Marshall Divided

Why We're Living in an Age of Walls
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78396-343-0
Verlag: Elliott & Thompson
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

OUT APRIL 2025! The iconic bestseller Prisoners of Geography, updated with brand new content to reflect the changing global geopolitical landscape since it was first published 10 years ago. THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER New from the No.1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Prisoners of Geography Which side of the fence are you on? Every story has two sides, and so does every wall. We're in a new era of tribalism and the barricades are going up. Money, race, religion, politics: these are the things that divide us. Trump's wall says as much about America's divided past as it does its future. The Great Firewall of China separates 'us' from 'them'. In Europe, the explosive combination of politics and migration threatens liberal democracy itself. Covering China; the USA; Israel and Palestine; the Middle East; the Indian Subcontinent; Africa; Europe and the UK, in this gripping read bestselling author Tim Marshall delves into our past and our present to reveal the fault lines that will shape our world for years to come.

Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign affairs with more than 30 years of reporting experience. He was diplomatic editor at Sky News, and before that was working for the BBC and LBC/IRN radio. He has reported from 40 countries and covered conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. He is the author of the No. 1 Sunday Times bestsellers Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics and The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World; the illustrated edition Prisoners of Geography: Our World Explained in Twelve Simple Maps, shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year; as well as Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls; Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags; and Shadowplay: Behind the Lines and Under Fire.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Marshall, Tim

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

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THE BORDER WALL BETWEEN ISRAEL AND THE WEST Bank is among the most forbidding and hostile in the world. Viewed from up close, whichever side you find yourself on, it rears up from the ground, overwhelming and dominating you. Faced by this blank expanse of steel and concrete, you are dwarfed not only by its size but by what it represents. You are on one side; ‘they’ are on the other.

Thirty years ago a wall came down, ushering in what looked like a new era of openness and internationalism. In 1987 President Ronald Reagan went to the Brandenburg Gate in divided Berlin and called out to his opposite number in the Soviet Union, ‘Mr Gorbachev – tear down this wall!’ Two years later it fell. Berlin, Germany and then Europe were united once more. In those heady times, some intellectuals predicted an end of history. However, history does not end.

In recent years, the cry ‘Tear down this wall’ is losing the argument against ‘fortress mentality’. It is struggling to be heard, unable to compete with the frightening heights of mass migration, the backlash against globalization, the resurgence of nationalism, the collapse of Communism and the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. These are the fault lines that will shape our world for years to come.

We tend to hear a lot about the Israeli wall, the US–Mexico border wall, and some of those in Europe, but what many people don’t realise is that walls are being built along borders everywhere. It is a worldwide phenomenon in which the cement has been mixed and the concrete laid without most of us even noticing. Thousands of miles of walls and fences have gone up around the world in the twenty-first century. At least sixty-five countries, more than a third of the world’s nation states, have built barriers along their borders; half of those erected since the Second World War sprang up between 2000 and now.

In Europe alone, within a few years there could be more miles of walls, fences and barriers than there were at the height of the Cold War. They began by separating Greece and Macedonia, Macedonia and Serbia, and Serbia and Hungary, and, as we became less shocked by each stretch of barbed wire, others followed suit – Slovenia began building on the Croatian border, the Austrians fenced off Slovenia, Sweden put up barriers to prevent illegal immigrants crossing from Denmark, while Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have all started defensive fortifications on their borders with Russia.

But Europe is certainly not alone: the United Arab Emirates has built a fence along the border with Oman, Kuwait likewise with Iraq. Iraq and Iran maintain a physical divide, as do Iran and Pakistan – all 435 miles of it. In Central Asia, Uzbekistan, despite being landlocked, has closed itself off from its five neighbours, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan. The border with Tajikistan is even mined. And on the story goes, through the barriers separating Brunei and Malaysia, Malaysia and Thailand, Pakistan and India, India and Bangladesh, China and North Korea, North and South Korea and so on around the world.

These walls tell us much about international politics, but the anxieties they represent transcend the nation-state boundaries on which they sit. The primary purpose of the walls appearing throughout Europe is to stop the wave of migrants – but they also say much about wider divisions and instability in the very structure of the European Union, and within its member nations. President Trump’s proposed wall along the US–Mexico border is intended to stem the flow of migrants from the south, but it also taps into a wider fear many of its supporters feel about changing demographics.

Division shapes politics at every level – the personal, local, national and international. Every story has two sides, and so does every wall. It’s essential to be aware of what has divided us, and what continues to do so, in order to understand what’s going on in the world today.

Picture the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi masterpiece , in the sequence titled ‘The Dawn of Man’. On the African Savannah in prehistoric times, a small tribe of proto-man/apes is drinking peacefully at a watering hole when another tribe turns up. The individuals are quite happy to share with their own group – but not with this new ‘other’ tribe. A shrieking match ensues in which the new group succeeds in taking over the watering hole, forcing the others to retreat. At this point, if the newcomers had had the nous to make a few bricks and mix some cement they could have walled off their new possession and guarded it. But, given that this is set a few million years ago, they have to fight it out again when the first tribe returns some days later, having boned up on warfare, to reclaim its territory.

We have always liked our space. Grouping into tribes, feeling alarmed by a lot of outsiders and responding to perceived threats are very human things to do. We form ties that are important for survival, but also for social cohesion. We develop a group identity, and this often leads to conflict with others. Our groups are competing for resources, but there is also an element of identity conflict – a narrative of ‘us and them’.

In the early history of mankind, we were hunter-gatherers: we had not settled, or acquired permanent fixed resources that others might covet. Then, in parts of what we now call Turkey and the Middle East, humans started farming. Instead of roaming far and wide to find food, or graze livestock, they ploughed the fields and waited for the results. Suddenly (in the context of evolution) more and more of us needed to build barriers: walls and roofs to house ourselves and our livestock, fences to mark our territory, fortresses to retreat to if the territory was overrun, and guards to protect the new system. Those walls were functional – and they often worked.

The age of walls was upon us and these great fortifications have gripped our imagination ever since. We still tell each other tales of the walls of Troy, Jericho, Babylon, the Great Wall of China, Great Zimbabwe, Hadrian’s Wall, the Inca Walls in Peru, Constantinople and many others. On and on they stretch, through time, region and culture, to the present – but now they are electrified, topped with searchlights and CCTV.

However, these physical divisions are mirrored by those in the mind – the great ideas that have guided our civilizations and given us identity and a sense of belonging – such as the Great Schism of Christianity, the split of Islam into Sunni and Shia, and in more recent history the battles between Communism, Fascism and Democracy.

The title of Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book was based on the belief that globalization would inevitably bring us closer together. It has increased international trade: you can click a button and someone in Shanghai will put something in a box and send it to you – but that is not necessarily unity. Globalization has also inspired us to build barriers, especially after the financial crisis of 2008, when the money ran out. When faced with additional perceived threats – terrorism, violent conflict, refugees and immigration, the increasing gap between rich and poor – people cling more tightly to their groups.

The new age of division in which we find ourselves is mirrored and exacerbated by developments in the digital world. The co-founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, believed social media would unite us. He has subsequently admitted that he was mistaken. In some respects it brought us closer together, but it has simultaneously given voice and organizational ability to new cyber tribes, some of whom spend their time spewing invective and division across the World Wide Web. There seem now to be as many tribes, and as much conflict between them, as there has ever been. The question we face today is: what form do our modern tribes take? Do we define ourselves by class, by race, by religion, by nationality? And is it possible for these tribes to coexist?

It all comes down to this ‘us and them’ concept and the walls we build in our minds. Sometimes the ‘other’ has a different language or skin colour; a different religion or other set of beliefs. One example of this came up recently when I was in London with a group of thirty leading young journalists from around the world who I was helping to train. I’d mentioned the Iran–Iraq war, in which up to 1 million people died, and had used the possibly clumsy phrase ‘Muslims killing Muslims’. A young Egyptian journalist jumped from his chair and shouted that he could not allow me to say this. I pointed out the statistics from that terrible war and he replied, ‘Yes, but the Iranians are not Muslims.’

The penny dropped, along with my heart. The majority of Iranians are Shia, so I asked him, ‘Are you saying that the Shia are not Muslims?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘The Shia are not Muslims.’

Such divisions do not come down to competition for resources, but rather to a claim that what you think is the only truth, and those with differing views are lesser people. With such certainty of superiority, the walls quickly go up. If you introduce competition for resources, they go up higher. We seem to be in that place now.

The world is in many ways better than it has ever been. In recent decades hundreds of...