WALLS OF STEEL

“...the fall of the Berlin Wall serves for us all today as a call to fight oppression and to tear down all the walls that still separate the world, that divide cities, regions and nations. This is the message that a unified Europe proudly embodies and delivers to the world. We are brothers, we are Berliners...” - Nicolas Sarkozy 9/11/09.

Well SchNEWS ain’t gonna argue that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a bad thing - the collapse of East Germany and the triumph (however short-lived) of people power in Eastern Europe back in ’89-’91 are things to be celebrated. But in the middle of last week’s hype you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Wall was the last barrier between humanity.

In fact the Berlin Wall now looks embarrassingly lo-tech, a Soviet neo-brutalist construction in concrete and barbed wire, compared to the futuristic barriers being constructed around the whole of Europe to keep out the world’s poor. Checkpoint Charlie just went biometric.

Just days before Europe’s heads of state gathered in Berlin to gush about the passing of tyranny, they were in Brussels at the summit of the EU Council voting for expanded funding for a crackdown on migration. Against a background of continual brutalization, isolation and forced return of migrants they collectively announced “A determined European response based on firmness, solidarity and shared responsibility remains essential, in line with the European Pact on Asylum and Migration,” and called for “the enhancement of the operational capacities of FRONTEX”.

The European Union’s frontline force against migration is FRONTEX - a transnational border agency. The force employs over a thousand people directly and has an annual budget of 22.2 million Euros. It’s growing too - personnel increases and a budget doubled since last year. It aims to co-ordinate all EU border agencies and, through the use of cutting edge biometric technology, ensure that the division of the world into haves and have-nots remains impenetrable.

The EU’s borders now extend for many more miles than the Iron Curtain ever did, there’s plenty of barbed wire of course but the maritime boundaries are now on the other side of the Med and even off the coast of Africa (see map).

But don’t worry we’re not the only ones at it - the US-Mexico border is similarly militarised, the Apartheid Wall stealing Palestinian land is virtually complete and don’t even think about trying to get in or out of China. The barrier is to the 21st century what the railroad was to the nineteenth century and the motorway to the twentieth. We are all still ‘Berliners’ – only now divided into North and South.

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