This year marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wall, which stood between 1961 to 1989, came to symbolize the ‘Iron Curtain’ – the ideological split between East and West – that existed across Europe and between the two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, and their allies during the Cold War. How significant was the Berlin Wall physically and psychologically during the Cold War?
The Berlin Wall was important physically, as well as psychologically, because Berlin was the only city that was divided by the Cold War between the Soviet Union and its allies in the Eastern Bloc and the West.
Given the disparity that quickly emerged between the two sides in economic wealth, freedom of expression and so on, the fear was that, without that wall, there would’ve been a unification of Berlin in a way that the Soviet side would have lost.
But it was also very important psychologically because it became the symbol of the division between two ideologies that saw each other as inimical to each other.
That meant that if you wanted to visualize the Cold War, and the separation between the capitalist, democratic system of the West and the communist, command-and-control system of the East, Berlin offered a place where you could physically walk from one world, through a checkpoint, into the other. The whole Cold War could be reduced to this one nexus point.
Because of its psychological, as well as its physical, significance, the fall of the Berlin Wall quickly became the symbol of the collapse of the communist ideology it had shielded.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, European countries have reportedly built over 1,000 kilometres of walls – the equivalent of more than six times the total length of the Berlin Wall – along their borders. Why has Europe been building more walls? How far do you think they have been used as symbols to appeal to political bases and has it worked with voters?
The walls that have been built in Europe recently have been for a very specific reason. This was the huge influx of migrants and refugees to Europe in 2015, through what was called the ‘eastern Mediterranean’ or ‘western Balkan route’, from Turkey to Greece and on through the Balkans, Serbia and Hungary to northern Europe in what was Europe’s biggest migrant and refugee crisis since the Second World War.
What’s interesting is that for Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian government, which was on the frontline of the flow of migrants and refugees, building a wall was a way of reasserting its sovereignty.
Like many other countries along the ‘migrant route’, they resented that the rules under which people could migrate into Europe were flouted by northern European governments, which were willing to accept large numbers of migrants and refugees.
By accepting them, they kept attracting more, and so Orbán was worried that, at some point, Germany might say, ‘We can’t take anymore,’ and they’d be left in Hungary.
It’s important to remember that the communist states of central and eastern Europe were kept in aspic by the Soviet Union. They existed in a hermetically sealed environment without immigration. As a result, they didn’t experience the rise of multicultural societies of the sort that emerged in Britain, Belgium, France and Germany, where immigration persisted throughout the Cold War period.
The countries of central and eastern Europe were delighted that the Berlin Wall collapsed because it allowed them to unify with western Europe. They had been vassal states of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and by joining the EU, they re-discovered personal freedom and re-gained national sovereignty. They thought they had become masters of their own future again.
But they suddenly found they were on the frontline of a new movement of people that wanted to get into the same world that they’d entered some 15 years earlier. And, as hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees began arriving, they suddenly realized they were in a union that did not respect their sovereignty.
So, for them, putting up walls was a sovereign act against a European Union that didn’t seem to take their sovereignty seriously.
Has it worked? Definitely. The flow of migrants has been reduced drastically. This is partly because the European Union paid Turkey to hold back the over three million migrants based there. But the walls also acted as a physical and psychological deterrent.
It also worked politically. It allowed Viktor Orbán and other European parties that took the sovereigntist line to strengthen their appeal to voters because voters like to know that governments can do certain things like protecting them and their borders.
What is hypocritical, however, is that many of the governments in western Europe which criticized the Hungarian government for building its wall, have actually been rather grateful that they did so, as it slowed down the flow of migrants to their countries.
Then there’s the additional hypocrisy of the European Union criticizing Donald Trump for building his wall with Mexico when Europeans are benefitting from one in Hungary.
Two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, US President Ronald Reagan challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to, ‘tear down this wall,’ declaring, ‘across Europe this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand [freedom].’
32 years later, building a wall along the US–Mexico border has become a cornerstone of the current US administration under Donald Trump, who has pledged to build a ‘big beautiful wall’. How does this reflect the political evolution of the US?
President Reagan talked about tearing down the Berlin Wall as a symbol of the Cold War because he knew that the fall of the wall would undermine the Soviet Union.
President Trump is way beyond the Cold War. Building a new wall is his response to the growing sense of economic dislocation that segments of America, like Britain and other parts of Europe and the developed world, have experienced on the back of the rise of globalization, which was partly the result of the end of the Cold War but also the rise of China.
The spread of globalization, the declining earning power of many workers in the West, advances in technology which have taken away many high-earning jobs and the eight years of austerity after the global financial crisis are all factors driving Trump’s thinking.
Have inflows of Mexican immigrants or immigrants through the Mexico border been the principal driver of economic insecurity? No. What you’ve got is Trump promising to build a wall as a symbol of his administration’s determination to protect Americans.
So I’d say the US–Mexico wall is another symbolic – or psychological – wall. Trump’s wall is supposedly about stopping illegal immigration but there are still plenty of ways to come through the border posts. It’s principally an exercise in political theatre.
