The refugee crisis has sparked a rise in nationalism and right-wing sentiment, fuelling fear and alienation. Razor wire is again stretching across borders, dividing people and creating barriers both physical and cultural.

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Europe’s walls are back. Concrete and wire; armed patrols; fear, alienation, suspicion. A continent bristles with fortified distrust. It feels, and acts, besieged. So I walk the battlements. I chat to a right-wing extremist, who crosses his arms proudly in front of a watchtower sprouting infra-red CCTV as he crowns himself defender of the Christian West. I’m hectored by Thracian farmers angry at the refugees trampling their vegetables. And I’m given a watermelon by a policeman turned people-smuggler who fishes in the fast, cold river between Greece and Turkey, where he sees migrants’ bodies bobbing among the tangled trees. Thirty years ago the Berlin Wall fell, pulling the Iron Curtain down with it. Grainy video scenes were imprinted on history: a cheering, waving mass of people chiselling away at totalitarianism. This was more than just German reunification, it was a parable of liberation. A validation. A promise that as much as we push at each other, we’d much rather embrace. Yet today across the world – and especially in Europe, where this promise was made – razor wire is again stretching across borders and dividing people, physically and in pitiless cultural barriers constructed and patrolled by rekindled nationalism. In this year’s Harvard University Commencement Address, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told graduates of her pain as a young woman walking home on the east side of the Berlin Wall, so close to the freedom on the other side. Merkel implored her audience to break down the re-emerging walls: of ignorance and narrow-mindedness, among family members and social groups, between people of different skin colours and religions. “If we tear down the walls that restrict us, if we open the door and embrace new beginnings, then everything is possible,” she told the gathered students. “Walls can collapse. Dictatorships can disappear.” I’m not as erudite as Merkel, and I can’t get Pink Floyd earworms out of my head. “All in all it was all just bricks in the wall” … “Together we stand, divided we fall.” So I decide to call Roger Waters. The Wall, Pink Floyd’s largely Waters-written semi-autobiographical 1979 album, tied a rock star’s personal breakdown to themes of alienation, withdrawal and hate – as Waters has said, “If you isolate yourself, you decay.” It became the bestselling double album of all time, and gained unexpected political potency when, eight months after the Berlin Wall fell, Waters staged a huge concert at the Brandenburg Gate, where half a million members of the city’s divided community reunited in song. “There was a very brief and possible point at which the world, geopolitically, might have moved forward,” Waters says by phone from New York, as he recalls that night. Now he, too, sees walls going up again. “It more than saddens me. It angers me beyond measure. It’s miserable and it’s scary as shit.” Reflecting on the impetus for new walls, he settles on fear. “Fear is an exercise in control. It’s always divide and conquer. If you can persuade the people who vote for you that the problem is people trying to flood through the borders, you can get them to do almost anything. You can get them to put up with any prohibition.”


Building Walls is the title of a 2018 report from Centre Dèlas, an independent Barcelona-based institute dedicated to the study of peace. It recalls the November 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, “marking what many hoped would be a new era of co-operation and openness across borders”. Authors Ainhoa Ruiz Benedicto and Pere Brunet write that the opposite seems to have happened. “Edifices of fear, both real and imaginary, are being constructed everywhere, fuelling a rise in xenophobia and creating a far more dangerous, walled world for refugees fleeing for safety.” It’s a global phenomenon, even putting aside US President Donald Trump’s rise on the back of a promised new wall between the US and Mexico. In Europe the report tallies up almost 1000 kilometres of barriers – the equivalent of more than six Berlin Walls – that have been built since the 1990s, most constructed in the past five years to prevent displaced people entering the continent. It counts 15 post-Cold War walls built by 2017, on the borders of Spain, Norway, Hungary, Greece, Macedonia and elsewhere. “Much of Europe has turned itself into a fortress excluding those outside – and in the process also increased its use of surveillance and militarised technologies that has implications for its citizens within the walls.” The physical walls parallel “walls of fear stoked by xenophobic parties”, say the report’s authors, shaped by the “post-9/11 security paradigm”. So I decide to go see them. To trace the line through fear and compassion in Fortress Europe. KIRKENES NORWAY At just 200 metres long, the Storskog border fence at Kirkenes, Norway, is widely seen as symbolic. Credit:Thomas Nilsen/Barents Observer As the plane descends to this small town in far north-eastern Norway, the land beyond the buzzing propellers is glacier-scraped, patterned with lakes of snow melt. We are hundreds of kilometres above the Arctic Circle. This is the border between Norway and Russia. Even at lunchtime, the August sun can’t heave high into the clear blue sky. It slants through the windows of Kirkenes’ Borderland Museum, which opened in 2009 to tell the story of a land that has seen many transitions between nations and cultures. It strikes off the handlebars of the museum’s incongruent display of old bicycles. Some have torn, red stickers with Russian script on them.


In August 2015, at the height of what became known as Europe’s Syrian migration crisis, refugees suddenly appeared here, 4000 kilometres from home, crossing into Norway from Russia on bikes. More than 5000 of them arrived within a few months, to a town of barely 3500. How they got here was unclear. But the very unlikeliness of their arrival spoke volumes of their desperation to reach the West. “It started small, sort of,” says Bodil Dago, a curator at the museum. “All of a sudden they were there. And all of a sudden it was finished. It was handled and they were shipped away [for resettlement and processing of their asylum claims elsewhere in Norway]. This is a border area. You don’t want to stay.” Museum registrar Camilla Carlsen remembers the refugees as sociable and outgoing, and agrees that the influx “only lasted for a few months actually”, but admits to being afraid during that time. The refugees were temporarily housed in a sports hall next to the local school. “If someone had freaked out, they’re only, like, 10 steps away from a school for, like, hundreds of children. That’s what you think about. We are used to being far away from everything, and isolated, and suddenly they were there and walking along the street. And I have five girls, teenagers, and some of [the refugees] are really young men, and really beautiful.” By the end of the year, the Syrians had stopped coming. Again, nobody here really knew why. Then came the border wall. A steel fence was announced in August 2016, after eight months in which no one had bid for asylum via the northern frontier. The announcement was made by the justice minister from Norway’s right-wing, anti-immigrant Progress Party, which had joined the governing coalition in 2013. Loading Thomas Nilsen is editor of the local newspaper, the Barents Observer. He says the 3.5-metre-high fence was viewed as “a symbolic act from Ministry of Justice politicians who needed to show they were able to do something ... People were more laughing about the fence than taking it seriously.” The wall was just 200 metres long. “If a person can escape out of Damascus or Aleppo, cross through the border zones in Syria over to Turkey and manage to go up to Moscow or St Petersburg and up all the way across the Kola peninsula to the border of Norway, then that person will also be able to walk around a 200-metre fence,” says Nilsen, with dry Norwegian sarcasm. “Walking around it is very easy.” The Russians already had a much bigger, longer fence along the same border, a legacy of the Cold War – and had been letting refugees through the gate. “If they want the border to be closed, then no one will get through,” says Nilsen, matter-of-factly. The Russian fence made the Norwegian one doubly redundant. Not only that but, once the Norwegian fence was finished, and as the winter frosts began to freeze the ground, a quarter of its length had been built too close to Russia. So the fence had to be moved – by a few centimetres. “We’re not proud of that,” says the museum’s Dago. “It’s not very helpful to the local population. It wasn’t our idea. It’s just … you know.” Carlsen calls it a “joke”, a “political statement [that] has nothing to do with anything”.


I ask the Observer’s Nilsen about the real dangers in Kirkenes. Refugees? Polar bears? Car accidents? There are no polar bears, he says, and “people here are the world’s best at driving in winter”. Mostly, Norwegians worry about Russia and its regular, provocative military exercises in the sea off Kirkenes. Carlsen’s husband was taught as a child that if someone waved from the Russian side, you did not wave back. But since the fall of the Iron Curtain three decades ago, there’s been increasing border traffic. The Norwegians go to Russia to buy half-price petrol, the Russians come to Kirkenes to buy nappies. Dago has one more story about the wall, related to an exhibit upstairs in her museum: “We have these big crabs coming from Russia,” she says. “They don’t respect the border. They started to come here in the beginning of the 1990s. They damaged the fishermen’s nets, they ate the food of the fishes, and it was a really big problem. “But today we’re earning lots of money from them. They are exported, I think to Japan. When I think about borders, I think sometimes they are a good thing. Otherwise you couldn’t control who is coming into your country. But you can’t stop the crabs. That’s difficult.” There’s a lesson in there somewhere: about how hard it is to make a border impermeable, and the opportunities you might miss if you do. RÖSZKE AND ÁSOTTHALOM HUNGARY Members of the Hungarian Defence Force erecting a border fence in 2015 to stem a wave of refugees. Credit:Getty Images


In September 2018, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stood defiantly in front of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, his blue suit buttoned over his blue tie, his eyebrows arched. He told off “socialists and liberals” for their condescension, their ignorance of history. “We have built a fence,” he said. “We have stopped illegal migrants. Hundreds of thousands of them. We have defended Hungary and we have defended Europe.” In an echo of an Australian PM two decades earlier, Orbán said “we will protect our borders and we will decide who to live together with”. Replied former Dutch foreign minister Frans Timmermans, “We are going back to a European history none of us want to see again.” During Europe’s 2015 migration crisis, Hungary was the first country to shut its gates, denying the tide of a million refugees a path to the north-west, reinforcing its southern border with a new fence and deploying armed guards along it. I was there, on the Serbian side, when masked, baton-wielding, Hungarian riot police tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed and beat back a crowd of Syrian and Afghan refugees bound for Germany. They fled, finding a path west instead, across a minefield into Croatia. Now I’m back in Hungary, approaching the Hungary-Serbia border, this time from the north. A laneway at the small Hungarian border town of Röszke leads down to cabbage fields. A home abuts the razor wire. Around the property’s corrugated-iron gate a striped hat pokes, followed by a ponytail and a gold earring framing a friendly face. Zoltán Szucs, 63, ushers me and my fixer into his home, and insists we sample his pálinka, Hungary’s eye-watering national spirit. Szucs sits under the boar’s head on his wall and tells me he is a retired farmer who now makes a bit of money from metalwork, making fences and garage doors. He likes fences, especially the one next to his house. “I am thinking now this kind of fence should be installed all over the world,” he says. “Even bigger. Just like in America.” He respects Trump and he respects Orbán, whose administration faces widespread allegations of corruption – “I don’t really care how much he steals.” He doesn’t respect the Germans who opened their borders and “are just crying at home like babies now while [migrants] are raping their wives and kids”. The migrants, he says, “cannot assimilate and they can do terrorist attacks”. The other day, he heard on the CB radio that maybe the fence doesn’t work. So he went down and threw a stone at it. A light started flashing immediately, and the loudspeakers fired up, announcing in three languages that it was illegal to cross the fence and that they should go to the closest transit zone. Szucs approved. Szucs’s wife, Iren, 69, nods. Before the fence, she says, one time about 70 migrants arrived at their house and she was so scared she dropped her watering can and ran inside. “We don’t need them,” she says. “I have granddaughters and I’m really afraid what kind of future they will have in this world. I saw many horrible things during Communism, but this is worse.” From Röszke, I drive west through leafless, wintry timber plantations to nearby Ásotthalom, where the local mayor, László Toroczkai, made global news in 2015 for an over-the-top anti-immigrant Facebook video. At its climax he stood accessorised with dark sunglasses, chiselled face, and arrayed border guards. The tag line: “Hungary is a bad choice. Ásotthalom is the worst.”

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