

A POINT OF VIEW

By David Cannadine

Do good walls make good neighbours? The Victorians thought so, but those on either side of barriers between Gaza and Israel, and the US and Mexico, may differ. The breaching of the wall that separates Gaza from Egypt set me brooding on the subject of barriers and borders. I think it was Oscar Wilde who once observed that he couldn't see why people put railings around cemeteries, because those who were buried inside couldn't get out, and those who were alive outside had no wish to get in. It's a typical Wilde one-liner, but like many of his more memorable sayings, it doesn't survive closer scrutiny. For tending the graves of deceased relatives has been regarded as a major family obligation in many cultures, and visiting cemeteries and worshiping ancestors have been commonplace human activities throughout history. For the Victorians, railings not only regulated access, but symbolised a safe, ordered society



Hear Radio 4's A Point of View But Wilde was making one good point, namely that railings, fences and walls can serve two very different purposes: they can prevent people escaping by keeping them in, or they can prevent people gaining entry by keeping them out. The Victorian society in which Wilde lived was preoccupied by the need to do both of these things, and Wilde learned about this the hard way, when he was found guilty of committing acts of gross indecency, and sent to prison for two years in May 1895. He was initially locked up in Pentonville, then transferred to Wandsworth, and finally sent to Reading, where he served most of his sentence. But Wilde loathed the loss of his freedom, and this sense of confinement pervades one of his last works, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Keyholders only The Victorians were equally concerned to keep people out, putting railings round their city parks, and around the gardens in the middle of their city squares: in the one case to ensure that access to their parks was regulated to particular times of day, and thus to particular sorts of people; and in the other to preserve the exclusive rights of the rich residents to get into the gardens in the middle of their squares of which they alone possessed the key. Out or in? As the Victorians understood it, railings not only regulated access, but they also symbolised the safe, settled, ordered society they liked to think they belonged to, where everyone knew their place, both socially and geographically. And so the destruction of iron fences, by unruly crowds determined to assert their right of access to exclusive spaces, became one of the great fears of the respectable classes in 19th Century Britain. These anxieties were far from being groundless, especially in the case of London's Hyde Park. In 1866, the Reform League staged a protest in support of giving the vote to all men, but it gradually degenerated into a riot, and the railings which should have kept them out of the park were torn down by the mob, who then caused further mayhem by trampling on the flower beds. For some of Queen Victoria's more nervous subjects, such transgressions portended the collapse of the established order. But 19th Century society survived, and so did the railings; although in many cases they did so only until the early months of World War II. When Churchill became prime minister, he installed Lord Beaverbrook as minister of aircraft production, and Beaverbrook was responsible for providing the raw materials with which the Spitfires and the Hurricanes were built. One way he did so was to requisition the iron fences surrounding many of the cemeteries, parks and squares in Britain's towns and cities. Northern Ireland's peace walls have been copied in Iraq Indeed, when I first visited London during the late 1950s, one of my most vivid memories was of the metal stumps which were all that was left after the railings had been sawn off by Beaverbrook's minions; and in some of our parks, it's only recently that they've been restored, with the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund. In the aftermath of WWII, the Soviet authorities were determined to prevent the peoples of Eastern Europe whom they had recently suborned from escaping to the freer and better life that existed in the West. In the speech he delivered at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946, Churchill described this barrier to freedom as an "iron curtain" which had descended across the continent, from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic. He wasn't the first person to coin this phrase, but he made it internationally famous; and for the next 40 years, the borders between the nations of the Warsaw Pact, and those that had joined Nato, were disfigured by barbed wire, surveillance towers and machine gun emplacements, as a sort of grotesque parody of 19th Century barriers. Wall tumbling down The most notorious expression of this iron curtain would eventually become the Berlin Wall, which was put up by the Communists in August 1961. It was constructed of concrete, it was 12 feet tall, it included electrified fences and guard posts, and it was more than 100 miles long. Mr Reagan at the Berlin Wall It surrounded what was then called West Berlin, an isolated enclave in Communist-controlled East Germany; and its purpose was not to stop the inhabitants of West Berlin from heading east, since scarcely any of them wanted to do that, but to stem the much greater tide of those in the east who wanted to get to the west. As such, the Berlin Wall stood as a stark symbol of the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, and it was in West Berlin, just 20 years ago, that Ronald Reagan made one of the most famous speeches of his presidency. "Mr Gorbachev," he thundered during the course of it, "tear down this wall." Reagan's speech was not only well-delivered, it was also well-timed, since the 40-year Communist hegemony was approaching its end. Just over a year later, in November 1989, the East German government issued a decree that the wall should be opened, so that the long-suffering citizens of East Berlin could now travel to the west, and this meant that families that had been separated for decades were now reunited. Soon after, Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union fell apart, and by the end of 1990, the Berlin Wall had indeed been torn down. For some years thereafter, it was quite the fashion for Americans to buy small pieces of the wall, and display them in their homes, like latter-day religious relics, and as symbols of their nation's triumph in the Cold War, and of its successful commitment to supporting freedom. One rule for some In the post-Communist, globalised world we now inhabit, the free movement of ideas, of money and of materials is widely taken for granted and generally thought to be a good thing. But globalisation also implies the free movement of people, from one country to another, or from one continent to another, in search of work and a better life: a freedom of movement which the collapse of the iron curtain, and the demolition of the Berlin Wall, seemed to portend. Not Gaza but California Yet it hasn't worked out quite like that in practice. The migration of people from the former Communist nations of Europe to France, Germany, Spain and Britain has become a highly-charged political issue in all of those countries; and the same is true in the US, where there are alleged to be more than 12 million illegal immigrants. Should they be assimilated, and be allowed to become citizens, or should they be sent packing back to Mexico, where so many of them have come from? There's no simple or easy answer to these questions, as is clear from the varied positions that are being adopted by the candidates in the presidential primaries. But meanwhile, and in an ever more desperate effort to keep Hispanic workers from entering the country illegally, barriers have been put up along large parts of the 2,000-mile US-Mexican border, in California, in Arizona and in Texas. In October 2006, George Bush signed a bill authorising the construction of an additional 700-mile fence. It hasn't been built yet, but there are several towns, including San Diego in California, Nogales in Arizona and El Paso in Texas, that are divided by the barriers that are already there, in a manner eerily reminiscent of East and West Berlin at the height of the Cold War. It's a strange contradiction that President Regan advocated the demolition of a wall in one part of the world, whereas President Bush is in favour of putting up a wall in another part. The freedom of people to live and work where they want may be appealing in far-off Europe, but it's clearly a less enticing prospect to many Americans when they're confronted by its consequences much nearer to home. And it's the Republicans, so strongly committed to the unfettered working of an enterprise economy, who are most ardently in favour of such a construction, which will restrict the free flow of labour. "Good fences," Robert Frost once observed, "make good neighbours." But that's not always true. I wonder how long it will be before a president of Mexico visits El Paso, and thunders at his opposite number in the White House, "tear down this wall!"

Here is a selection of your comments. We have walls around our houses to divide our land from anothers, for security and privacy. It seems to work well it pretty much the same principal for neighbouring countries who may have require such measures. We have a responsibilty to protect our own interests as do they.

andy corsham, London Don't forget the so-called "Peace Wall" in Belfast, if you search Google images for this it's quite an eye-opener. Why is it still there one wonders and how hypocritical for us to tell others to tear theirs down!

Dennis Levene, Manchester How about the wall between Israel and the west bank palestinians? We were told that would never work. But the number of Israeli civillians killed by the palestinians was SIX last year. Before the wall, there were individual bombings which killed twenty or more at a time and bombings were weekly. Likewise the walls in Baghdad, seperating combative communities. Again we were told it would never work, but here we are with inter-ethnic killings down to a small fraction of what they were. Who says walls never work?

John, England As normal with the US double standards and they wonder why Muslims pick on them.

Jexif Lerkov, United Kingdom Can anybody confirm or positively refute the stories that the gathering of railings (and other domestic metal items - pots, pans etc) was no more than propoganda and that everything collected was dumped into the sea off the south coast?

Alan Dedden, Verwood, Dorset, UK This analysis misses one very obvious point - that there's a world of difference between walls designed, like the Berlin Wall, to keep people in, and those intended, like the US-Mexico fence (or, supposedly, UK immigration controls), to keep unwelcome visitors out. Does Mr Cannadine have walls and fences around his own home, I wonder?

charles hutchinson, London, UK I have always found the popular acceptance of boarder controls and populist clamour for their tightening strange. Despite the very short period of history for which even inconsistent enforcement of immigration policy has been possible, there is a popular perception that this is an obvious right of governments - and that it is desirable that they do so. Given the pathetic lack of buy-in to our society by swathes of Britain's indigenous population, and the quality of international communications we now enjoy, it constantly surprises me that such store is placed in lines on maps by our leaders. Workforce mobility is the key corollary to the free movement of money, perhaps some day the benefits we have had as a nation from the latter, will convince us of the worth of the former. Call me cynical, but it won't happen whilst politics is still hostage to the small minded nibyists of Middle England.

Alister, Oxford, UK Denis Cassidy states in his book "The Way Things Were" (p109) that railings removed during WW2 were never in fact used, as David Cannadine implies, as scrap iron for the war effort. Cassidy refers to this as "one of the worst cases of bureaucratically inspired vandalism....arising from crass and unco-ordinated central planning". Can anyone confirm this?

John North, Newcastle upon Tyne Look down on Earth from orbit, there are no boundaries, no lines or walls to divide us - borders are artificial markers of greed, attempting to control and confine, to restrict. What good is there in that??

Megan, Cheshire UK



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