The Comment Factory

This year the inevitable replay of the last days of the Berlin Wall has been in full swing.  It was the occasion for a nostalgic look back to the days of great escapes, brave night runs ending in tragedy and to reel out still-relevant aphorisms about the evils of forced separation.  Popular culture has made the best out of the sad events of 1961-1989, revisiting the compelling stories of survivors and serving up bits of retrieved concrete for all those who need physical proof that such a structure did exist in the centre of a continent with the Enlightenment to its name.  Thankfully the Berlin wall now serves as a warning from history and the Iron Curtain fell with it faster than you can say David Hasselhoff.    Such man-made borders serve a wholly explainable politico-military purpose within the confines of their time: they are a topping up of spiritual defence-attack processes that a society’s elite decides is necessary for their view to remain at the top of the list.  Paradoxically however, the ultimate defence mechanism often actually engenders the much-feared attacks.

There is no need to become paranoid about the preponderance of walls generally, though some give more cause for concern than others:  it is a case of degrees of necessity.  You need walls to build a house, to secure a high-profile site, as levees or sea barriers- in short to achieve basic security in an imperfect world.  But many walls, while clearly necessary in terms of short-term expediency, smack of double standards.  Of course diplomats and others need to be protected in Baghdad’s Green Zone compound for instance, but at the same time this highlights the lack of protection Iraqis face outside of those walls.  Aside from this it is obvious that those giving the go-ahead for the building of such architecture are extrapolating from the correctly-perceived righteous context in which other walled structures arise, such as the everyday examples cited above.  If I can protect my family in my home, the logical extension is that I can go further and protect the wider community in my country too.  We have any number of national and transnational borders and documentation for that.  The wall is a step further, the final step in a process of fear.

Walls, often via castle-based cities, have served as protection for hundreds of years.  In the medieval era walls could not be viewed as a transgression against freedom of movement or the sovereignty of peoples in the way they might be now. They were an integral part of a society whose norms and rules reflected baser living before the technological and medical advances of our day. These medieval relics seem quite quaint today, to be appreciated and toured.  Outside the monastery walls of Christendom, the rank and file of the village lived apart from those who frequently formed the nucleus of their community life.  Monks who provided learning, work and charity to their communities still needed the physical separation of a wall between them and those not in their order.  Thus a spiritual concept of separation was made real in order to reinforce their power.   Similarly the crusader castles of the day stood as a reminder of territorial conquest and religious power.  And of the all-too real fear that anything less than a walled fortress would be overrun in minutes.

Among the most controversial walled structures in the current political climate is the Israeli West Bank barrier.  It is interesting that the Israelis prefer the structure to be known as a separation or security fence.  Meanwhile Palestinians view it commonly as the segregation or apartheid wall; clearly this wall needs to be portrayed by the Israelis as having defence as its primary concern (in line with Israeli rhetoric more generally) and by Israeli opponents as being first and foremost a form of attack and repression.  It is, like many walls before it, but a physical manifestation of the siege mentality pervading the nation building it.   However the high-volume of commentary from world geopolitical institutions demonstrates the vital importance of walls in security discourse

In Belfast, the number of so-called Peace Walls or Peace Lines (Orwellian etymology in the sense that they were put up due to the activities of warring factions) has actually increased since the Good Friday agreement.  This on the surface equals failure of a sort but there are two schools of thought on this issue within a community still divided in religious terms in many areas: children grow up not meeting anyone not of their religious denomination despite such people living a few doors away. However it does keep people from both sides of the sectarian divide safer than they may be without them.  Certainly, while the walls are recognized widely as temporary edifices when viewed in a rational manner, this does not mean that all inhabitants would be happy to see them go or agree on a timeline for their dismantling

The former Chancellor of West Germany, Willy Brandt, probably came close to defining how such structures often come to be judged by history when he coined the phrase “the Wall of Shame” to describe the Berlin wall.  Not all walls are shameful but they do run a heavy risk of being considered a crude solution at best, even by those who erect them.  Frequently, they lead to a more esoteric, closed society and lay the ground for a host of longer-term problems and resentments.  In his tome on ‘Violence’ (2008), Slavoj Zizek has written that the most violent thing is often to do nothing. In terms of wall-building, perhaps to renounce such a policy would show a positive sort of violence, one where one is violently dedicated to a non-violent approach.  And yet “this is the era in which new walls emerge everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on the US-Mexico border.  The urge of the Populist New Right is just the most prominent example of the urge to raise new walls”. 

Apart from the obvious physical harm and separation that people in aggressively-walled historical and current political territories have had to contend with, there is the issue of ephemerality.  When does a wall stop being a wall and start being a tourist attraction?  Maybe when the President of a powerful nation walks along it during a high-profile diplomatic tour.  During his trip around Asia Obama was careful to take in historical sights, most notably the Great Wall of China.  Even when walls are no longer a defensive military measure, they mutate into a political consideration, if historical appreciation of a country can be counted as a political tactic. So, once the root socio-political power contest is resolved, walls crumble and are usually reduced to the aforementioned relics (of a shameful or beautiful kind), coupled with a nice bit of light tourist-baiting and memento mori of the most wistfully melancholic kind