By
Polly Pallister-Wilkins
The
last decade has seen an increase in the process of wall and fence
building that seems somewhat incongruous in an era of apparent
unprecedented globalisation and human movement. Britain got over its
penchant for building walls as a policy solution to the sectarianism
of Northern Ireland and the subsequent peace process was hailed as a
triumph of liberal inclusion, even if the walls themselves remained.
The same cannot be said for elsewhere however. Recent moves by Greece
to fence off part of its border with Turkey, Israel's continued use
of fence building, India's Bangladesh border fence and Spain's
re-fortifying of its exclaves, Ceuta and Melilla are just a few
examples of a process of walling that is seen as a logical policy
response to a range of diverse threats.
Cities
and states have historically sought to protect themselves through the
construction of walls and fences. From the moats and drawbridges of
old to the modern day high-tech motion sensor fences of today this is
a process as old as human settlement itself. But as a policy response
to a host of divergent problems – terrorism, nationalist movements,
environmental degradation, refugees, migrants, organised crime and
smuggling – it is somewhat lacking in imagination. If only because
the policy of walling seems to be one that requires ever more fences
to respond to problems caused by those that went before.
Here
the example of Israel is insightful. No stranger to fence building
and most famous for its system of walls and fences snaking through
the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel in recent months
has turned once again to walling as a policy solution to what it sees
as the threat posed by southern migration from Africa. In November
2011 the Israeli government announced a plan to fence the border
between itself and Egypt. Now it seems this fence is not enough.
Human
ingenuity for technological solutions to social problems is matched
only by human ingenuity in finding ways quite literally around such
technological solutions. In an example of this, the Israeli
government – having realised that migrant routes, being fluid and
reactive are liable to change, heading across the Red Sea and into
Israel via Jordan – announced earlier this week that it is now
planning to fence its border with Jordan also. This would have the
result of Israel entirely fencing itself in from a host of threats.
But
why? In the same week when Turkey's Foreign Minister on a visit to
Brussels reacted with sadness at Greece's fence building project in
Evros, saying that it was an act of division between the EU and the
outside world. Echoing the carefully honed liberal rhetoric of the EU
itself Egemen Bagis said Europe needed to talk of bridges not walls.
"It is not the time to talk about new walls in Europe - we need
to talk about new bridges. Europe paid the cost of walls in the
recent past and ... everyone should work to build new bridges between
different views, different cultures and different countries."
Such a lecture from the Turkish Foreign Minister is an appeal to the
supposed liberal values at the heart of the European project and
supposedly at the heart of globalisation itself which makes the
symbol of the Evros fence all the more potent. A symbol of Europe
fencing itself off or in?
Of
course walls and fences are always more than just symbols. They are
real material structures meant to deter, block and create a sense of
security, whether or not they in fact do any such thing. The efficacy
of walls and fences to actually provide the much needed security
against threat that they promise is worthy of critical reflection as
such reflection exposes such fence building to be the lazy policy
solution that it is.
Let's
take the Evros fence. The fence will run for 12.5km along the
Greek-Turkish border and while situated to reflect the pressure of
migratory flows the Greek-Turkish border is considerably longer than
12.5km. Will Greece be forced to fence its entire border and all its
beaches, when like Israel it realises that migrants and migrant flows
react, shift and move. Or is the fence a cynical symbolic gesture to
calm a panicked public under siege from a five-year recession and
stringent government austerity measures?
Let's
also take the fences of Ceuta and Melilla, which were re-enforced in
2005. These fences, while preventing migrants reaching this bit of
Europe in Africa, simultaneously shift migrant routes east into
Algeria, Tunisia and Libya and onto Malta and Lampedusa. Thus Spain's
success is Malta and Italy's pain. In addition the fences - while
seemingly designed to remove the relating problems of human border
encounters, such as death and bribery - in fact only shift the
problem of border policing onto the Moroccans who are charged with
preventing people reaching the fences in the first place. Meanwhile
thousands of Moroccans move in and out of the two exclaves daily,
both legally and clandestinely as the economies of these two frontier
cities are reliant not on Spain but on the surrounding Moroccan
population and their legal and illegal capital which is more
suggestive of their place in a wider networked world than attempts to
contain them through fences suggests.
Fences
are seemingly an easy solution to a growing sense of domestic
uneasiness. They are borne out of causes as concrete as economic
recession and its social consequences or as un-tangible and divergent
as threats from terrorism and climate change. Yet this reassertion of
good-old-fashioned state sovereignty fails to provide the panacea
they claim. Instead a greater need for walls and fences, burden
shifting and isolation, is created. What is clear is that building a
fence to guard against the effects of climate change will stop the
tide, but won't prevent its creation.
Dr
Polly Pallister-Wilkins is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department
of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and
African Studies. Her research focuses on the processes of wall and
fence building under contemporary globalisation and migration policy
in the Mediterranean. She can be followed on Twitter at:
http://twitter.com/#!/PollyWilkins
