The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.
—Ecclesiastes 1:9
When working as a reporter, I once walked out of the Green Zone in Baghdad with two colleagues at the height of the bombing and kidnapping campaign in the early 2000s. The modus operandi outside the Green Zone was to travel lying down on the back seat of a beat-up car with tinted windows, accompanied by two men with assault rifles up front. As I passed the last checkpoint guarded by American soldiers, every footstep began to take on significance. With each one I was one step farther away from safety—and assistance, should anything go wrong.
It is a strange space, one with few people and no one in charge. There is no structure, no law, and the people who do venture into this no-man’s-land fall emphatically into “us” or “them” categories. Journalists used to be recognized as neutral, but those days are mostly gone, and in many conflicts we are seen as targets for retribution, or as cash cows to be sold or ransomed. On this occasion we went a few hundred yards, spoke to a group of civilians, grew increasingly nervous, and hurried back to the relative safety of the Green Zone, which was regularly mortared. But we all agreed it was better to lose your head quickly to shrapnel than to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s knife-wielding gang—the embryonic “al-Qaeda in Iraq.”
These strange places—the spaces in between—are often created by our conflicts and divisions. Sometimes they’re still contested territory; sometimes they’re mutually agreed buffer zones. Whichever they are, stepping into them can be unnerving. You do so at your own peril, often very aware that each side is training weapons on you as you proceed.
There are, alas, many modern examples. Cyprus is divided in half, between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, by a 111-mile-long buffer zone. The starkest part is the Varosha area of the city of Famagusta. In 1974 the inhabitants fled, fearing a massacre by Turkish troops, and never returned. Varosha is now sealed off by barbed wire, guard towers, and the Turkish military. Inside this ghost town it is mostly quiet, apart from birdsong. The streets are empty, the pavements overgrown with weeds, and many of the abandoned buildings are still in ruins from the war. At night the city disappears into the darkness, with no lights because there are no people. You cannot cross the Cypriot divide in Varosha, although now at seven points on the island an official from one side will check your passport before you go a few hundred yards until you reach the other side, whereupon you must present it again. Both sides watch the space in between, a shadowy place, beyond the confines of safety and comfort, where you are watched, and beyond which lies “the other.”
Enforced separation and violent confrontations are the extreme effects of what happens when we build walls—and when the divisions they represent are apparently insurmountable. No one wants this; such spaces and such situations are frightening and dehumanizing. Going from one side to the other under scrutiny and threat can be unsettling.
Moving between Israel and Gaza is a cold, isolating experience: you feel as if you’re caught somewhere between a sci-fi nightmare and some sort of lab experiment. To cross from Israel, you must pass through two Israeli checkpoints. Armed guards watch from behind bulletproof glass. Your belongings are thoroughly inspected. At the end of a long corridor you press a buzzer; the camera above takes a long look at you before the door clicks open. Now outside, you are in Gaza. But no people are here; you are in a fenced-off corridor, in a stretch of no-man’s-land over a thousand yards wide (wider in some places). At last you emerge fully into the harsh sunlight and scrubland. Several hundred yards farther a Palestinian checkpoint awaits, where the inspections are less thorough. The return journey has much more stringent checks on the Israeli side: border guards monitor the banks of cameras from behind tinted windows; sound and touch sensors are fitted all along and near the wall; full-body scanners, the sort you find at airports now, are in use; luggage is swabbed for traces of explosives.
This may seem an unfriendly or overly rigorous routine, but arguably it works. The wall reduces the chances of suicide bombers from Gaza entering Israel, and the section of no-man’s-land increases the range for rockets fired into Israel by at least a thousand yards. This is an uncomfortable truth. Yes, the sight of the Gaza wall, the barriers around Bangladesh, the barbed wire between Hungary and Serbia, offends our sensibilities and is testament to our failure to resolve our differences. It is easy to decry the trend of wall building; and walls can indeed imbue tough issues with a false sense of resolution. However, they can also provide temporary and partial alleviation of problems, even as countries work toward more lasting solutions, especially in areas of conflict. The Gaza wall, along with many other measures, for example the Iron Dome antimissile system, has dramatically reduced the number of fatalities on the Israeli side of that conflict. The Saudi wall with Iraq has helped prevent infiltration by IS.
But what of those walls in nonconflict areas? The barbed-wire policy of Hungary, in both the physical and the political sense, has reduced the inward flow of people, but is unlikely to stop it altogether. And mass migration isn’t going to end in the foreseeable future. People on the move are fleeing poverty and/or violence, heading toward wealthier, more stable countries. While such levels of poverty and conflict prevail—and across the Middle East and Africa, that is likely to continue—the waves of migrants will keep coming, perhaps even increase. The world’s population is still growing: in Africa, already home to widespread poverty, the population is expected to double, from 1.2 billion now to 2.4 billion within about thirty years. So although the poverty rate is decreasing, as the population increases, more people are likely to be trapped in poverty overall, with little hope or opportunity to change their circumstances.
A number of richer countries will continue to erect walls to help stem the flow of migrants. Some people argue, however, that we should simply dispense not just with walls, but with borders themselves—and allow completely free movement, so that any person can go anywhere on the planet he or she wishes.
In a 2017 Foreign Affairs essay, Nathan Smith, assistant professor of economics at Fresno Pacific University’s School of Business, described this “open borders” idea as
a regime of nearly complete freedom of migration worldwide, with rare exceptions for preventing terrorism or the spread of contagious disease. . . . Ending migration controls in this way would increase liberty, reduce global poverty, and accelerate economic growth. But more fundamentally, it would challenge the right of governments to regulate migration on the arbitrary grounds of sovereignty. . . . The more efficient allocation of labor would result in global increases in productivity, leading the world economy to nearly double in size. This increased economic activity would, moreover, disproportionately benefit the world’s poorest people.
Smith argues that we could end world poverty by opening borders, and therefore we in the West have a moral duty to do so, especially as a means for righting historical wrongs. Some view the practice of citizenship within a state as being as violent and discriminatory as the slave trade because it places citizens’ rights over human ones, legitimizing some people as more human than others. If borders were opened, the strain on resources in the West would be immense; welfare-state systems, for example, would have to be dismantled. Smith recognizes that “open borders would probably lead to a large increase in visible extreme poverty in the West,” but counters that “impoverishment by Western standards looks like affluence to much of the world,” and that the benefits to millions outweigh the inconveniences and downsides for Westerners.
At first glance this argument has logic. You can make the humanitarian case that, overall, things would level out. However, it doesn’t appear to factor in two crucial elements. First, what effect would such mass movement have on the countries being abandoned? The initial emigrants would be those who could afford it, no longer having to make perilous journeys at the mercy of people traffickers and across deserts and seas. With fewer doctors, teachers, and other educated people, those abandoned countries would decline—perhaps even collapse and become utterly impoverished—with no prospect whatsoever of advancement.
The second problem is human nature—or, more specifically, group identity. An optimistic view maintains that the nation-states on the receiving end will struggle but cope, that they will absorb the newcomers. But a glance at history, and at the present, suggests a more cautious view of humanity may be required. Mass movements of people have already triggered the rise of nationalism: local populations do not seem to be happy when large numbers of outsiders descend upon them. The impact on politics in Europe is clear: the Continent has moved sharply to the right and extreme right. It is a similar story across the globe. It’s commonplace to read articles denouncing the Western countries for having some of the most restrictive immigration laws and highest levels of racism in the world. Elsewhere, they know better: other regions are just as capable of being anti-immigrant, violent, religiously intolerant, and racist. The pressures of globalization and rising population numbers are being felt the world over, and we’re seeing a rise in nationalisms—both secular and religious—as a result. In India, for example, given the prevalent attitude to the current levels of immigration into the northeastern states, it seems unlikely that a massive increase in migration from Bangladesh would reduce friction. Elsewhere, since 2014 the residents of the Paraguayan town of Encarnación have been divided from their Argentine neighbors in Posadas by a fifteen-foot-high, mile-long concrete wall along the Paraná River on the Argentine side. Official reasons for the construction were vague, but the context was clear: it was part of increasing anxiety, in one of South America’s most liberal countries, over migration. Next to Paraguay is Bolivia, from where migration into Argentina also comes. This prompted the congressman from the northern Argentine province of Salta, Alfredo Olmedo, to say, “We have to build a wall. . . . I agree 100 percent with Trump.”
Open borders are not going to work in the current climate—or even for the foreseeable future. The idea of the nation-state has caused its share of problems, of course. We seem to have recognized this when drawing up the UN laws on the ownership of space, which state that
outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means. The Treaty establishes the exploration and use of outer space as the “province of all mankind.” The Moon Agreement expands on these provisions by stating that neither the surface nor the subsurface of the Moon (or other celestial bodies in the solar system), nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or non-governmental organization, national organization or non-governmental entity or of any natural person.
For the earth, however, it is too late to start again. The planet and its human inhabitants are too complex for a sudden shift to a global government in which nation-states are dissolved and the world is “the province of all mankind.” The demise of the nation-state is frequently forecast for a variety of reasons: globalization, federal superstructures such as the EU, the rise of city-states, and, most recently, the rise of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. And yet the nations and the states keep surviving. What’s more, the world of nation-states that we live in has, for all its flaws, brought with it relative stability. We have come a long way, even if there is further to go. Measure the post–World War II era against the seventy-five years prior to it and you can see how much progress we’ve made. Globally, literacy rates are up, and poverty rates down. Diseases have been cured, infant mortality has been reduced, as has maternal death in childbirth. By means of science, democratic principles, and good leadership, this progress can continue.
However, if we do not move more money to where most people are, many of them will try to move to where the money is. In the immediate future foreign-aid budgets should be increased. In the near future, we need a twenty-first-century Marshall Plan for the developing world to harness the riches of the G20 group of nations in a global redistribution of wealth. After the destruction of World War II, the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe. This massive effort was driven by the Americans and carried out in the knowledge that it would benefit both sides. We now need a plan of even greater scope and ambition, executed in the knowledge that it will benefit everyone. It should encompass development, infrastructure, trade, education, health, and climate change.
We have already had a taste of what will happen without such measures. Migration will continue, indeed grow, and in the face of this “threat” to their prosperity and stability, wealthier nations will only become more protective of what is theirs—territory, services, culture—further fueling nationalist movements and the fashion for wall building. Politics will become nastier, the barriers will be built higher, and increasingly violent attempts will be made to physically beat back those coming over the walls. Many hard-liners and xenophobes (often the same people) want zero immigration. This is undesirable from both a humanitarian and an economic standpoint.
The Western countries require immigrants for the midterm future to sustain themselves. I say midterm because I’ve yet to see a prediction of what will happen when the tipping point is reached—when technology, replacing most jobs, meets peak migration. But for now the world needs migration at sustainable levels that, for example, do not empty Bangladesh while destabilizing India. But how to control it is not clear: Who should be allowed in—economic migrants beneficial to a country’s prosperity, or refugees fleeing war and persecution? Who decides who falls into the former category? How many should be permitted to come?
And how can these newcomers be integrated in a way that doesn’t cause problems with the locals? Most of the West has accepted, and in some cases embraced, diversity. Any ideas of racial purity are long gone, confined to the fringe, such as we saw in the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Any level of violence toward “the other” is unacceptable; the firebombing of migrant centers in Germany, for example, is a disgrace.
But while most Westerners don’t engage in this sort of extreme behavior, they do want to preserve the underlying values of their culture. After centuries of bloodshed, imperialism, and many other ills, the Western countries are now underpinned by a shared belief in democracy, gender equality, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. Naturally, sometimes a nation does not conduct itself in accordance with its own civilized values, but this hypocrisy does not mean that the values are not there. What the majority of people want is for those coming to their communities to share their values, or at the very least to tolerate and not militate against them. A large proportion of modern Europeans would not object if a homosexual couple moved in next door, but they would be unhappy with a homophobic neighbor seeking to whip up hatred against homosexuals. So we need to find a way for newcomers to join the host community, not seek to undermine its values. This is not a question of race or religion, or simply good manners: the only place the guest gets to smash the plates is at a Greek restaurant. In this two-way relationship, it is also the host’s responsibility to make the guest welcome. This applies to guests and hosts in countries and cultures the world over. Both sides can build bridges and reach across to “the other.”
* * *
Until the universal brotherhood of man is accepted, and the world has no competition for resources, we will build walls. It was ever thus. We are animals. Wonderful, sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, incredible in our capability, infinite in our imagination, but still creatures of this world, and like every other creature we need our space.
A proverb found in most languages is “Good fences make good neighbors.” This is not some trite folksy saying; it states an inevitable truth about boundaries both physical and psychological. We plan for a future in which we hope for the best and fear the worst, and because we fear, we build walls.
If that seems a deterministic view of humanity, there is an upside. Our ability to think, and to build, also gives us the capacity to fill the spaces in between the walls with hope—to build bridges. For every wall between countries, there is an information superhighway; for every al-Qaeda, there is an interfaith outreach group; and for every missile-defense system, there is an international space station. Billions of dollars are donated in aid by rich nations. The codification of human rights acknowledges that, in theory, humans are all created equal. We have built great halls in which to meet, discuss, and try to resolve our differences. The United Nations, the EU, the African Union, ASEAN, Mercosur, OPEC, NATO, the World Bank, and hundreds of other pan-national and global organizations have all been created to help unite us and mediate our conflicts. They are a formal recognition of the human condition, and through them the megatribes seek to resolve their differences, maintaining their walls while searching for more lasting solutions.
So, although at present nationalism and identity politics are once again on the rise, the arc of history has the potential to bend back toward unity.