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Jan 10, 2019 16:59:05 #

ARGUMENT

Walls Don’t Work

As the Great Wall’s history shows, border fortifications are expensive, divisive—and useful political tools.

BY PAMELA KYLE CROSSLEY | JANUARY 3, 2019, 1:41 PM

The idea of throwing up a border wall to prevent incomers is pretty old and has never worked very well. History is adorned with famous walls, from the Sumerian Wall of Mardu 4,000 years ago onward, and the moments their defensive pretensions collapsed. The ruins today remind us that using a wall to prevent incursions is the oldest and weakest idea in the arsenal of the state—one reason why almost nobody has tried to make them work for the last thousand years.

The most romanticized wall, the Great Wall of China, reminds us that walls are nevertheless good for something. The origins of the wall lay in a network of local walls built by the separate principalities of ancient China before its unification under a central ruler in 221 B.C. That ruler, known to history as Qin Shi Huang, cobbled together the northerly facing walls and built them higher. Then as now, China had three other sides, but they were protected by mountains and by the sea.

China had an enemy on the northern side of the wall, the formidable nomadic Xiongnu, who could muster a hundred thousand riders or more. The wall could force the Xiongnu to ride around it, or at least around its strongest sections, expending the supplies, time, and energy of horse and man. Infantry who wanted to climb the wall found it hazardous and laborious, though not impossible. It did not amount to much in the way of security, but it certainly created an interesting obstacle course for anybody invading from the north.

The Great Wall of China’s greatest material uses were for surveillance and for customs regulation. The elevated towers on the wall allowed effective survey of the landscape and any movement on the other side. Like other historical walls, the Great Wall was a fancy way of getting large contingents of watchmen up where they could see.

And like many other walls, the Great Wall had fairly regularly spaced gates—all vulnerable to being burned and hacked by determined enemies. In this case they could be opened to allow Chinese armies out on those occasions when some ruler based in China decided to invade Mongolia or Manchuria. But they were most useful as customs stations. China has traded vigorously with all neighbors and a large number of distant lands for most of its history. Along with that, it has always attempted to regulate trade and suppress contraband. A series of big gates separated by an imposing wall was just the thing. Weary merchants with lumbering camels generally chose to enter through the gate and be taxed rather than attempt to clamber over the walls.

There was another use for the wall. In China as elsewhere, hewn granite blocks and good bricks were appreciated as pilferable materials for the construction of streets, churches, temples, houses, and pigsties, causing walls to shrink and practical architecture to sprout throughout the ancient and medieval worlds.

Yet even beyond these advantages, the true magic of the wall was and is its value as a political tool. It was the first emperor’s first public works project. It symbolized the vast scale of his personal rule. The imposition of forced labor to get the wall to the desired size demonstrated his coercive power. The tight control he exercised over income—all to the glory of the wall—and expenditure strengthened his grip on the bureaucracy and the army. His demands for more revenue for the wall caused the state to steadily enlarge.

Similar effects resulted the time a ruler based in China decided upon a program to repair and augment the wall. In the Ming dynasty, which ran from 1368 to 1644, the most extravagant project produced the look of the wall recognized today. And from Ming times to the present the wall was invoked, in words or in image, to represent the integrity of China as it faced its perpetual challengers from the north, the imposing power of Chinese rulership, and the universal magnificence of China past, present, and future.

That is the sense in which the wall has been employed through the 20th and 21st centuries—as the all-purpose brand name of products intended to show China’s technical and commercial prowess: cigarettes, playing cards, underwear, cameras, herbal medicines, computers, and an SUV that Americans can expect to have in their showrooms by 2022. For patriotic displays, nothing beats a video of the Great Wall with flags flying from every turret while some ecstatic chorus belts out the national anthem. The Great Wall is so critical to Chinese pride that the formidable length of its distinct Ming period manifestation (about 5,500 miles) is for purposes of state statistics inflated by the addition of virtually every bit of wall rubble in north China, for a grand total of over 13,000 miles. When it comes to a symbol of executive power or national pride, facts are no object.

Now a U.S. president is going on about a wall. The year is 2019, and defensive walls have been abandoned for hundreds of years, seeing as how people can now fly. The historical surveillance advantages of watchtowers have been more than adequately superseded by drones, satellites, aerial reconnaissance, and even binoculars, which the emperors of China never had. The shining inspiration for President Donald Trump’s wall—or fence, or series of slats—appears to be the 400 miles or so of razor wire that Hungary’s illiberal authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has constructed to force aspiring migrants to his country to trickle through Slovenia.

Trump’s theory is that people who have walked a few hundred miles without adequate food, water, rest, or medical care will find a wall/fence/barrier discouraging, and no doubt many will. Others, as has always been the case, will find the challenge of a wall an insufficient counterweight to the rewards of getting over, under, or around it. They may even remember that the United States has two long coasts, one attached to each end of the hypothetical wall, and that along the way they will find that American smugglers, hunters, ranchers, sovereign citizen landowners, and all-terrain vehicle enthusiasts will have made plenty of punctures in the grand barrier itself.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/03/walls-dont-work/

The World Is Full Of Walls That Don’t Work

Why would Donald Trump want to Build another one?

But what Trump doesn’t understand—ironic, for someone so preoccupied with “winning”—is that building walls between nations is an utter failure of the geopolitical imagination. Walls are a blunt instrument of diplomacy. At best, they offer temporary respite from deeper tensions which usually remain unresolved by separation. At worst, walls can exacerbate the problems they were intended to solve. Put simply, walls do not work as permanent solutions to tough problems. Which is why, ultimately, they fall.

(snip)

Sometimes, barriers can even make things worse. When a wall is built and a lasting solution postponed, its builders run the risk that the temporary fix will aggravate the problem it was designed to alleviate. After all, when a barrier becomes an established feature of the geopolitical landscape, it often offers a rallying point for unresolved tensions, becoming a suppurating wound causing perpetual irritation.

(Snip)

Israel/Palestine

In its modern form, the conflict between Palestine and Israel was born during the British mandate of Palestine following World War I. In 1917, the so-called Balfour Declaration informed Zionists in search of a national homeland that the British government viewed with favor “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for Jewish people.” However, this statement was immediately qualified when it also advised that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” This diplomatic sleight of hand simultaneously legitimized the claims of both Israel and Palestine—and helped usher in a century of confusion and bloodshed.

Almost immediately, there were problems. Arab nations were resolutely opposed to any kind of negotiations on anything (territorial or otherwise) with Israel; and Israel was not about to surrender the toehold that the Balfour Declaration had offered. Disputes over the dimensions of partition for separate Palestinian and Israeli states lingered until the United Nations produced its own plan for a political settlement in 1947, granting territory to form a new state of Israel. Less than a year later, the first Arab-Israeli war broke out, and in one form or another, the battles have continued ever since.

Today, rather than try to forge a lasting peace with an official demarcation of Israeli and Palestinian states, Israel is constructing walls around Palestinian-occupied territories. Israel claims these walls are to protect its citizens from attack. Palestinians counter that this separation barrier is cover for an Israeli attempt to establish de facto territorial limits for a future partition between the two states. From a Palestinian viewpoint, the building of walls by Israelis in disputed territory is simply deepening the crisis, and pushing a peaceful agreement between the two sides further into the future. The wall, in other words, is just adding fuel to the political fire. And as for trying to stop the bloodshed? This summer saw a new wave of violence in the region.

East Berlin/West Berlin

At the end of World War II, Germany was divided into east and west regions, reflecting the respective influences of the Soviet Union and the Euro-American alliance. Germany’s capital city, Berlin, located in East Germany, was also divided into east and west sectors. Sixteen years later, in 1961, migration from East to West Berlin had become so voluminous that East Germany constructed a militarized and fortified barrier zone (composed of multiple walls and fences) across the city to prevent unregulated movement between the two sectors.

The wall was intended to stem the flow of migrants. But it did nothing to solve the deeper problems that were causing the exodus from East Berlin in the first place: a repressive, authoritarian regime that brooked no dissent; and drastically declining standards of living for ordinary citizens who were able to observe the spectacularly successful West German economic recovery simply by looking out their windows. If anything, the wall worked against the Soviet Union, because the West turned it into a powerful symbol of communist oppression, especially when East German guards began killing those trying to cross to West Berlin.

The Berlin Wall remained for 28 years, until 1989. It wasn’t until Soviet influence declined that political support for the wall began to erode. Finally, one night, a combined assault by citizen demolition crews and avid souvenir hunters began tearing down the Wall, allowing Easterners to cross once more without hindrance.

United States/Mexico

One of the most prominent new walls of the 21st century is the newly erected barrier between the United States and Mexico.

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War and was followed by a six-year effort to survey and mark the boundary line between the two nations. Initially, only 52 boundary monuments marked the 2,000-mile boundary, and during the next 140 years, the line was by and large casually observed. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the first fences appeared in major border cities, aimed at stopping the flow of migrant labor from Mexico. But after 9/11, the U.S. government launched a full border fortification program, imposing an unprecedented degree of separation along most of the land boundary.

Over the past 10 years, a total of 651 miles of fortifications have been erected, primarily along the land boundary. They consist of vehicle and pedestrian barriers, supplemented by a high-tech “virtual” surveillance border. The 651 miles were regarded as the maximum length of feasible wall-building, since in many places the terrain was so steep that construction was impossible, and fence construction across reservoirs and other water boundaries was not viable.

Has the border wall worked? Did it help stop undocumented immigration? Well, it turns out that it’s hard to prove that it did.

The U.S. government collects information on many immigration indicators, but no one explicitly measures the volume of undocumented border crossings, or the extent to which the Mexican border is in fact “secure.” We do know that apprehensions fell and deportations rose to a record level in recent years, and consequently, the unauthorized migrant population in the U.S. fell from 12.4 million in 2007 to 11.1 million in 2011. What no one can conclusively prove is how much the 651 miles of wall contributed to this decline in undocumented population in the U.S. About five years ago, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began saying that the wall was never intended to stop people from crossing, but merely to slow them down so they could more easily be apprehended by conventional methods. So, could it be that doubling the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents to more than 20,000 was a more important factor in achieving these results? Other possible causes mentioned as contributing to the decline included: rising deaths and injuries incurred by border crossers, as well as spiraling costs of assisted border passages; declining job opportunities caused by economic recession in the U.S.; and improvements in the Mexican economy. In a nutshell: undocumented migration into the U.S. is at its lowest level since the 1970s; deportations are at the highest levels ever; but the contribution of the walls and fences in achieving these results cannot even be measured, still less proven.

(Snip)

Truth be told, the wall is more likely to make things worse. It will risk even greater disruption to connections between cross-border communities, increase environmental destruction by building of new fortifications, elevate congestion costs and delays that inhibit binational trade, and further insult and antagonize diplomatic relations with Mexico.

The concept of a “wall” may sound good in political rallies. It purports to identify a source for the country’s ills; it plays on fear-driven nativist sentiments; and it recommends action to solve the problem, however imprecisely the problem is understood. But if you’re looking for effective policy, stay away from building more walls. For centuries, walls have not worked, and ultimately, they always come down.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/donald-trump-2016-wall-wont-work-214167