasons people want to cross