Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone Books/MIT Press, US$25.95 cloth) is concerned with the role that walls — the Berlin Wall, for example, or the Israeli wall that winds through the West Bank — play in modern political discourse and economic thinking. She begins by quoting Paul Hirst, the late British political theorist. Hirst was speaking about the Atlantik Wall, which the Nazis erected to slow the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. Once it was breached, Hirst observed, walls designed to prevent enemy egress “as a principal means of defence, even on the most extensive scale, were obsolete.” On the same page Dr. Brown quotes this sentence from Niccoló Machiavelli, the Florentine diplomat and philosopher whom some consider the Henry Kissinger of the very early 16th Century: “Fortresses are generally much more harmful than useful.”
Yet fortress-like walls are becoming an evermore common feature of the modern world. In Dr. Brown’s view, they are the price of globalization and the tensions it creates, or at least magnifies: “tensions between global networks and local nationalisms, virtual power and physical power, private appropriation and open sourcing, secrecy and transparency, territorialization and de-territorialization.” Other conflicts are born in the no-man’s land “between national interests and the global market, hence between the nation and the state, and between the security of the subject and the movements of capital.” These tensions, she believes, find expression “in the new walls striating the globe, walls whose frenzied building was underway even as the crumbling of the old Bastilles of Cold War Europe and apartheid South Africa were being internationally celebrated.”
Some examples might include:
• South Africa, which maintains a thicket of security walls and checkpoints inside its own boundaries and plans to build an electrified wall on its border with Zimbabwe.
• Saudi Arabia, which has a 3-metre-high wall on its border with Yemen and a most fearsome one on its border with Iraq. The latter is 885 kilometres long. By comparison, Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Romans to keep the Scots tribes from invading southward, was only about 120 kilometres in length.
• India tries to wall out Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma while walling in the part of Kashmir that is in dispute. The last-named wall consists of a long minefield inside parallel barricades of barbed wire and concertina wire. (I never realized, until I heard Lloyd Axworthy speak on the subject, that landmines are, of course, far cheaper than security personnel and so are often used as unmanned alarm systems in certain areas of operation.)
• Uzbekistan fenced out Kyrgyzstan in 1999 and Afghanistan two years later. Two years after that, Botswana walled out Zimbabwe, first claiming it did so in order to protect the health of livestock.
• The European Union builds walls round Spanish communities in Morocco as the Moroccans erect ones of their own to secure resources in Western Sahara.
• There are retaliatory walls, such as one that the Chinese (after all, the world’s master wall-builders) erected to keep out North Korean refugees. This caused people on the other side to put up their own wall, to keep at bay those hordes of non-existent Chinese refugees eager to live in luxury in North Korea. Then there are co-operative walls. Malaysia, worried about Muslim guerrillas in the north, worked on a system of steel-and-concrete barriers in partnership with Thailand, which is alarmed periodically by the same violent extremists in its own three southern-most provinces. Looking ahead, the United Arab Emirates plans a wall to protect its border with Oman.
With so much wall-building going on, could we be headed for a wall gap, analogous to the missile gap of which defence analysts and pundits spoke so often during the Cold War? To Dr. Brown, who teaches at the University of California in Berkeley, the answer would doubtless be no. To her way of thinking, protective walls, though as old as civilization itself, covering everything from “little more than crude fences [that ran] through fields [to] mammoth imposing structures heavily armed with contemporary surveillance technology,” are constantly changing. The greatest changes have been the most recent.
The medieval fortifications that punctuate the European landscape were built not only to deter invaders. They also were made to shock and awe (as well as comfort) those living inside. The architectural gigantism they saw every day made docile taxpayers of poor souls living in tiny dwellings in sight of the gates. In the same way, stained glass windows in cathedrals made devout worshippers of these same people, who otherwise rarely saw bright colours except in nature. In early modern Europe, city walls were built up and repaired over generations as part of every citizen’s duty. Such practices encouraged the rise of city-states, such as those in Italy during the Renaissance. In turn, competition among city-states brought nation-states into being. Such nation-states, intertwined with the idea of sovereignty, lie at the heart of this book.
Walled living (the phrase sounds as though it belongs in a prospectus for a new condo development) ensured everyone a place to hide when jealous rivals and wacky potentates attacked communities for their belief-systems or their wealth. Now, with the global economy playing havoc with nation-state sovereignty, or at least making separate concepts of what used to be only one, Dr. Brown sees all these new wall megaprojects not as “resurgent expressions of nation-state sovereignty [but as] icons of its erosion.”
Her view is that “far from defenses against international invasions by other state powers, 21st-Century walls are responses to transnational economic, social, and religious flows that do not have the force of political sovereignty behind them.”
Thus, she continues, there is a strange unspoken dialogue between “neoliberals, cosmopolitans, humanitarians, and left activists” who dream of a world without political borders and the full range of conservatives who desire both increased trade as well as walls with filters to keep human and chemical dangers from slipping through. “Security today,” she writes, “requires not just containment, but movement, flow, openness, and availability to inspection.”
To paraphrase as briefly as possible, when the concept of nation-state sovereignty is weakened, the two concepts linked by the hyphen move apart from each other as they decline individually. The result: more damn walls everywhere. Dr. Brown sees a single historical phenomenon at work in the building of all these walls, notwithstanding the widely varying purposes to which they’re put and how they’re constructed. The strongest adhesive binding them together may be the fact that they don’t work terribly well in “resolving or even substantially reducing the conflicts, hostilities, or traffic.” But they do prove as a rule that they are far more expensive than first imagined and almost invariably become permanent fixtures though conceived of as only temporary measures.
To illustrate, Dr. Brown cannot resist (who could?) retelling the story of the odd assortment of walls built along the U.S. border with Mexico. The first section, erected between 1990 and 1993, extended inland only 23 kilometres from San Diego on the Pacific. The material used was surplus aircraft landing mats from the Vietnam War. These were found to provide good traction for illegal immigrants and drug traffickers. Later initiatives kept pushing the wall eastward into Arizona, New Mexico and finally Texas, always one step behind the enemies’ movements. The border walls now cover about 1,368 discontinuous kilometres.
Some stretches are triply reinforced concrete-and-steel walls 18 metres high. In other places the defences consist of concrete posts stuck in the middle of desert roads. At still others, there are virtual fences consisting only of cameras, sensors and the like: drone-walls, one might call them. So far, 36 state and federal laws have been circumvented in such construction. Some portions of these barriers have cost $21 million a mile ($13 million a kilometre). Middle-aged white male civilians have formed armed vigilante groups to patrol some of the obvious gaps in coverage. Dr. Brown believes the project may have lowered illegal immigration from Mexico but actually increased drug smuggling. She puts it all down to erosion of state sovereignty combined with the “heightened xenophobia and nationalism increasingly prevalent in Western democracies today.”
In all the superficial ways, Ralph D. Sawyer, the author of Ancient Chinese Warfare (Basic Books/HarperCollins Canada, $46 cloth), could hardly be more different from the author of Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Mr. Sawyer is an independent scholar in the fields of China’s military and its intelligence apparatus, subjects on which he serves as a consultant to corporations and defence agencies. He lives in Boston and is a fellow of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary. His book, the second in a projected series of three on the general subject, runs to more than 550 pages. Even the author himself calls its level of detail “somewhat tedious.” It is, however, of enormous value in letting us look at some of Dr. Brown’s points in greater detail, at long range, and from the perspective an entirely different culture.
For the few thousand years that we know about, China was a civilization that lived hunkered behind walls of one kind or another, usually because there was no one central government or at least not a strong one. City walls became even more important through the imperial period but took a terrible drubbing during communism. Mao Zedong, for example, ordered the magnificent walls of Beijing destroyed because they were, to him, unpleasant reminders of European colonialism during the Qin dynasty (though of course they extended back much farther in history). Mr. Sawyer’s book covers the Legendary Era and the Hsia and the Shang Dynasties, leaving off at the commencement of the Chou Dynasties in the second century BCE. Allowing everything for the great stretch of time involved, the huge amount of territory covered, and the amazing diversity of the feudalist people involved, it is still possible, with the help of modern archaeology and other tools, to arrive at some useful generalizations.
First, groups of people lived together in self-contained settlements for the protection of themselves, their food stores and their animals. Most of the earliest examples of such places appear to have been protected only by shallow ditches around the perimeter. Later, ditches were supplanted by moats; these were easier to make than walls if one lived on a lake, stream or river. Second, there was never, despite the common assumption otherwise, a long period of more-or-less complete peace. Some groups were almost always at war with some other ones.
Walled settlements were the result. These grew much safer, more resistant to attack and of course far more populous as architecture and engineering became more sophisticated. (At least for a long time. Later, during the Chou Dynasties, they almost always proved vulnerable to siege, regardless how thick or high the walls or how complicated the defensive geometry.) One of Mr. Sawyer’s examples had walls 25 metres high. So it was that slowly that the typical Chinese city took shape: “an inner, generally segmented, and fortified sector containing the royal quarters, palaces, and ritual complex; outer walls encompassing the important inhabitants; and an external area for the general populace, workshops, and livestock…”
To date, Mr. Sawyer has put 30 years’ work into researching and writing Ancient Chinese Warfare and its predecessor. He’s nothing if not inclusive. At one point, he slips out of character and speculates on the physiological need that leads humans to feel that they are safe when behind walls. Dr. Brown also dabbles with the same question but on a higher level, searching Martin Heidegger and Sigmund Freud for support of this notion (but not finding much). She does far better on her own, exploring what she calls the various “fantasies of walled democracy,” such the irrational fear “of the dangerous alien in an increasingly borderless world.” She adds: “The projection of danger onto the alien both draws on and fuels a fantasy of containment for which walls are the ultimate icon. The protective walls of the home are now extended to the nation, taking to a parodic height [the political philosopher] Hannah Arendt’s argument in The Human Condition that the overtaking of the political by the social in modernity converts the national into a giant household.”
Personally, I see nothing parodic in this. Walls as protection from whatever one fears or despises has its origin in the single family (if not, as old Freudians would have said, in the womb itself). But it is constantly adjusting to new cultural and political changes on the other side of the wall or cultural changes taking place inside the pale. I don’t know whether or to what extent this is actually true, but I once read of an experiment in which an American and a Japanese were asked to bed down in separate identical bare rooms, each equipped with only a sleeping mat. The American always moved his mat against one wall while the Japanese moved his to the centre of the room. Each felt safe and contented in his own way. Dr. Brown notes that wall-building megaprojects in South Asia are usually undertaken to keep out immigrants while those in Middle Eastern countries are generally built to keep out terrorists. This statement is open to so many obvious exceptions as to be nearly without merit. Walls such as she describes are being built to guarantee the belief that there are two classes of citizenship — no, of humanity — so that the higher order of people can keep out the one they demonize. These are different sorts of walls than those that keep a family together; the latter concern solidarity and privacy rather than security. Recently we’ve read and heard a great deal about Osama bin Laden’s “family compound” in Abbottabad — just as a generation ago we heard so often of “the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port.” Thinking in terms of Dr. Brown’s and Mr. Sawyer’s ideas rather than in terms of world news, don’t both examples use the word compound in the same way?
George Fetherling’s latest book is Indochina Now and Then (Dundurn Press).
