the new petro power paradigm - Diplomat Magazine

DELIGHTS|BOOKS
Jakub Hałun
The Chinese — the world’s master wall-builders who erected the Great Wall of China, pictured above, to protect the northern borders of the
Chinese Empire — have erected a retaliatory wall to keep out North Korean refugees.
• India tries to wall out Pakistan, Bangladesh
and Burma while walling in the part
of Kashmir that is in dispute. The lastnamed
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 nonexistent
Chinese refugees eager to live in
luxury in North Korea. Then there are cooperative
walls. Malaysia, worried about
Muslim guerrillas in the north, worked
on a system of steel-and-concrete barriers
in partnership with Thailand, which is
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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 nationstates
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,
FALL 2011 | OCT-NOV-DEC