Reinventing the Stranger: Walls All Over the World, and How to Tear Them Down

As President Donald J. Trump seems to be somewhat backing away from his campaign promises to erect a mega-wall "closing" the border between the U.S. and Mexico in order (so it is claimed) to block the flows of migrations from entering the country, while deporting a greater amount of "illegal migrants" and families already living in the U.S., the question of migrations and refugees is clearly acquiring a new dimension all over the world. In the Mediterranean basin, with thousands of people dying every week in shipwrecks and hundreds of thousands awaiting in camps inside or (mostly) outside the European territory, it has acquired a truly dramatic proportion. This is not a temporary or marginal issue. It affects the very definition of citizenship and fundamental rights. It has juridical, political, moral, economic, and in fact anthropological dimensions, since it commands the articulation of residence and mobility for entire populations. It is overdetermined by questions of security and the development of a new wave of xenophobia, but also remarkable efforts of solidarity, which create a new cosmopolitanism. It is in this context that I offer the following reflections, taking their cue from analyses I had sketched some years ago (2006) under the title "Strangers as Enemies" in a workshop at McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada). At the beginning of a new cycle, full of (many) dangers and (some) promises, I try to assess what has changed and what remains pending in the global regime of borders and passports.

What has certainly not evolved—or if it has, it is in the sense of increase, multiplication and complexification—is the proliferation of walls, their installation on the site of borders, which they fortify and redouble, but also displace, or fragment, in nearly every part of the world, East and West, North and South (and in fact their similitudes across these regional divides tends to considerably relativize their meaning, or to make it more complicated). Combined with discourses, technologies, institutions and policies, affects and collective opinions which sometimes support their existence and press for their development, but also denounce their violence and their inconvenience, they have become not only a burning political issue, but an essential dimension of the "political" today, and in fact what anthropologists would call a phénomène social total, or a "comprehensive social fact," where the cultural, the symbolic, the material, the institutional aspects of social relations are combined, which contribute to the formation and dissolution of collective identities, the management of conflicts, the transformation of legal statuses. In a recent book, to which I will return, political theorist Wendy Brown has analyzed the constitution of "walled states" and proposed to relate it to a general historical trend of the waning of sovereignty, with dramatic effects on the citizens and their subjectivities. This is already an indication that the question of walls and their political functions harbors big stakes and deep ambivalence. Most of us, locating themselves on the left or rallying to a liberal discourse, in the widest possible sense of the term, are spontaneously critical of this phenomenon, which they see as inseparable from violent repressions, institutional discriminations, and a tendency to normalize the exception or the emergency measures. I agree with this critique, to which I am trying to contribute with conceptual elaborations, but I also think that it would be absurd and counterproductive not to examine and analyze in depth the rationales for the construction and defense of walls, walled borders, walled states and societies in today's world, in particular the idea of protection against threats, generally pictured as "invasions," material or immaterial, which is perhaps the main concept with which they become associated. This concept resonates very strongly, not only with individual and collective psychology, but with the function of the State as it was defined in classical legal and political philosophy. What we need is a thorough description of the modalities of wall constructions, to begin with the geography of their spreading, a careful examination of their analogies and differences with similar phenomena in the past, and a critical discussion...