Walled world: the growing divisions across the globe

As the wrangle over Donald Trump’s border wall with Mexico rages, it’s worth examining the role of such barriers creating division across the globe and why they are almost certainly doomed to failure

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

“IT’S going to be a big, fat, beautiful wall!” This was the promise Donald Trump made to cheering supporters at a US presidential campaign rally in San Jose back in 2016. We have come a long way since then. For not only will Trump have been in office for two years this time next week, but the thorny issue of his border wall with Mexico has become the leitmotif of an acrimonious and dysfunctional presidency that has brought about the longest partial shutdown of the US government on record.

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 Civilization 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 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 feet-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 Vallet, there were seven border walls or fences in the world at the end of the Second World War and by the fall of the Berlin Wall this had risen to 15. Then came the terrorist attacks on the US on September 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 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 effect of the wall on the lives of millions of Palestinians is a small price to pay for the relative guarantee of their