Source:
http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/20090923/14773/des-murs-pour-arreter-les-pauvres
There are wall to wall. The Israeli wall is not the Berlin Wall. And erect the fence at the border between Mexico and the United States is yet another process: establishing a rift between rich and poor. The common point is the establishment of a flawed solution designed to ward off fear of the other. But among all categories, only one barrier is really new: the wall anti-immigrant. Tzvetan Todorov This is explained in the new issue of " Books", which hits newsstands this Thursday 24 September 2009
Tzvetan Todorov is a historian and essayist, honorary research director at CNRS. He is author, most recently, of "Fear of Barbarians" (Robert Laffont, 2008) and of "human signature" (Seuil, 2009). He is a member of the Editorial Board of "Books".
Books .- Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many walls to separate populations have been built or are under construction worldwide. These walls do not they all reflect in one way or another, this "fear of the barbarians" which is the title of your latest book?
Tzvetan Todorov .- Actually, I'm not sure we have interest in unifying all the questions posed by the various walls here and there, separating people together. The identity of the subject material covers a variety of functions. The Berlin Wall, to start with him, belongs to a rare category. While most walls are designed to prevent foreigners from entering the country, he sought instead to prevent the locals from going abroad. This wall was part materialized, palpable Iron Curtain, a chamber in prison built by the communist governments so that their peoples can not escape. It was not used to protect people but to confine them. Another category of walls, well represented is that of border walls between countries that were at war. So, today, fences separating the two Koreas, India and Pakistan over Kashmir, or the Greek and Turkish Cyprus. The battles have ended, but peace could not be established, so everyone takes shelter behind a barrier.
Books .- All other walls, however, they do not reflect no fear of the barbarian, or simply that of the other?
T. Todorov .- The protective walls are much more common. They played a particularly important role in the distant past, at the time to destroy a wall was an arduous undertaking. Hence the Hadrian's Wall to protect the Roman Empire or the Chinese wall, or the fortifications around the medieval towns. These walls, serving as military defense, have been gradually abandoned because of technical progress - explosives - made them ineffective.
A new species of wall appeared in recent decades, and is particularly characteristic of our time: the anti-immigration wall, to prevent the poor from entering the rich countries to earn their bread better and live more decently. The most spectacular, built between the U.S. and Mexico, cutting the continent in two. A much more ad hoc, there is the fence around the English enclaves in North Africa, Ceuta and Melilla. To this picture must be added the walls of smaller to protect an area, for military reasons (as the Green Zone in Baghdad) but also because of the fear born of a nearby slum and disreputable, as in Padua). The protective fencing erected around some luxury residences are an interesting variation of this last category: they are golden ghettos, where people themselves have chosen to shut himself.
Books .- Why did you not mention the wall which is spoken more often, that Israel is building in the West Bank?
T. Todorov .- It is that this wall is like no other, in that it performs several functions at once. It is, first, and officially, a barrier of protection against attacks by fighters from Palestine. One can of course regret that no other medium has been found to overcome the dispute between the two populations, but we must also note that since the construction, the attacks have decreased by 80%. However, its role is not limited to this. Indeed, it is not built on the border between the two territories, the so-called Green Line but on Palestinian land, encroaching on them sometimes a few tens of meters, sometimes tens of kilometers.
This wall, built in drive, replaces the former frontier (the Palestinians are not allowed to go on their land the other side), and its second function is to annex a part of Palestinian territory. But this is not the last. For the construction of this wall is inseparable from a policy of occupation of land, which is to link Israel to the settlements established in the territory of Palestine, by the way-only roads, dividers and controls. The various pieces of the Palestinian territory, where residents have the greatest difficulty communicating with them, now resemble the Bantustans created by South Africa during apartheid. This should be a wall of protection has become parallel when viewed from the opposite side, a wall of confinement, a prison wall. It also has a political function: to make impossible the formation, alongside Israel, a sovereign Palestinian state and livable.
Books .- A wall is sometimes seen as the party in "hard" a less spectacular wall (border) or a virtual wall. And the walls erected in the English enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta are a point of attachment that Eastern Europeans call the "Schengen wall" means a device to control immigration in Europe. The virtual walls do not they play a role as important as the visible walls?
T. Todorov .- The invisible walls, what are the boundaries that would be impassable, and they are much longer than the walls of brick, stone or metal. Was the case around the Soviet bloc before 1989: the Berlin Wall was only a small fragment of the Iron Curtain, which, though invisible, was no less waterproof. At the time I lived in Bulgaria (until 1963), no resident could cross the curtain without authorization: Border Patrol shot on sight. All the news from the other side were monitored. It was unthinkable to call abroad, you could not read Western media that the communist (and again), the foreign radio stations were jammed when they emitted in Bulgarian.
Small walls around Ceuta and Melilla are extended by other means. Why build a wall when your country is bordered by the sea? Similarly, the United States do not double walls of their border with Mexico when they can rely on the Rio Grande or the deserts of Arizona to deter would-be immigrants. Africans seeking to enter Europe are now trying to address in the islands: the Canary Islands, Malta, Lampedusa. More than building walls, European states are investing in surveillance equipment, airplanes and boats, radars and infrared detectors. Thorough checks made at the airport of Roissy also participate in this invisible wall. But if immigration from the East, through Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia became more intense, side so that Europe is not surrounded by seas, it is not excluded that we will see the construction of new wall materials, new barbed wire.
Books .- Is it not curious to see itself up these real and virtual walls, even though we live par excellence time of "globalization"?
T. Todorov .- Of all the categories we have just discussed, only one is exclusively modern anti-immigrant walls. Now they are inherent to globalization: there is no paradox. Formerly, the farmer in Mali did not plan to go to Paris, and Honduras had no intention of moving to Los Angeles did not know that these places existed. It had to happen the remarkable current interconnection of different parts of the world to be born a dream. Today, products manufactured in North circulate freely in the South, and more information and pictures. The walls are anti-immigrant reaction from the rich to the impact of globalization on the poor.
This reaction, this new "fear of the barbarians", is unfortunate. It is inefficient in that it acts against the effects without worrying about the causes. Now the issue is clear: the difference in compensation for work that goes between the North and South, from 1 to 10 or 1 to 100. Until this disparity remains, the poor will try by all means, come to the rich because it is their only chance of survival. They are willing to risk everything - walking for weeks in the scorching desert, be tossed about for days and days by the waves in makeshift boats ... Plus, they also play their honor these men feel compelled to find something to feed their wives and children left behind. If they can pass through a channel, they explore a different, more dangerous for them but also, ultimately, for us, because of the increased resentment that results.
must do everything to help raise living standards at home, because it is in our interest: we like it or not, we inhabit the same world. It will not be simple (corruption is often among the elites of poor countries), but it's worth worth a try. The money we spend on border control and the erection of walls would be better spent in cooperation. In addition, he must try to change our relationship to strangers. If they could move more freely, they would return more often in their home countries and would benefit from the knowledge acquired elsewhere. Those who remain do not threaten our survival, the cultural identity of a people has never been static, only the dead civilizations no longer change. And aging Europe needs an infusion of young and active population.
Much work must be conducted in cooperation with others when they are at home, when they moved to integrate with us - because globalization is an irreversible trend. A joint action should be initiated at the European Union, hoping that its people continue to lend a sympathetic ear to right-wing populist who thrive here and there. Including France, as evidenced by his hilarious Ministry of National Identity and legislation that wants to turn into a crime non-informers and hospitality.
Books .- Read the story long, we see that the walls are destined to fall, like Berlin, to be circumvented, as the Maginot Line, or lose their raison d'être, as the Great Wall of China. Do you see a reason to be optimistic about the fate of the existing walls?
T. Tedorov .- To know that all walls are intended to fall one day is cold comfort to those who suffer. It is necessary to measure their impact in terms of human existence, not that of history, much less than natural erosion. The Berlin Wall fell forty-four years after the Soviet Union had installed the fence around his conquests of the Second World War. Forty-four years of suffocation inside a prison open. Now each of us has one life! We can not pretend that the prison did not exist and live until the change - especially as the established order seemed to us that the subissions, built to last centuries. In addition, growing behind the walls you deforms inside, you end up forgetting that there is, outside the prison or, more rarely, you feed such a hatred of the prison it invades your being, you lose all sense of nuance and not around you see that black and white. What is not so reassuring: the walls, even fatal, live longer than people.
.- All Books these walls we're talking about real or virtual, always symbolize the fear of others. This does not she part of the so-called own rights? Humanity Is not sentenced to erect walls?
T. Todorov .- What is the characteristic of human communities, but also those that form the higher animals is that they establish relationships with foreign communities of the same species, fear is one of the possible reactions in these circumstances but it is far from alone. When two groups come into contact with humans and their interests diverge, they may Certainly, choosing the separation: either the leak or the erection of a wall. They can also, and even worse, get into a war whose outcome would be the extermination of the opponent or his complete submission (to impose a hierarchical relationship makes it possible to stop the war).
But, from the same divergence of interests, they may also engage in a negotiation, which implies mutual concessions by both parties. Negotiation takes a thousand forms, which have in common to avoid extreme solutions of the break, war or submission. More than the fear of others, negotiating is characteristic of the human species because it presupposes the use of language and taking into account the temporal dimension of the past as the future. That's what the great French historian and anthropologist Germaine Tillion called a "policy of the conversation." It is also one that stands in his speech, the current president of the United States, Barack Obama, and he hoped that his words will soon be followed by deeds.
Interview by Olivier Postel-Vinay
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