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BOOKS|DELIGHTS
The walls of the world: keeping in, keeping out
george fetherling
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.”
Germans crowd on top of the Berlin Wall, near the Brandenburg Gate in November 1989,
the month the wall came down.
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.
Sue Ream
diplomat and international canada 57