Good Walls Make Good Neighbors?

The Berlin Wall was the physical manifestation of the ultimate evil from 1962 to 1989. Even before the East Germans built the wall, there was the figurative Iron Curtain behind which lurked a wicked, calculating totalitarian foe. But the Berlin Wall gave that terror a physical presence that demonstrated the failure of the society behind it. The wall and, elsewhere in eastern Europe, restrictions on personal travel showed those nations’ fear of the outside world, the ideas and dreams that lay beyond the artificial borders created by humans.

I recall the Berlin Wall, now receding into the history of past century, as I see new walls springing up on real and imagined national borders. The United States is erecting a steel wall along sections of its border with Mexico. Israel is creating a national border by building a reinforced security border with Palestinian areas. Both nations claim national security to justify their construction. But conceding that point only leads to the question of why national security is threatened.

The 20th Century wall builders made the same claim. Most Americans saw the Berlin Wall and, by extension, the sealed borders of eastern Europe, as blocking people from escaping dictatorship. That was a side benefit to the wall’s real purpose, which was to protect the regimes hiding behind those walls. This century’s wall builders are no different. They fear what is beyond that wall and seek protection from it. Mexican immigrants threaten Anglo culture even as they fuel the American economy in a wide variety of low wage, unpleasant and sometimes hazardous jobs.

The real threat from this immmigration lies in its cause. Many Mexicans cannot earn a decent living in their home country; too many people live in a nation plagued with graft, corruption and disadvantages in world trade. Mexico must export its surplus population into the rich economy of the north. That tide will continue until Mexicans believe that they can live in their home country. Like the Berlin Wall, the US border wall will only slow, not stop the tide.

Israel seeks to stop military incursions from Palestine and force a boundary settlement in its favor. Here too, the obvious national security threat–Palestinian suicide bombers–is only a symptom of the problem. Dispossessed Palestinians still have grievances remaining from Israel’s creation and until they are convinced that Israel and its supporters are willing to address these grievances fairly and equitably, they will continue to attack. Like the Berlin Wall before it and the US-Mexican wall, Israel’s barricade will at best deter, not stop, the attacks. But the wall does provide a visible symbol of protection for its builders who can point to the steel, concrete and razor wire as a “solution” to an intractable problem that they will not otherwise address.

The security provided by these walls is illusory. Illegal immigrants will continue to pour into the US as long as they do not see any economic future for themselves in their home country. Like water, they will flow around whatever barricades we place in their path because they have no other alternative. The same scenario will play out in Palestine where economic hopelessness breeds the desperation and hate that sends suicide bombers against Israeli soldiers and civilians. The only real security for either nation lies in addressing the underlying causes of that drive people to such desperate actions.

Modern wall building is nothing new. Walls have a long history in human affairs. The Romans built walls to protect their empire from tribes which they could not subdue. Chinese emperors constructed the Great Wall for the same reason. These walls did not provide the lasting security envisioned by their builders, although their ruins offer an interesting look at the past for today’s tourists.

In the final analysis, walls and barricades are temporary solutions. Real solutions that offer prospects of long term security come about only when regimes come out from behind their walls to deal honestly and openly with problems confronting their societies. It is a lesson that today’s wall builders will ignore at their own peril.