Dedicated to my mother Margaret McDonald

and a life spent building bridges

CONTENTS

Introduction

1    China

2    USA

3    Israel and Palestine

4    The Middle East

5    The Indian Subcontinent

6    Africa

7    Europe

8    UK

Conclusion

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

INTRODUCTION

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. They were heady times in which 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 are seeing walls being built along borders everywhere. Despite globalization and advances in technology, we seem to be feeling more divided than ever. 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. Within a few years, the European nations could have more miles of walls, fences and barriers on their borders 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.

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.

There are many reasons why we erect walls, because we are divided in many ways – in terms of wealth, race, religion and politics. Sometimes divisions lead to violence, and walls are erected to protect or defend. Sometimes walls go up to keep certain people out. Sometimes physical walls don’t go up at all, but we still feel the separation; it’s in our minds. These invisible barriers are often just as effective.

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. 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 2001: A Space Odyssey, 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.

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. The age of walls was upon us and has 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.

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 The World is Flat was based on the belief that globalization would inevitably bring us closer together. It has done that, but it has also inspired us to build barriers. When faced with perceived threats – the financial crisis, terrorism, violent conflict, refugees and immigration, the increasing gap between rich and poor – people cling more tightly to their groups. The co-founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, believed social media would unite us. In some respects it has, 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 in a world where the concept of ‘us and them’ remains?

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 Iranians had 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.

For the purpose of this book I use walls as shorthand for barriers, fences and divisions in all their variety. We do look at physical walls in each chapter, most of which involve bricks and mortar, or concrete and wire, but those walls are the ‘what’ of division, not the ‘why’ – and they are just the beginning of the story.

I haven’t been able to cover every divided region. Instead I have focused on those that best illustrate the challenges of identity in a globalized world: the effects of migration (the USA, Europe, the Indian subcontinent); nationalism as a force for both unity and division (China, the UK, Africa); and the intersections of religion and politics (Israel, the Middle East).

In China, we see a strong nation state with a number of divisions within its borders – such as regional unrest and wealth disparity – that pose a risk to national unity, threatening economic progress and power; thus the government must exert control over the Chinese people. The USA is also divided, for different reasons: the era of Trump has exacerbated race relations in the land of the free, but has also revealed a hitherto unrivalled split between Republicans and Democrats, who are more opposed than ever before.

The divisions between Israel and Palestine are well established, but with so many further subdivisions within each population it is almost impossible to try to agree upon a solution. Religious and ethnic divisions also spark violence across the Middle East, highlighting the key struggle between Shia and Sunni Muslims – each incident is the result of complex factors, but much of it comes down to religion, especially the regional rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. In the Indian subcontinent population movements, now and in the coming years, reveal the plight of those fleeing religious persecution as well as that of the many economic and climate refugees.

In Africa, the borders left behind by colonialism are proving difficult to reconcile with tribal identities that remain strong. Across Europe the very concept of the EU is under threat as the walls go back up, proving that the differences of the Cold War years haven’t entirely been resolved, and that nationalism has never really gone away in the age of internationalism. And as the UK leaves the EU, Brexit reveals divisions throughout the kingdom – long-established regional identities, as well as the more recent social and religious tensions that have formed in the era of globalization.

In a time of fear and instability, people will continue to group together, to protect themselves against perceived threats. Those threats don’t just come from the borders. They can also come from within – as China well knows . . .

CHAPTER 1

CHINA

‘As in the real world, freedom and order

are both necessary in cyberspace.’

– President Xi Jinping

The Great Wall of China is over 13,000 miles long, running roughly along the border between central China and Inner Mongolia.

CHINESE EMPERORS HAVE ALWAYS STRUGGLED TO UNITE their disparate and divided fiefdoms into a unitary whole. President Xi Jinping is no different. He may not be called emperor, but his official titles give the game away – General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, President of the People’s Republic of China, Chairman of the Central Commission for Integrated Military and Civilian Development – the list goes on and on. He’s not just a Supreme Leader, he’s a Very Supreme Leader.

Everything about what he leads is vast, including the challenges. China’s five geographical time zones amount to an area the size of the USA. Within this space live 1.4 billion ethnically diverse people, speaking dozens of different languages; it’s a multi-ethnic empire with Communist Chinese characteristics. There may be five geographic time zones, but there’s only one that is official. The answer to the question ‘What’s the time?’ is ‘Whatever time Beijing says it is.’ This central rule has long been the case, but the twenty-first-century emperor has a luxury few of his precursors enjoyed. He can survey his empire from the air – not just the area encompassed by the Himalayas, to the Sea of Japan and the Gobi Desert, down to the South China Sea, but now the economic empire spanning the globe.

Xi is good at quietly projecting his power. He travels more than many of his predecessors. He flies to the world’s capitals, confident in the united economic power of the new China, but en route to the airport he will be reminded of how careful Chinese leaders must always be to ensure that the centre holds.

As you drive north-east along the Airport Expressway out of Beijing towards the Great Wall of China, the divisions within the population are at first difficult for an outsider to identify, but then become increasingly easy. Xi can see these at a glance because many have arisen in his lifetime, some under his leadership.

From the city centre, with its gleaming, neon-lit temples to consumerism and upscale apartment blocks for the well-off, the road leads on past miles of high-rise flats inhabited by the ever-burgeoning middle classes. Further out are the factory and industrial workers who, year on year, continue to flow in from the countryside to the capital and other big cities. A local can spot which apartment blocks house the better off, and which have been hastily thrown up to cope with the influx. Once out into the small towns and villages, there is little neon and less commercialization. In this part of China the towns are drab, colourless, spartan affairs with few amenities; to the foreign eye, there is only an overwhelming sense of greyness. This is perhaps China’s greatest divide – that between urban and rural, rich and poor – and, as we shall see later, it worries the ruling Communist Party. It knows that the unity and stability of the People’s Republic depend to a great extent on bridging the gap, and that its iron grip on the people will slip if it fails to do so.

Unity has always been crucial to China’s success, and at the same time one of its biggest challenges. In the past, the one thing that played both a physical and symbolic role in unifying the country was the Great Wall of China. If Xi kept going along the Expressway, straight past the airport, he’d end up on an eight-lane highway heading further northeast, and from there arrive at a structure that has gripped the world’s imagination.

As you approach the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, the highway diminishes into a simple two-lane road, the buildings become fewer and the landscape increasingly verdant. A few miles away from the wall, the road leads to a car park where you must transfer to a coach to take you to where the road ends. Then it’s either a cable car to the top or a steep 2-mile hike, possibly accompanied by a herd of goats. The unguided goat tour is not optional – if the goats want to follow you, they will; if they don’t, they won’t. Whichever route you choose, you will eventually see something that makes the effort more than worthwhile.

When I first gazed over the miles of brickwork snaking along the mountain tops, I was not as overawed as I had been at, say, the Grand Canyon. Nor did I feel overwhelmed, as I was by the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa in Dubai. I did not feel political ideology emanating from it, as I did when I visited the Berlin Wall at the height of the Cold War. But there was something else. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that I understood China just a little bit better than before.

It didn’t make me any sort of expert – far from it – but in that moment I had a much better appreciation of phrases such as ‘ancient culture’ and ‘the greatest feat in human history’, and of the concept that many in the People’s Republic still divide the world into those who are Chinese and those who are not. After all, the wall was built around a simplistic idea: on one side of it was civilization and on the other barbarity.

Behind me, to the south, lay the heartland of the Middle Kingdom populated by the Han people. To the north, in the far distance beyond the mountains, was where the steppe and desert of Mongolia began, flanked on the right by Manchuria and on the left by the Xinjiang region.

Before the wall existed, some 2,500 years ago, the northern mountains offered a degree of protection to the Han, who had developed settled societies in the fertile lands of the North China Plain. But raiding parties, and occasionally whole armies, from all three regions would find ways through the mountain passes into the flat agricultural lands of the feudal states and cities such as Beijing, Luoyang and Kaifeng. And so, over centuries, the Chinese would develop the quintessential symbol of ‘us and them’.

The great American Sinologist John King Fairbank had perhaps one of the best descriptions of the Great Wall, calling it ‘a line of demarcation separating the steppe from the sown field, nomadism from agriculture, and barbarism from civilization’. And this fits with the prevailing attitude of ‘Sinocentrism’ at the time – the belief that China was the cultural centre of the earth, and the most advanced civilization. The Han also believed that China’s emperor was the only ruler on earth who was mandated by heaven itself, and thus the legitimate emperor of the world. It therefore followed that not only were all other rulers subordinate, but that all other civilizations were inferior. Near neighbours of different ethnicities were to be brought under the rule of the emperor, although they could have their own local leaders. Nearby barbarian states could have kings, but they had to recognize that they were lesser than the Chinese emperor. And even places further afield, such as Xinjiang, Java and Japan, were deemed ‘tributary states’ and had to pay tribute to the Middle Kingdom. This was not a world view designed to win friends, but it certainly influenced people, and for long periods it worked.

Over the centuries, the Great Wall enhanced China’s security, binding it as a political entity and providing the stability to develop farmland in western and northern regions. As the wall stretched westwards it also protected part of the Silk Route, thus furthering economic growth. At its longest, and including the parallel walls, the defensive system stretched for more than 13,000 miles. To give a sense of its magnitude, that is equivalent to four walls parallel to each other, each stretching from the east coast of the USA all the way across to the Pacific Ocean, with a lot of bricks to spare.

Although the physical role it played in uniting the country diminished over the years, it remained an important symbol in the national consciousness. So much so that after the Communists came to power in 1949, Mao Zedong mentioned the wall in a poem about the Long March titled ‘Mount Liupan’, which includes the lines:

The heavens are high, the clouds are pale,

We watch as the wild geese disappear southwards.

If we fail to reach the Great Wall we are not true men,

We who have marched more than 20,000 li . . .

The wording of the penultimate line has subsequently been adapted into a popular proverb that says, ‘One who fails to reach the Great Wall is no hero’, meaning ‘If you can’t overcome great difficulties, you’re no hero.’

The poem caused some problems in the new regime, as the Communists seemed to have conflicting views of the wall – many saw it as a symbol of the nation’s feudal past and believed it should be consigned to history, even encouraging people to vandalize it. But, given that Mao had written about it, other Communists wanted to visit it to show ‘Chairman Mao spirit’. If you go to the Mutianyu section, you can see written in gigantic white characters on the mountain top, ‘Loyalty to Chairman Mao’. And the wall was mentioned in the national anthem, adopted in 1949, so it was clear the Party recognized its cultural and historical importance. For the most part, they settled for ignoring it – to begin with, at least. During the Cultural Revolution, however, the most fervent of the Red Guards actively destroyed sections of the wall – to them it was a part of the ‘Four Olds’, which had no place in the new China: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits and Old Ideas.

Mao died in 1976, and with him the Cultural Revolution. After 1978 the new leader, Deng Xiaoping, began a methodical reconstruction of the wall. He started slowly – the early post-Mao years were a time for caution – but by 1984 he was confident enough to pronounce, ‘Let us love our China and restore our Great Wall.’ In this particular endeavour, it’s likely that Deng had one eye on tourism and foreign currency; the Communist leadership was beginning to embrace aspects of capitalism, and was well aware of how far it had fallen behind other parts of the world. And so laws were passed to make it illegal to damage, remove or write graffiti on any part of the wall, alongside attempts at rebuilding (with mixed success) and a drive towards attracting visitors.

The Great Wall has played a huge role in the popular imagination of both the Chinese and the rest of the world – although some historians argue that the Europeans were more obsessed by it than the Chinese themselves and that this contributed towards awareness of, and identification with, the structure in China itself. So the wall has been instrumental in defining China from outside as well as within its own confines.

In reality, the wall was only ever partially successful in military terms. Without doubt its early-warning system, fortifications and strategic strongholds offered some protection, but, as we’ve seen, they were hardly impregnable. However, its role as a symbol of defence, of dividing the Han from the ‘outsiders’, was invaluable; today it remains an icon of a great and ancient culture.

But what of the great and modern culture?

Qin Shi Huang, the founder of the Qin dynasty, succeeded in uniting seven warring states into one China in 221 BCE, but just because it has lasted twenty-three centuries does not automatically mean it will last another.

The Chinese do not like to talk to outsiders about the country’s problems or divisions. Whereas you’ll not have to go far to find someone in Britain or France, say, who will happily tell you their country is going to the dogs, in China it is considered unpatriotic and a loss of face to criticize the state. Of course, it might also be risky given that China remains a one-party dictatorship.

Nevertheless, there are problems and divisions in the twenty-three provinces, four municipalities, five autonomous regions and two special administrative regions. One of the biggest is that between the Han heartland and the non-Han areas that surround it in a semicircle. To the north-east is Manchuria, to the north Inner Mongolia, to the north-west Xinjiang and to the west Tibet. These regions are crucial for security, natural resources and trade, but they aren’t all in favour of Chinese rule. Manchuria is now totally dominated by the Han, but the other regions maintain their own identity, language, customs and, in the cases of Xinjiang and Tibet, their own religions (Islam and Buddhism) and separatist movements.

China has tried to control Xinjiang and its Uighur people for several centuries, but the population has never fully accepted domination by Beijing. There were a series of uprisings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and even a short-lived Eastern Turkestan Republic in the 1930s. Mao then annexed Xinjiang in 1949 and it now accounts for about one-sixth of China’s territory. To give an idea of how barren and sparsely populated Xinjiang is, it’s worth pointing out that it is about half of the size of India but with less than 2 per cent of its population.

Distribution of the Han population across China’s provinces (2010).

The intervening years have seen a mass movement of Han settlers into Xinjiang, and in a few years’ time they are likely to comprise almost half of the current 22-million-strong population. This has not gone unopposed. The Uighurs complain that they are excluded from the better jobs and persecuted by militia formed within state-controlled construction industries, and there are occasional riots and ethnic clashes. Opposition is sometimes conducted through the legal system, but there is also a small terrorist campaign, fuelled partially by Muslim fighters who have returned from Iraq and Syria. Jihadist organizations in the Central Asian republics are thought to assist them with money and, if necessary, safe havens. Alarm bells began to ring when the Islamic State (IS) terror group released a video showing Uighur men training in Iraq, vowing to plant their flag in China and threatening that blood would ‘flow in rivers’.

In the spring of 2017 there was an outbreak of ethnic violence in the area between Uighurs and Han. This was followed by a massive show of force by heavily armed government troops. The regional Communist Party leader recommended that the soldiers ‘bury the corpses of terrorists in the vast sea of the people’s war’. President Xi was somewhat more restrained, contenting himself with a call for a ‘Great Wall of Iron’ to be built to safeguard Xinjiang and a warning that ethnic division would not be tolerated – ‘Just as one loves one’s own eyes, one must love ethnic unity,’ he said.

Despite the unrest, there is little chance of Beijing loosening its iron grip. The region acts as a buffer zone, is on the new Silk Road and so is crucial for trade, and it has large reserves of the coal that energy-hungry China so badly needs. But, even so, the authorities are seriously concerned about events there. Such divisions and dissension undermine the Communist Party’s image as the only source of power and protector of the people.

The same goes for Tibet. Strategically it serves as a buffer zone for the heartland, preventing India from dominating the high ground along the border with India – arguably, the Himalayas act as a barrier, which is perhaps why a major conflict has never emerged between the two nations. This also allows China to protect its water sources – Tibet is sometimes called the ‘Asian Water Tower’ as so many major rivers flow out of the region.

If you measure Tibet by the three Tibetan provinces, it is about 965,000 square miles, or nearly four times the size of France, and thus equals about a quarter of China’s land mass. However, when Beijing refers to Tibet it means the Tibet Autonomous Region, which was established after China defeated the Tibetan army in 1950. It is less than half the size of the original three provinces, as the rest of the area became absorbed by other Chinese regions, and it contains only a third of China’s ethnically Tibetan population.

As with the Uighur Muslims, the Tibetan Buddhists retain a strong sense of identity separate from the Han Chinese. But for both regions, any hope of self-rule has almost disappeared. In Tibet, it’s estimated that half of the population are now Han. Accurate figures are difficult to obtain, but it’s thought that there are about 6 million Tibetans and 6 million Han living in the area as a whole. In the larger towns they live cheek by jowl, albeit often in different neighbourhoods, although in the rural areas the Tibetans remain a majority.

The divisions between the ethnicities are something the state believes it can handle, as long as those within the Han are smoothed over. And it is these divides that may pose the greatest threat to the prospects of long-term prosperity and unity in China. It’s a threat taken very seriously by the Communist Party. It has learned the lessons of history and knows what happens when the state is weakened by a fragmented population.

In the nineteenth century, China saw a major reversal in the way its trading operated. The land trade routes through Central Asia had always been the economic priority, but now the sea lanes became the primary route. This reversal was not entirely by choice – the British and other foreign powers had used their military strength to force favourable trading terms upon China. As a result, the focus of trade shifted to the Pacific coast, which helped the communities in that region to develop, but it weakened the trading prospects of the interior, which in turn reduced the amount of money spent on its infrastructure. So while the coastal regions prospered, the dirt-poor farmers remained dirt poor – and the foreigners became increasingly powerful. This undermined the central authority over the regions and was partly responsible for the splintering of the state. Given such a divided population, the centre could not hold. A now thoroughly weakened China was helpless in the face of, first, the ‘barbarian’ colonialists, then civil war, and finally invasion by the old enemy, Japan, beginning in 1931.

After the Second World War, when the Communists had won the civil war, they knew they had somehow to bring the country back together. Communist regimes are not known for their liberal tendencies or their relaxed approach to rules and power-sharing. Out went the foreigners and into the regional capitals went the Party cadres. Under Mao they brutally repressed any signs of dissent from the regions and centralized all power in the Party based in Beijing, which from 1949 was again the capital of the country.

Many of the trade links with the developed world were cut, which partially resulted in that great communist ideal – equality. Slowly the coastal areas became almost as poor as the interior, solving that particular imbalance between the regions. Aside from many of the Party bosses, most people continued to be poor for several decades as Mao consolidated power and brought the non-Han territories under his control.

Mao may have reunited the country but it came at the cost of development, and at exactly the time when other nations in the region were emerging into the world economy and rapidly improving themselves. Japan, South Korea, Singapore and others were all outpacing China in economic terms, some in a military capacity as well. If this trend were to continue, it would threaten both China’s defensive security and its internal cohesion, once it became apparent to all how far behind the Chinese had fallen.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, took a deep breath and a gamble: if Chinese consumers were too poor to buy many of the goods China could produce, the economy had to be opened up to the outside world once more. This meant trading via the Pacific coast, so the coastal regions would again prosper more quickly than the interior, thus risking a repeat of the divisions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It was, and still is, a race against the clock. It is also a strategy that relies on an economic policy that must maintain its relentless pace, no matter what. China has to continue making things. The world has to keep buying these things. If the demand drops, China cannot afford, as a normal capitalist system might, to stop making these things. It must keep up production, keep the factories open, subsidize the banks; no matter the surplus – try to dump some abroad at fire-sale prices, sell even more to the part of the domestic population which can afford them. Just don’t let the system stop, because if it does, so might the entire country.

This is a fascinating capitalist version of the old Soviet Communist system, which produced as many tractors as the government told it to, regardless of how many were needed. It has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty – at the cost, however, of environmental damage and the renewed widening of the gap between the coastal region and the interior, the rich and the poor.

The wage difference between rural and urban workers has narrowed slightly in the past few years, but even now someone in a city can expect to earn three times as much as a country worker. Levels of income inequality in China are among the highest in the world, leading to a feeling that China’s wealth-making machine has served the few, not the many – or in Chinese slang, for ‘the Zhao family’, an idiom similar to ‘the top dogs’. The expression has its popular roots in a 1921 novel, The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun, which includes the line ‘You think you’re worthy of the surname Zhao?’, referring to a wealthy clan. The phrase began to appear on the Chinese internet in 2015 and now the saying ‘Zhao and not Zhao’ is equivalent to ‘the haves and have-nots’.

Distribution of wealth across China’s provinces, GDP per person (2010).

All countries have wealth inequality, and all have similar sayings, but the difference in China is the size of that gap, and the sheer number of people on the wrong side of it. A 2015 report from the China Family Panel Studies at Peking University exploring the ‘well-being of the Chinese population’ concluded that, overall, wealth inequality was getting worse. It reported that a third of China’s wealth is owned by 1 per cent of households, while the bottom 25 per cent of households account for just 1 per cent of wealth. The disparity can be traced back to the opening up of the economy in 1979.

The government is very aware of the problems and dangers such division can pose, especially as an internet poll conducted in 2015 suggested that wealth inequality, with its knock-on effects on health and education, is the top issue that people want the government to address. In a news item on the report the People’s Daily newspaper commented, ‘These inequalities are growing steadily. If they cannot be effectively solved, they may very likely threaten social stability and thus become a bottleneck in future social development.’

There is even a divide between the generations, with some elderly people harking back to the days of Mao and ‘equality’. They look askance at the younger generation, more of whom are urban, better educated and consumerist, or at least seek to be. The Communist Party’s future is dependent on what it delivers to them and vice versa.

The developing fissures in Chinese society cannot be allowed to widen. One of the ways in which the government intends to address the problem is to create a much bigger urban consumerist population, thereby offsetting the blows to the economy when exports abroad falter. Estimates vary, but at least 150 million people have left the rural areas this century and the number is expected to increase. It is the younger generations who move from the countryside, and within them are a disproportionate number of men – married men will sometimes travel to find work in the cities, leaving behind family members to maintain the fields. Despite this, it is crucial to remember that even now about 900 million Chinese live in rural areas and about 500 million in an urban environment.

Change has been quick, and will quicken. By 2026 Beijing hopes to have moved another 250 million people, meaning that by then half of the population will be urban. To achieve this involves a mass uprooting of people, along with the destruction of villages and the building of cities, megacities, roads and high-speed railways. The majority of the movement continues to be from west to east, the west still tending to be more rural, with higher illiteracy rates; the east, especially towards the seaboard, is increasingly urban and oriented towards technology, industry and business.

However, the mass migration to the cities reveals and exacerbates another gap within the urban population, again between rich and poor. It has been created by the hukou system, a form of registration that is rooted in the social structure of the country. It is one of the things that have helped to entrench the perception of the rural population as second-class citizens.

The hukou system predates the Great Wall, going all the way back to the Xia dynasty (2070–1600 BCE), which started registering every member of every family. In 1953 the Communist Party continued to use the ancient system but also started to classify people as rural or urban dwellers. This was not just another way to keep tabs on everyone; it was intended to stop people migrating to the urban areas, which were not capable of absorbing an influx at the time, and to avoid a repeat of the inequalities between country and city of the previous century.

To this day the system still exists and everyone’s name, parents’ names, date of birth, spouse, etc., must be registered – which is normal in many countries. But, in China, where you are registered determines where you live and, crucially, where you can receive state aid and in what form. The key divisions arise in the local vs non-local and agricultural vs non-agricultural categories.

Let’s say your family is registered as non-agricultural Shanghai. This immediately gives you access to a wide range of health and education services in the city. For example, according to a paper in the China Economic Review, funding per pupil in Beijing in 1998 was twelve times greater than in Guizhou province, a ratio that increased to fifteen in 2001. On the other hand, if your family is registered as agricultural from a farming region 1,000 miles west of Shanghai, the schools you have access to are way below the standard of those in Shanghai, as are the limited range of social services. Moreover, your work consists of back-breaking labour, which sometimes results only in subsistence farming.

So, you move to Shanghai to seek work in a factory. Your wages will immediately be higher, and you may be able to send some money back home. But you are registered as ‘rural agricultural’, so you do not qualify for social security or healthcare in Shanghai. In the event of marrying and having a child, you are also not registered for your child to be educated in Shanghai. This has resulted in a massive urban underclass of migrant workers from the rural areas who are now completely cut off from social services. They were second-class citizens in the countryside, and now find that they are regarded as such in the cities too.

The government faces a quandary when trying to address this problem. One option is to initiate a revolution in social funding in the countryside and bring the rural areas up to the standards of the cities. But not only would that cost vast sums of money, it might also keep people in the countryside at the very time the government knows it still needs to create an urban consumer population if its economic policy is to work. Worse still, some of those already in the cities might choose to go home. If that happens, the economic miracle goes bust, unemployment rockets and social disorder follows.

Somehow Beijing needs to balance the books. It must fund a hukou system in the cities for those who have come from the rural areas, while also increasing the funding for social services in general as the cities continue to grow – then somehow, ideally simultaneously, raise standards in the countryside while still encouraging movement to the built-up areas, preferably creating new cities in the interior.

This is quite a challenge, and how to tackle it is not straightforward; quite apart from the vast expense, the creation of so many new urban environments, spread out around the country, is a logistical challenge. Beijing is toying with the idea of allowing regional governments more power to tax at a local level, raise revenues through land sales and spend the proceeds as it sees fit. It might work. But if it fails, Beijing will have to bail out the local government. And even if it succeeds, it might fuel what the Party dreads – regionalism.

Deng appears to have known that his gamble would give rise to many of these issues. In a famous interview in 1986 Mike Wallace of CBS News asked the then eighty-two-year-old Communist leader about the startling phrase attributed to him from the late 1970s that ‘to get rich is glorious’. Deng replied, ‘According to Marxism, Communist society is based on material abundance . . . So to get rich is no sin. However, what we mean by getting rich is different from what you mean. Wealth in a socialist society belongs to the people. To get rich in a socialist society means prosperity for the entire people. The principles of socialism are: first, development of production and second, common prosperity. We permit some people and some regions to become prosperous first, for the purpose of achieving common prosperity faster. That is why our policy will not lead to polarization, to a situation where the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.’

He was half right and half wrong. Half wrong because the rich have got richer, but half right because despite the vast gap in equality, the poor have not got poorer – in fact many have got richer.

China has created a middle class of about 400 million people and it has lifted hundreds of millions more out of abject poverty. It’s a work in progress, and you can’t rule out the possibility of things going backwards, but there are enough Chinese who can still remember just how poor most people were before, and that there was almost no chance of lifting yourself out of that poverty – after all, most of the grandparents of today’s mature adults were peasants in a feudal society. This buys the Party a little more time to address the problem; but if it cannot narrow the wealth gap soon, eventually the resentment from the ‘non-Zhaos’ will grow.

Another problem the government faces is that of an ageing population. This isn’t unique to China, of course. But it is a particular issue for China because of the ‘one child only’ policy, which means that the population is ageing much faster than in other countries. In less than a decade the number of elderly will rise from 200 million to 300 million. Is the government prepared for such a change in demographics? Its economic policy has been reliant on a young and plentiful labour force. Proportionally, this pool of available labourers – and taxpayers – will get smaller at the same time as the financial burden of providing care to the ageing population increases, putting economic progress at risk.

Again the solution is not clear. One option is to raise the retirement age by five years, but that simply postpones the problem, and in the meantime creates another: the college graduates the education system is churning out want jobs; unemployment and lack of promotion are already difficulties and will only be exacerbated if the older generation retires later. The alternative is to ensure that the social services can provide pensions and drop the ‘one child’ policy. The latter was done in 2015, but the government is still looking for ways to fund the former.

These are the multiple divisions simmering within the Han population, all of which pose a potential threat to the government if they worsen. The authorities must retain control of China’s heartland if they are to keep its economic policy on track and the outlying regions in check. Their solution is to control the flow of information, to prevent dissenting ideas from spreading, to stop opposition consolidating. They must divide in order to unite; and so, in the age of the internet, the Great Firewall of China came into being.

This creates contradictory policies: suppressing information while simultaneously creating a vibrant economy that is increasingly based on data exchange across the country and with the outside world. In the early days of the internet this was not a problem for a government hell-bent on protecting its position as China’s only source of power and information. Access was limited, so all internal mass communication was state-controlled, and the few internet cafés or universities connected to the web could be easily monitored, both physically and electronically. As recently as 2005, only 10 per cent of the population had access to the internet. Now, however, the figure is 50 per cent – and rising. That’s about 700 million users, which is roughly a quarter of the world’s online population. And that is harder to control.

Keeping the Chinese people digitally cut off from the outside world has been easier than dividing them from each other. What the outside world calls the Great Firewall is known in China as the ‘Golden Shield’. This outward-facing firewall is supposed to protect the Chinese population from such damaging ideas as democracy, free speech and unplugged culture. Although there are some ‘workarounds’ such as virtual private network (VPN) services, which are designed to tunnel under the wall, most Chinese people do not have access to sites as diverse as Time, Dropbox, The Economist, Facebook, YouTube, Amnesty International, The Tibet Post, The Norwegian Broadcasting Company, Le Monde or Pornhub.

The inner walls, meanwhile, are there to prevent potentially political cyber networks emerging and to keep what is happening in one part of the country – Xinxiang, for example – quiet from the rest. The Party particularly fears social media being used to organize like-minded groups who might then gather in public places to demonstrate, which in turn could lead to rioting.

Rogier Creemers, a researcher of law and governance in China at Leiden University in the Netherlands, is one of the world’s leading experts on the Chinese internet. He argues that the outside world doesn’t fully understand the Chinese government’s attitude to the digital revolution: ‘I would say that in comparison we generally see the internet through a rose-tinted lens, that everyone’s free, there’s freedom of information, democracy, etc. China from the get-go was a lot more sceptical. They thought new technology would have new consequences and we need to deal with those consequences. When the Chinese talk about wangluo anquan – cyber security – they don’t just mean technological integrity [protecting the physical system, e.g. power lines, from damage] or cybercrime. They mean the entire role internet technology may have in destabilizing economic and social stability. So, things we may not see as cyber security such as, say, online rumours, they do.’

China has its own versions of companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter in the shape of Renren, Baidu and Weibo, but they are heavily monitored. The level of censorship varies between the regions; for example, in Tibet and Xinjiang the firewalls are both higher and deeper. A university student in Shanghai might get away with using a VPN to access a banned foreign news source, but one in the Uighur capital of Urumqi would probably receive an invitation to discuss the technology at the city police HQ. There are ways of tracing who is using VPNs, and for what reason, and the state wants to know all about it. It knows that some domestic and foreign companies, and indeed some individuals, will use the technology for business purposes, to which it largely turns a blind eye. But in 2009 Uighur activists gained access to Facebook, and the company’s continuing legal troubles in China can be traced back to that incident.

Until 2013 a succession of start-up media platforms saw the business opportunities the internet offered and some became quite popular but ended up in hot water and were banned. In August 2015, for example, the start-up news site Initium Media launched from Hong Kong. Just a week later there was an explosion in a chemical factory in the northern city of Tianjin. Initium’s reporters managed to get past the security cordons, discover that 173 people had died, and followed up by reporting on the factory owner’s high-level connections. Days later, with no official announcement, the site was blocked in mainland China, forcing the company to change its business model and concentrate on reaching Chinese people outside China – a somewhat smaller market.

The authorities were particularly alarmed in 2010 when smartphones became available and affordable, and people had the ability to spread information easily and quickly, 24/7. So, as Dr Creemers explains, the leadership used a number of policies and regulations to push social media into the private sphere: ‘For example it has tried to ensure that the Weibo [microblogging] platform has become less popular, but that WeChat is widely promoted. Why? Because WeChat is not public: if you share something within your chat group, it is not shared by massive numbers of people, and what is shared is shared slowly. This makes it easier to monitor – it’s divide and rule.’

The new Chinese cyber-security legislation, which came into law in 2017, has built the walls higher than ever, metaphorically speaking. The legislation, formulated to ensure ‘digital sovereignty’, includes classic ‘catch-all’ laws designed to mean what the Party interprets them to mean. For example, if a foreign company is involved in any part of China’s critical information structure, it must store all of its information on physical databases inside China. What constitutes ‘critical’ has not been defined. This information can be accessed by the government, and cannot be sent outside China without being checked by the intelligence services. Foreign and domestic social-media companies must keep all registration details by would-be users, then track and record their online activity for at least six months, and be prepared to hand over that data if the government demands it. The legal language is so loose that, theoretically, any foreign company that has offices in China could be required to store any information it has about a Chinese citizen within China. A company must also agree to actively assist any investigation into its data storage by the government.

All this costs money, which the domestic companies would rather be spending on other things and which foreign companies might baulk at. With the added worry about the risk to their ‘intellectual property’, IT and new technology firms especially might decide to invest in a more benign business environment instead. While this could in theory free up space for domestic companies to develop, they in turn are hampered by the restriction on the free flow of information and ideas. Even before the legislation, in 2016, the Washington Post reported that, according to the American Chamber of Commerce in China, four out of five of its member companies had experienced a negative impact on business due to internet regulations and censorship.

Dr Creemers describes the Party as ‘the ultimate risk-management company’, constantly scanning the horizon for any signs of political unrest. He believes that when the internet first came to China, the authorities took a few years to work out how to deal with it, but now they are very clear where they are focusing their efforts: ‘The most important tactic the government has developed is in forestalling organized opposition. They will not allow cross-cutting interest to materialize. They believe they must keep people divided so that they can’t organize along lines of class, geography or whatever. The traditional media were organized so that they were limited; for example, professional newspapers for the steel industry, which would only write about steel, provincial papers could only report about their region. So even if one outlet went rogue, there was limited damage. The internet spoiled that model. For the first time in recent history individual Chinese people have access to the tools of mass communication, and there were a few years where the internet ran amok. Some people think the government is paranoid; I’m not so sure, I think they are very soberly aware of everything.’

Aware of the growing risks to his monopoly on power, President Xi has personally led the push to overhaul China’s cyber strategy by ordering the groups crafting it to report directly to him. For the president, the propagation of communication is a potential threat and so the censorship starts at the top.

Xi is the first Chinese leader to come to power fully aware of the potential of the internet. Since assuming office in 2013 he has personally overseen all of China’s cyber strategies, both internal and external. All the major government cyber departments report directly to a committee he chairs. He has used this power not only to devise the policies, but also to help create something of a ‘cult of personality’ around his persona. The Party has even ‘bestowed’ upon him the title of ‘Core Leader’, which puts him in a pantheon occupied only by Mao and Deng and indicates something close to absolute power. The Core Leader’s face is now everywhere in China, gazing down on you from billboards, in offices and on millions of products on sale in tourist shops across the country, from Beijing and Shanghai to the Great Wall.

At the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party in late 2017 the president further consolidated power. He ensured his supporters were elected to the politburo and they in turn now promote the concept of ‘Xi Jinping Thought On Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’. This was the first time since Mao that a leader’s ideas were promoted as ‘thought’, which in Chinese political terms is the top of the tree.

Yet another digital divide is between the minority of Chinese who speak English and those who do not. Type ‘Tiananmen Square, uprising, tank’ into Baidu’s search box in German and you might possibly get back a link, in German, to the events of 1989. Type the same words in Chinese and you’ll probably see: ‘According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, some results are not displayed’, or, if you’re lucky, a nice photomontage of one of the great tourist attractions of the world.

David Bandurski, co-director of the China Media Project, has noted the introduction of a new term being used by the Cyberspace Administration of China – ‘positive energy’. This, he argues, is a euphemism for content that is acceptable to the authorities, but some Chinese scholars are ‘concerned about the possibility of a crackdown on “rightists” under the guise of promoting “positive energy”’. Until 2016, the head of the administration was Lu Wei, a man who understands the power of information. Wei had worked his way up through the ranks of the Xinhua News Agency before taking up his cyber role. He was then promoted to deputy director of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, which in essence means deputy head of all media control in the country. It was Wei who said his country had ‘cyber-governance with Chinese characteristics’, echoing Deng’s phrase ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. Wei added that his country was ‘very hospitable to the outside world, but I can choose who will be a guest in my home’.

Internet censorship does restrict China’s economic potential. The country is still the world’s leader in e-commerce, with digital retail sales making up almost 40 per cent of the global total, but retail internet sales and innovation are two different things. China wants not only to create a much bigger internal market but also to make high-end goods and develop cutting-edge technology. It is very aware that although iPhones are made in China, their design and technology come from far away in Silicon Valley.

This is a price the government believes is worth paying for the time being; it is part of the balancing act and gamble with time. The Communist Party needs to ensure it can feed 1.4 billion people, find work for them, find things for them to make, and find markets into which they can sell those things. At the same time, it believes it must crush the possibility of any organized opposition, be that democracy-loving students, independence-minded Tibetans, Falun-Gong-practising religious types, or even artistic expressions of freedom. If that means holding back the free flow of information at the expense of the economic miracle – so be it.

Qin Shi Huang knocked down the internal walls of the warring states only once he was confident in his ability to hold them together. More than 2,000 years later, the power of the leadership, and the unity of the Han and the nation, still come first. Even if that unity is achieved through a digital wall that separates China from the rest of the world and divides itself.

CHAPTER 2

USA

‘Show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll

show you a 51-foot ladder.’

– Janet Napolitano, former US Secretary of Homeland Security

Part of the existing border barrier along the US–Mexico border, separating Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, from Sunland Park, New Mexico.

ON THE DAY AFTER DONALD TRUMP WAS ELECTED AS THE 45th President of the United States the uber-arch, neoconservative commentator Ann Coulter published a meticulously planned ‘detailed schedule’ of the priorities for the first 100 days in office. She began with: ‘Day 1: start building the wall.’ Then progressed to: ‘Day 2: continue building the wall.’ And so on: ‘Day 3: continue building the wall. Day 4: continue building the wall.’ This went on until: ‘Day 100: report to American people about progress of wall. Keep building the wall.’ It’s all good knockabout stuff, based on hubris and clickbait journalism, and it helps pay her mortgage, but it’s unlikely Ms Coulter was stupid enough to think it would happen. And, of course, it didn’t.

For months, Mr Trump had been promising to build a wall on the US–Mexico border to help curb illegal immigration into the USA. Though he appears mostly to ‘consult his own genius’ (to use the French phrase about President Giscard d’Estaing), even before he entered the White House he was informed of the expense of wallbuilding, the political opposition to it and, of equal importance, the terrain upon which the wall was to be built. Speeches about ‘a wall, a great big beautiful wall’ played well with his core support, but that is a poor basis upon which to found a massive engineering project, and the plans in his head soon ran into a wall of reality – and the quicksand of Washington DC.

Within weeks of Trump’s election, conservative Republican senators such as Lindsey Graham were scrambling out of that quicksand. Mr Graham, one of the smartest operators on Capitol Hill, began talking about the word ‘wall’ being a ‘code word for better border security’, as if the president’s speeches had been delivered in the style of the secret BBC radio broadcasts to the French Resistance – ‘This is London! Jean has a long moustache.’

It had not been a code word; Trump had even specified that the wall would be built of precast concrete planks with an average height of 30 feet. However, pretending that it was a metaphorical term was a useful linguistic trick by which to enable the Grand Old Party to carry on without too much damage. President Trump went on to sign a $1.1 trillion bill to fund government spending for the rest of the fiscal year. The monies set aside for the wall totalled zero.

This is perhaps the most famous non-existent wall in the world. But even though it is yet to be constructed, it is a powerful symbol of how division has driven, and continues to drive, the cultural and political juggernaut that is the USA.

Still, a lack of funding wasn’t going to stop the president. The US Customs and Border Protection Agency invited tenders to build Trump’s wall, with the stipulation that the barrier must be strong enough to withstand blows for up to four hours from ‘sledgehammers, car jacks, pickaxes . . . propane or butane or other similar hand-held tools’. Other rules were that it must be ‘physically imposing in height’ and ‘impossible to climb’. The resulting 200 or so submissions were interesting.

One entry was from a Rod Hadrian of California, who nonchalantly brushed past the limited success his namesake had in keeping out the alien hordes. Another, from Pittsburgh-based Clayton Industries, said it had the answer – a chain-link fence on the Mexican side of the border, and a wall on the American side. In between them would run a trench filled with nuclear waste. From Clarence, Illinois, Crisis Resolution Security Services entered a design that was a Great Wall of China lookalike, complete with turrets and crenellated walls. It consisted of two 26-foot concrete walls built on a 30-foot packed-earth berm. Along the top would run a pedestrian walkway, as on the Great Wall of China, but the company’s founder, Michael Hari, also saw the potential for cycling along the wall and turning it into a tourist attraction. Mr Hari, a former sheriff’s deputy, claimed to have compassion for people who try to enter the USA illegally, but said that he submitted his designs for patriotic reasons, telling the Chicago Tribune: ‘We would look at the wall as not just a physical barrier to immigration but also as a symbol of the American determination to defend our culture, our language, our heritage, from any outsiders.’

This is the heart of the matter. Walls can reduce illegal crossings, although this particular border barrier is an especially porous one, but they do more – they make people who ‘want something to be done’ feel that something is being done. As Dr Reece Jones of the University of Hawaii, and author of Violent Borders, says, ‘Walls rarely work, but they are powerful symbols of action against perceived problems.’ The Great Wall of China aimed to separate the civilized world from the barbarians; Trump’s wall aims to separate Americans from non-Americans. It’s the concept of the nation that unites Americans – and now, for some, Trump’s wall signifies the preservation and sanctity of that concept. It endorses the idea of making ‘America Great Again’ and symbolizes the support that exists for putting ‘America First’.

All countries contain divisions. The Founding Fathers knew this and attempted to establish one nation under God, with equality for all. The flaws in the early days, notably slavery, are well known, but after a troubled history the USA has become, in constitutional and legal terms, a free country, protecting the rights and equality of its citizens and striving to break down the internal divides. This in itself is a remarkable feat: equality in law is a strong basis for achieving equality in practice.

One of the USA’s ideals has been that all its citizens are defined as being American, a population bound by shared values, not by race, religion or ethnic background. The motto held in the beak of the eagle in the Great Seal of the United States reads: ‘E pluribus unum’ (out of many, one). More than most countries, the USA has partially succeeded in blending peoples from all over the world into a nation. In Lebanon or Syria, for example, national identity falls well behind ethnic, religious or tribal identity. Nevertheless, you don’t have to look too closely at the ‘shining city on a hill’ to see that some parts of it are far from lustrous and others are showing rust.

Each wall tells its own story. The Saudi barrier along the Iraqi border is functional, and it functions. It does not stand as a testament to Saudi suspicion of ‘the other’, because across that border the ‘others’ are mostly of the same religion, language and culture as the people in the kingdom. America is different. It’s the ‘otherness’ of those who are entering the country, and the fear that they could dilute what some perceive to be ‘American’ culture, that makes the wall so important to its supporters. For those who oppose it, the wall goes against American values of freedom, liberty, equality and an America for all. The controversy about the wall gets to the heart of the debate about who gets to define what ‘American’ means in the coming century.

According to the US Census Bureau, in 2015 there were 27.5 million people in Texas, of whom 38.8 per cent were Hispanic. Studies by the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan think tank, suggest that in 2014 there were 4.5 million immigrants in the state, the majority of them Spanish-speaking. This trend is also seen in some of the other states in the region. Head south from Phoenix, Arizona, through the flat desert lands, towards the border about 180 miles away: the further south you go, the more Spanish you hear spoken, and the more Hispanic life becomes. As this trend grows, it is possible that within a few decades several states will give Spanish legal equality with English as the official language in schools and the government system. At the federal level the USA has no official language, but in thirty of the fifty states it is currently listed as English. However, some states, including Texas and New Mexico, already use both English and Spanish in government documents and more will inevitably follow suit as the years pass. As the Spanish language and culture become increasingly dominant, some regions may start calling for even greater autonomy from the federal system. This may be decades down the line, but it is a very real possibility; history is littered with examples of nation states evolving in such a way.

So some parts of the American electorate are concerned that the USA will no longer be a white-majority, English-speaking country as the demographics change, and this is one of the issues driving current US politics. Nativism seems to have reached a peak with the election of Trump, and the erection of a concrete wall would symbolize a particular period in American history. But it’s important to understand that the US–Mexico border has long been a troublesome one. Its current route was mapped out following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican–American War. But its location before that had been quite different.

Where exactly the dividing line lay became an issue of national security after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, bringing the Mississippi River System, which flowed into the crucial port of New Orleans, into the United States. At the time, the Spanish controlled Texas as part of ‘New Spain’, which now became a concern for the Americans as it meant that a potentially hostile military force could approach within striking range of New Orleans. They wanted control of the region. The Americans claimed that Texas was part of the Louisiana Purchase; Spain begged to differ, but was in a weak position from the start. According to a Spanish census of 1793 there were fewer than 5,000 non-Native American settlers in Texas. Spain was far away, the European wars had left it a weakened power, and the USA was next door to Texas, with ambitions to expand.

In 1819, as part of the ensuing negotiations, the two countries agreed that Florida would go to the USA and Spain would continue to control Texas, with the US giving up any claim to the area. However, in 1821 Mexico won independence from Spain and claimed Texas as part of its territory. Still greatly outnumbered by the indigenous population at the time, Mexico felt that the greatest threat to its hegemony was the Comanche nation, and so its priority was to increase the population of Texas in order to consolidate control – but this actually helped to deliver the opposite outcome.

Thinking that a larger American population would act as a buffer between the Comanche and its own settlers, and would easily be absorbed into the population, the Mexican government gave all sorts of inducements to lure colonists from the USA as well as Mexico.

Indeed, newcomers were to be offered Mexican citizenship three years after arrival. However, the new immigrants resisted certain aspects of Mexican culture, and did not assimilate as the government had hoped. Two obstacles in particular stood in the way: religion and slavery.

US–Mexico border in 1819 and in 2017, with existing fencing.

Most of the Americans arriving were Protestants, some of them devout. They were not about to embrace Catholicism, which Mexico insisted was to be the territory’s sole religion. Many of them were also slave owners, whereas Mexico supported the abolition of slavery, officially outlawing it in 1829. Realizing the problem, Mexico tried to limit immigration, but people kept coming illegally, and by 1834 considerably outnumbered Mexican settlers by nearly ten to one. The growing hostility well suited Washington DC, which encouraged an uprising against Mexican rule; as a result, Texas declared itself a republic in 1836. It then tried to join the USA, but for several years Washington denied the request. There were two main problems. First, a de facto buffer zone between New Orleans and Mexico had been created and it was not considered worthwhile to upset the Mexicans. Second, the Union was in turmoil over slavery and Texas was a slave state. Nevertheless, by 1845 Washington agreed: Texas became the twenty-eighth state, and the USA’s southern border now reached the Rio Grande.

The USA then pushed on ever westwards, sparking the Mexican–American War. In 1846 a skirmish along the Rio Grande lit the touchpaper. The war lasted until 1848, and when it ended Mexico lost about a third of its territory in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, including nearly all of present-day New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and California. And that was that. Mexico was weak, America was strong. But this situation will not necessarily last for ever. The borders have changed before, and could do so again. The Americans are aware of that: they’ve been barricading themselves in along their southern border for a long time, and this is not solely a Republican trait.

Following the end of the Mexican–American War in 1848, a sixyear effort was made to survey and establish the boundary line between the two nations, but initially only fifty-two boundary markers designated the 2,000-mile border, and the line was, by and large, only casually observed. During the years of Prohibition (1920–33), however, there was a marked increase in alcohol-smuggling from Mexico, and to combat the problem the US Border Patrol Agency was formed in 1924. A year later the town of El Paso was encouraged to build a ‘hog-tight, horse-high and bootlegger-proof barbed-wire fence’. Of course they were never entirely successful in stemming the flow of illegal liquor across the line – there were, after all, great profits to be made. As the century drew on, Prohibition came to an end, but the movement of illegal products across the border did not. Americans started to increase their consumption of drugs, so instead of alcohol, ever-greater quantities of marijuana, heroin and cocaine were shipped across to meet demand, and at the same time increasing numbers of people were heading north to find work.

A particular turning point in the flow of migrants from Mexico to the US came during the Great Depression. With serious economic problems throughout the USA, the issue of immigrants taking American jobs became a key one, and Mexicans were targeted in particular – during the Mexican Repatriation, somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million people were deported to Mexico, many of whom were actually US-born citizens. The USA changed its strategy once it joined the Second World War; with the majority of American labourers absorbed into the wartime economy, from 1942 there was a concerted effort to attract workers, particularly for farming industries, in order to service a booming post-war America, a trend that continued until the mid 1960s.

Government policy towards immigration changed again as economic downturn and increased migration saw renewed calls for immigration measures, and the barriers started to go up in earnest. In 1978 the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) put out a tender for two 12-foot-high fences topped with barbed wire to be built in Texas. A contractor from Houston reassured the INS that his designs would ‘sever the toes of anyone trying to scale [them]’ due to the sharpness of the razor wire he would supply. There had already been an increase in fence-building, but this particular statement attracted national attention and outrage, with critics dubbing the scheme the ‘Tortilla Curtain’. The issue was already in the national consciousness, but this incident helped to raise public awareness further – and it’s been rising ever since.

The fence-building continued, albeit with less celebration of finger- and toe-severing, but levels of immigration did not noticeably decrease. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan did a deal: around 3 million unauthorized immigrants who had been living in the USA since before 1982 were given ‘amnesty’. In return, Congress approved more stringent regulations to prevent companies from hiring illegal immigrants, as well as tightened border security.

Over the following years, additional barriers were built, but on a limited budget and on occasion using leftover materials from the Vietnam War, such as metal sheets known as perforated steel planking, which had been used as temporary aircraft landing strips. A stretch of wall in southern California was built using tens of thousands of these metal sheets, but to cut costs they were erected horizontally instead of vertically. They covered more ground, but the barrier was then, of course, lower and, as the sheets were corrugated, also provided handy toeholds for anyone wanting a bit of assistance in climbing over them. No matter what fences went up, people could still overcome them relatively easily. The Border Patrol officers began to think of the various barriers simply as a way to reduce the speed at which people could enter the USA, therefore making it easier to catch them, but not as a means to stop them entering.

In the early 2000s, with George Bush in office and in the wake of 9/11, the US government launched a full border fortification programme, imposing an unprecedented degree of separation along most of the boundary. Congress approved the Secure Fence Act, agreeing that another 700 miles could be built – among those voting for the measure were Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama; but even after these improvements and with cross-party support, the fence was, as Border Patrol spokesman Mike Scioli described it in 2008, little more than ‘a speed bump in the desert’.

When President Obama came to the White House there were over 600 miles of barrier, and he kept building – extending the fence, in some regions double-layering it, occasionally even triple-layering. During his term in office there was also a significant increase in the number of forced removals of illegal immigrants compared to the Bush years. This should not come as too much of a surprise given his speech to the Senate in April 2006, when he described the immigration system as ‘broken’, allowing a ‘flood of illegals’ into America:

The American people are a welcoming and generous people. But those who enter our country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law. And because we live in an age where terrorists are challenging our borders, we simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked. Americans are right to demand better border security and better enforcement of the immigration laws . . . And before any guest worker is hired, the job must be made available to Americans at a decent wage with benefits.

Obama adopted a softer tone when he called for undocumented immigrants to be allowed to come out of the shadows and ‘step on a path toward full participation in our society . . . not just for humanitarian reasons; not just because these people, having broken the law, did so for the best of motives, to try and provide a better life for their children; but also because this is the only practical way we can get a handle on the population that is within our borders right now’. This was a pragmatic approach to the problem, recognizing the difficulties involved in identifying and deporting immigrants who were already there, and making room for them to stay, but at the same time accepting that illegal immigration was a problem and taking steps to stop the ‘flood’.

However, the success of all the attempts by Obama and his predecessors to erect barriers along the border to stem the flow of immigrants is questionable. The unauthorized migrant population did fall from 12.4 million in 2007 to 11.1 million in 2011. However, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what percentage can be attributed to the barriers, to increased deportations or to changing economic conditions.

Part of the problem is that there are still opportunities in the USA – not just for those looking for employment but also for unscrupulous employers willing to exploit their workers, and here we face one aspect of the hypocrisy behind some of the anti-immigrant arguments. Countless American companies, big and small, employ huge numbers of illegal immigrants, pay them little, give them no legal rights, and hide their presence from the authorities. The government could begin to arrest lots of American management teams that knowingly hire illegal immigrants. How popular this move would be with companies that rely on cheap labour for construction contracts and fruit picking is another matter.

Ultimately, very few barriers are impenetrable. People are resourceful, and those desperate enough will find a way around, under or over them. Extra barriers simply push would-be illegal immigrants further and further into unguarded, unpopulated areas. These are often in the desert and usually have to be crossed on foot, meaning that thousands of people die from exposure as they attempt to make it to the Promised Land.

There’s an irony in building something that might seem to solve the problem of how to stop people getting in but simultaneously stops them from getting out. Many people actually enter the US legally, on a tourist visa. In the present decade, more than half of those crossing south to north have stayed on; however, a functioning wall makes it harder for them to go home once they have become an ‘illegal’. If you’re working illegally in, say, Phoenix, even if things aren’t going well for you, there’s little incentive in trying to leave knowing that you may well be arrested on the way out.

Another irony in this whole situation is that Mexico has its own very strict immigration laws, and annually deports more people than does the USA. Its immigration policy features racial overtones and is underpinned by the 1974 General Law of Population, which stipulates that people hoping to come to Mexico can be turned away if their presence upsets ‘the equilibrium of the national demographics’. America’s laws are tough on foreigners, but Mexico’s are tougher. For example, if you are caught in Mexico without authorization for a second time you can face up to ten years in jail. Republican politicians in the US delight in reminding their Mexican counterparts of these laws. Some tease them by suggesting that all three countries that are part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have the same immigration laws but base them on those of Mexico.

America’s immigration policies have also been influenced by the rise of terrorist incidents in the USA and across the Western world. Trump has responded with a harsher stance on immigration than his predecessors, with travel bans, the wall and a determination to deport and deter. Whether any of this helps is debatable, particularly in terms of the wall. To begin with, there isn’t any evidence that terrorists have entered the USA across the border with Mexico – the Department of Homeland Security has made several statements that contradict claims of threats from south of the border; for example, in 2014 it said that it had ‘no credible intelligence to suggest terrorist organizations are actively plotting to cross the south-west border’.

There is also limited intelligence (in the public domain, at least) to indicate that there is much of a threat in allowing refugees into the country. Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, researched terror attacks in the USA going back four decades, and concluded that of the 3.25 million refugees allowed in during that period, only twenty had been convicted of attempting or committing terrorism on US soil, and ‘only three Americans have been killed in attacks committed by refugees – all by Cuban refugees in the 1970s’. In fact, since 9/11 over 80 per cent of those involved in terrorist incidents have been citizens or legal residents of the USA.

Bill Clinton pointed out that the spread of ideas could not be stopped by walls, using as an example the 2015 terrorist incident in San Bernardino, California, in which fourteen people were killed and another twenty-two wounded. The attack was carried out by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who had both been converted to radical Islam on social media – Farook was born in the USA and was a lawful permanent resident. Clinton commented: ‘You can build a wall across our border with Canada as well. Create giant sea walls along the Atlantic and the Pacific . . . We can send the whole US Navy to the Gulf Coast and keep anybody from getting in there. We could use every airplane the US Air Force has got in the air to stop planes from landing. You still couldn’t keep out the social media.’ He did have a point, but President Trump was unswayed by the advice of his predecessor. Arguing that social media is difficult to police, or that terrorists do not enter the US illegally across the Mexican border, has less emotional resonance with many people than the benefits of a physical wall.

What do continue to flow across the border are illegal products – and this is a two-way street. Drugs made in Mexico can sell for many times their production costs because millions of Americans will pay top dollar for their illegal substance of choice. Going the other way, guns bought legally in the USA can be sold in Mexico for a huge mark-up. Evidence suggests, however, that barriers do little to interfere with the trade, and that in fact more drugs cross via official checkpoints than come through the desert – it’s cheaper for drug runners to bribe an official than to organize a run through the patrolled borderlands or dig a tunnel. That is exactly why the gang bosses fight each other for control of the walled-off border towns. Win the town and you win access to the officials. Guns and drugs smugglers are often cold-blooded murdering thugs, but they are also businessmen.

It would make sense for the two countries to work together on this issue, not just to control movement of people and illegal goods and substances, but to encourage trade and economic prosperity in the region. Mexico and the USA are very different places in terms of language, skin tone, religion, climate and history, but they are increasingly tied through economics, and if anything can move through, under, around and over barriers it is the profit motive. And while there are many ways to prevent unwanted immigration, one thing is certain: a vibrant, booming economy south of the Rio Grande would do more to reduce the inward flow than a wall, as far fewer jobseekers would bother to cross.

Take the car industry in the area, which has become known as the Texas–Mexico Automotive SuperCluster Region. Within Texas and four Mexican states near the border are twenty-seven vehicle assembly plants that rely on each other to produce finished models. Working together, they have succeeded in establishing a successful industry in the region on both sides of the border, creating jobs, encouraging innovation and boosting the local economies. Making sure that arrangements like these can continue unimpeded is in the best interests of both countries.

Despite this, in the first year of Trump’s presidency the USA continued to slowly withdraw into itself, scuppering multilateral trade deals, pushing to renegotiate NAFTA, and casting doubt on America’s commitment to NATO. The wisdom of these moves is debatable, but what is not is that only the USA can do this. America constitutes approximately 22 per cent of the world’s economy. More importantly, it can pull up the drawbridge because it exports only around 14 per cent of its GDP, according to the World Bank, and 40 per cent of that goes next door to Mexico and Canada, so even though global trade wars cost America dear, it is the only major power that can absorb the potential losses of withdrawing from globalization without seriously endangering itself in the short term.

However, history suggests that isolationism does harm the USA in the long term; whenever it has withdrawn into itself, it has always been drawn out again, and not always when it was prepared to be. The pros and cons of isolationism are one of many conflicts within American discourse at a time when the great Republic seems to be divided in many ways.

So, will Trump’s big, beautiful wall get built?

‘Guns, drugs, illegals’ – these can be emotive terms in political dialogue, and people want solutions to problems, so even after entering the White House President Trump kept up the bluster, telling the National Rifle Association, ‘We’ll build the wall. Don’t even think about it, that’s an easy one’, and assuring his supporters, ‘If we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall.’

The Donald may not be aware of the old English phrase ‘Fine words butter no parsnips’ (nothing is achieved by empty promises or flattery), but it certainly applies here. And despite the pre- and postelection rhetoric, the concept of Trump’s wall ran into the problems he had been warned about, the same ones his predecessors had with border control: politics, budget, state law, federal law, nature and international treaties. For example, Mexico and the USA each have copies of the document they signed in 1970, solemnly swearing to keep the floodplain of the Rio Grande open. President Obama went ahead and built fences anyway, but the terms of the treaty forced the fence barrier so far into the USA that it had to be built with huge gaps to allow Americans to get to their houses. This was something of a design flaw and was soon noticed by Latin Americans looking for ways to enter the land of the free illegally.

Private citizens own about two-thirds of southern borderland property and land. Many of them do not want a huge concrete wall in their backyards, and can take legal action to stop it from being built. If the state buys the land the previous owners must receive ‘just compensation’, and deciding what that might be can be a lengthy process. Native American tribes can, and have, launched legal campaigns as well. For example, the Tohono O’odham nation owns land that straddles both countries and has gone to court to prevent it from being divided.

The landscape itself presents further obstacles. The border stretches 2,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico via California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. At most a wall could be built along 1,000 miles of it, with natural obstacles such as steep terrain, bedrock and water getting in the way along the rest of the route.

Even so, the figures being bandied about for the project are so huge they are almost meaningless to most of us. Pick a figure, any figure, then add on a bit because no one’s really sure how much a wall would cost – other than ‘a lot’. Trump has estimated the price tag at between $10 and $12 billion, but most other sources suggest that the figure would be much higher. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has produced an estimate (albeit from quite rough approximations of the cost of materials, labour and a very uncertain time frame) which suggests that 1,000 miles of 30-foot-high concrete would cost anywhere between $27 and $40 billion. Other guesses included $25 billion and $21 billion, the latter from Homeland Security. This is still a staggering amount of money, but if you were selling the idea perhaps you could say it’s only $21 million per mile . . . None of these figures account for maintenance costs. Nevertheless, many people won’t be perturbed by the expense – after all, Trump has claimed that the cost of the wall would be covered by Mexico, a suggestion that was greeted enthusiastically by his supporters, though it’s a tougher sell south of the border, with former Mexican president Vicente Fox Quesada declaring, ‘Mexico is not going to pay for that f***ing wall.’

A cheaper way forward would be to buy into Senator Graham’s face-saving claim that the word ‘wall’ is code for ‘better security’. After all, a fence might partially do the job. In parallel with other measures, it would be much more cost-effective, and it would have the psychological effect of satisfying the need of some voters for a physical barrier to make them feel safer. Politicians are not strangers to the advantages of gestures over practicalities. But, so far, Trump remains firm that a wall is what the people want, and that is what they’re going to get. By early 2018 several prototypes of the wall had gone up but opposition from Congress to funding the project had not gone down.

The obstacles to the construction of the wall are substantial. The legal cases are conceptual roadblocks, which admittedly can sometimes be bypassed; but is it really worth it, given that there are other physical barriers in the way of actually building the thing? If the wall is a political statement, then for its supporters the answer would be yes, and that would override the difficulties presented by the terrain as well. The more concrete, the stronger the message, the more the core support swells. As long as there is a decline in immigration (which may well happen, due to a combination of other security measures or economic factors), then the fact that there are gaps in the wall will be overlooked by many voters; it will be hailed as a key policy in stopping foreigners from entering and protecting American values. A wall is a reassuring physical symbol – and sometimes symbolism can outweigh practicalities.

Other presidents have fortified the border with Mexico, but Trump’s wall is particularly divisive because it represents a specific moment in US history. The politics of building the wall isn’t just about keeping Mexicans out. A border defines a nation, and Trump’s wall is attempting to define what America is – both physically and ideologically. To understand how it reflects and deepens historical divides, we need to look at the other fissures splitting the country.

Of all the divisions in America, race appears to be the widest. There are approximately 324 million people in the USA. According to the CIA World Factbook, based on the 2010 census, of these 72.4 per cent are white, 12.6 per cent black, 4.8 per cent Asian, and just under 1 per cent Amerindian and Alaska Native. People of ‘two or more races’ comprise 2.9 per cent, and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders

0.2 per cent, with ‘other’ at 6.2 per cent. You will have noticed here the absence of the growing Hispanic population. This is because the US Census Bureau considers Hispanic to mean someone of Spanish/ Hispanic/Latino origin ‘who may be any race or ethnic group’. This disparate group is the largest minority in the US, making up about 17 per cent of the US population.

And that number is set to grow in the twenty-first century. As we’ve seen, the white majority is diminishing as a proportion of the population (especially in the southern states) in a country that is already struggling to be fully integrated. Estimates of population figures vary, but most experts agree that the white majority could cease to exist in a few decades’ time. Including the Hispanics, non-whites currently make up about 40 per cent of the population, a figure that is predicted to rise to 53 per cent by 2050, with Hispanics comprising about 29 per cent, making them the fastest-growing ethnic group over the next thirty years. To those who see this trend as a real concern, building a wall and potentially stopping the influx of immigrants holds out the hope of curbing this demographic shift, although in reality it will do little to alter the situation.

Hispanic proportion of state populations across the USA (2014).

The anti-immigration rhetoric that tends to accompany support for the wall, however, creates further tensions among the American population. Immigrants are regularly painted in a negative light, with Trump describing them as ‘bad hombres’: ‘When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best . . . they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.’ This type of language has contributed to the rising levels of reported discrimination against Latinos over the past decade. A 2016 Pew Research poll, for example, found that 52 per cent of Hispanics say they have been treated unfairly because of their ethnicity, a figure that rose to 65 per cent among eighteen- to twentynine-year-olds. Interestingly, this was the same figure for the same age group of black people, but overall Hispanics were far less likely than blacks to say they had experienced problems with ‘el racismo’.

Without question, enormous advances have been made in racial equality, and every day tens of millions of Americans of all skin tones happily coexist, intermingle, eat, work and play together. And yet racism is still a major issue across the country.

While the fast-growing Hispanic population certainly faces discrimination, the clearest racial divide in the US is between white and black, which originated in the time of slavery and continues today. The negative effect this has on people’s lives is clear: by almost all measures, being born black in America makes you more likely to be less well off, less educated and less healthy than being born white. This is not universally true: a well-off black, middle-class, suburban family probably has more opportunities in life than an impoverished white rural one. A Brookings Institute study suggests that whatever your ethnic group – white, black or Hispanic – if you are from a poor background, even with a college degree, your earnings in later life will be lower than those of a person from a wealthier family.

But, that said, as a rule of thumb, in the lottery of life the odds are not good if you are black. It remains clear that historical and contemporary racism is a major factor in the startling disparities between ethnic groups. This is true even at the very beginning of life. In the richest country on earth infant mortality is at 4.8 per 1,000 births among the white population but 11.7 for black people – roughly equivalent to a middle-ranking nation such as Mexico.

Lower health, lower wealth and lower expectations all contribute to lower education levels as well, which become apparent as early as the age of two. By then, according to OECD and US education statistics, slightly fewer black children are demonstrating proficiency in development skills. By three to five years old the gap grows slightly again in terms of reading ability; this is thought to be linked to a relative lack of reading materials in black homes, parents having less time to spend reading to children, and possibly a lack of interest in the books due to a dearth of non-white characters. As we move up through the school system we find black Americans being suspended and/or expelled at three times the rate of white students. In schools where the majority of pupils are from minority groups the teachers also tend to be less experienced and less well paid.

Behind these figures is the reality of daily life in what is often a low-income single-parent household. Twenty-five per cent of black parents say their children are in unsafe neighbourhoods, whereas for white parents the ratio is 7 per cent. By the time we reach graduation age we find that black Americans are twice as likely as their white counterparts to drop out of high school. One study says that if white American and black American high-school educational attainment rates were measured as if each were a separate country, the former would be equivalent to the UK and the latter Chile. At college level, 36.2 per cent of whites complete a degree, as opposed to 22.5 per cent of blacks. After taking those degrees into the workplace, black Americans then earn less. Black Americans are also more likely to go to jail: they make up approximately 14 per cent of the American population, but comprise 38 per cent of prisoner inmates.

And so it goes, from the cradle to the grave. America is a violent country compared to Europe, but if you are black it is an even more dangerous place. Murder rates for the white population are 2.5 deaths per 100,000 people. For black Americans it is 19.4, on a par with many Third World or developing nations. Statistics vary, but according to CNN, if you’re young, black and male you are nearly three times more likely to be shot and killed by a police officer than your white counterpart. No wonder the life expectancy of black Americans is four years less than that of whites. Together with a number of shootings of unarmed black men in recent years, these stark figures have caused unrest and protests across the country – for example the riots in Ferguson in 2014 – and have given rise to movements such as Black Lives Matter. And with the reactions of both officials and communities under great scrutiny in the aftermath of each incident, this has become an increasingly divisive issue.

The stats highlighting the problems are easy to find. Explaining their cause is more difficult, but it is clear that racism still plays a part in American society. It is impossible to get away from the beginning – slavery. The slaves were emancipated, but most were left in an impoverished state, facing societal discrimination; in these circumstances it was difficult for them to achieve parity with the dominant population quickly. How long is quickly? Well, it’s been more than 150 years and, despite the advances that have been made, especially in the last fifty, it is blindingly obvious there is more to be done.

Of course, race isn’t the only divide in the USA. When it comes to religion, for example, one of America’s great strengths has been that it is a secular state, but with a diversity of private religious belief and places of worship. Its faith remains overwhelmingly Christian, split between a variety of Protestant groups and Catholics, but since the 1960s it has been augmented by other faiths with significant numbers of believers. About 80 per cent of Americans identify themselves as Christian, Protestants being the most numerous at 46.6 per cent of the population as a whole, followed by Catholics at 20.8 per cent. After this come Jews (1.9 per cent), Mormons (1.6 per cent), Muslims (0.9 per cent), Buddhists (0.7 per cent), Hindu (0.7 per cent) and a plethora of other smaller groups.

Does all this amount to a melting pot? Up to a point. The ideal underpinning ‘E pluribus unum’ has survived to an extent, despite some glaring examples of inconsistency and hypocrisy. Nevertheless, in the present century the spirit of assimilation within a multi-ethnic society has been challenged by multiculturalism. The racial and ethnic divides play into many of the rifts in American society and have helped give rise to the politics of identity which so plagues the Republic. More and more Americans identify themselves by their ethnicity, religion or sexuality, thereby further polarizing and splintering the nation. Different ethnicities have been encouraged to retain an overt sense of identity; instead of leading to an acceptance of diversity, this approach seems in some cases to result in the separation of certain groups from the rest of society, to a degree, leaving them increasingly open to discrimination.

We saw this during the 2016 presidential election campaign when Donald Trump criticized the parents of Humayun Khan, a decorated Muslim American officer killed in Iraq, after Humayun’s father spoke up against his call to ban Muslim immigration. Khizr and Ghazala Khan are what the Americans call ‘Gold Star parents’. The term dates back to the First World War, when families with loved ones fighting abroad flew flags with a blue star for each immediate family member. If the family member was killed the blue star was replaced with a gold one.

The tone of Trump’s verbal attacks on the Khans was hardly one he would have used had the family been white Christians. In American politics Gold Star parents are considered off limits to critics because of the sacrifice the family has made for the nation. Trump said that he too had made ‘sacrifices’ due to the number of jobs he had created in America. He suggested that Mrs Khan had not been allowed to speak by her husband, hinting that this was because of their religion. No matter that Mr Khan used to take the young Humayun to the Jefferson Memorial and read to him the words therein inscribed – ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .’. Behind candidate Trump’s remarks seemed to be the idea that somehow this particular Gold Star family was different from others. There was also the sense that he was speaking to and for a section of America that defines Americans in a very narrow way. Senator John McCain, a Republican and former prisoner of war in Vietnam, voiced the opinion of the rest of the country when he said about Trump, ‘While our party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered licence to defame those who are the best among us.’

The idea of ‘difference’ is one that is played upon by both the right and the left; it is an aspect of the politics of identity that is exacerbating the divisions in the USA. At this moment in US history, though united by the idea of the nation, many groups are nevertheless pulling away from each other. This can also be seen in the increasing divergence in the political arena.

Two years before the bitter Trump/Sanders/Clinton clash of 2016, the Pew Research Center conducted its largest-ever study of American political attitudes. It found that people’s views were increasingly entrenched, and that there was a growing reluctance to accept others’ opinions. For example, 38 per cent of politically engaged Democrats described themselves as ‘consistent liberals’, up from 8 per cent in 1994, while 33 per cent of Republicans were ‘consistently conservative’, up from 23 per cent twenty years earlier. More worrying was the increased numbers of Republicans and Democrats who had contempt for each other, especially among those who were politically active. In 1994, 17 per cent of Republicans had very unfavourable impressions of the Democrats, but this has now risen to 43 per cent. For the other side the figures were 16 per cent rising to 38 per cent.

There is a geographical basis to this phenomenon, with committed Democratic Party voters increasingly to be found in larger urban conurbations, and Republicans in small towns and rural areas. Preston Stovall, an academic at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, writes of urban globalists and non-urban nationalists, which he believes ‘better approximates the divide than “Democrat” and “Republican”’. He laments the fact that the ideas of the non-urban are ‘reduced to the rantings of the ignorant’, while those of the urban are ‘rendered as elitist and morally depraved’:

I am dismayed by the way urban Americans tend to look down on rural and agrarian communities. I do not recall a time when an offhand denigrating remark about rural Americans was ever given anything but a pass or affirmation . . . we need to avoid the tendency to think that Republican voters are uneducated racists, and that Democrat voters are elitist reprobates.

It’s important to remember that these terms and statistics mostly relate to the politically active; outside of ideological silos and echo chambers there is more acceptance of the other and a greater willingness to compromise. Even so, this growing intolerance of opposing views has led to the increasingly violent rhetoric we hear in the mainstream and the strident versions we find on the internet. The relatively placid broadcasting days of the three main TV networks’ evening bulletins have given way to the rise of politically competing twenty-four-hour cable news channels, shock jocks and an ungoverned internet space where insults and death threats are the norm. The rise of twenty-four-hour social media platforms has also given a megaphone to the extremes, while the general news media has amplified that megaphone resulting in the impression that Americans are constantly at each other’s throats (or Twitter feeds) whereas in fact most are getting on with each other on a daily basis. Some of the most intolerant people now belong to the younger generation, many of whom are pushing back against the ideals of free speech and arguing that political intolerance is justified when it concerns people with whom they disagree.

Then there is also the extremism in America’s educational establishments, conducted by a small minority of students with some support from professors. Large numbers of the older generation of academics increasingly resemble rabbits caught in the headlights as their revolutionary children turn against the very people who taught them to be so ideological. It has made for a nasty intellectual atmosphere in America, with intimidating, baiting ‘no-platformers’ pushing forward and timid, intellectually weak professors in retreat. They are a danger to cohesiveness because the shrillness of their campaigns is amplified in online discourse. If increasing numbers of students leave university having been radicalized, whether to the left or right, there is a danger that their extreme views may become more prevalent.

One of the best examples of this came in 2017 at the Evergreen State College in Washington. A liberal-minded white professor, Bret Weinstein, objected to the idea that the college had to explain and justify any teaching appointments on the grounds of race. He then disagreed with a student body request that on a specific day white students should not attend college in order to create a safe environment for students of colour to debate issues. His classroom was subsequently invaded by students screaming about racism and white privilege. They demanded that he and two other staff be fired, and when the college president, George Bridges, tried to mediate he was repeatedly sworn at and told to be quiet. A video of the original incident shows students shrieking questions at Weinstein; when he asks them, ‘Would you like to hear the answer or not?’, they shout, ‘No!’ The incident was emblematic of the increasingly frenzied attempts to shame people with different views, where one group convinces itself that another is the epitome of evil and shouldn’t be given the opportunity to express its ideas. It may be childish, it may be simplistic, but it is also dangerous and threatens the ideal of free speech.

This modern closure of the American mind comes from both sides of the political spectrum and is reducing the space in the middle. Among the worst perpetrators are those actively seeking to promote suspicion and hatred of the other side. At one extreme they include both white and black separatist groups, some of whom are armed; demonstrations often result in violence. In 2017, for example, Charlottesville was the scene of a protest against the removal of a statue of the Confederate commander Robert E. Lee; but also involved were white supremacist groups and a parade of Nazi flags and racist and anti-Semitic slogans. Violence ensued, resulting in the death of counter-demonstrator Heather Heyer, who was run over and killed by a white supremacist. The ensuing outrage was exacerbated by Trump’s response: he repeatedly refused to condemn the alt-right, including the KKK and neo-Nazis, stating that there was violence on both sides.

Across the divide, and yet not so far away, are the black separatist groups; they may well be a reaction to societal white discrimination, but nevertheless their ideology is racist. A classic example is the Nation of Islam, whose leader, Louis Farrakhan, believes that 6,600 years ago a black scientist called Yacub created the white people as ‘blue-eyed devils’ designed to be inherently evil and ungodly. Mr Farrakhan has also said that Jews practise a ‘gutter religion’ and prey on black people; his solution to the problems faced by blacks is to support racial separatism and end inter-racial relationships.

Among the most famous of all great American speeches is Abraham Lincoln’s ‘A house divided’. He gave it in 1858 when accepting the Illinois Republican Party’s nomination as senator. The phrase comes from the Bible and is quoted in the Gospel of Mark, 3:25; Luke, 11:17, and Matthew, 12:25. In it Jesus says, ‘And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.’ Lincoln was referring to the split over the issue of slavery, but now the USA finds itself deeply divided once more: rifts over race, ethnicity and political leanings are all causing tensions and emotions to flare up.

America’s increasingly divided house needs a more rational, conciliatory and open-minded approach, but the debate is too often conducted – by both right and left – with hysteria and a fanatical determination to use identity politics to drown out ‘the other’. In this febrile atmosphere Trump’s rhetoric about the wall plays on historical and new divisions within the nation, speaking of a narrow definition of ‘American’. The racial, ethnic and political divides all coalesce in this question of the wall – of what the USA is, what it should be, and how it carries forward its own ideals of freedom and equality.

Barack Obama was hardly the most successful of America’s presidents and, like all the others, had policies that were divisive, but underpinning his view of his country was a conviction that a nation is stronger, and a better place, when it embraces the idea of ‘E pluribus unum’. He is already fading into history, but his place there is assured and is an example of what can be achieved by modern America. It is exemplified by his acceptance speech to the Democratic Party Convention in 2004:

The pundits like to slice and dice our country into . . . red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats . . . But I’ve got news for them . . . We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got gay friends in the red states . . . We are one people.

CHAPTER 3

ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

‘You see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem lies in

ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us build the wall

of Jerusalem, that we may no longer suffer derision.’

– The Book of Nehemiah 2:17

Palestinian men waiting to cross the wall through a checkpoint outside Bethlehem, the West Bank.

WITHIN MINUTES OF DRIVING SOUTH FROM THE OLD CITY walls in Jerusalem, the new walls of Bethlehem rise up in the distance. As you approach, you see they consist of 26-foot-high slabs of concrete, topped with barbed wire. Some sections are electrified, and interspersed with high watchtowers with dusty, thick, bulletproof glass, from behind which young Israeli soldiers look down on both zones. In the Israeli sector there is open ground, but once you are through a checkpoint and on the other side you can drive along streets just wide enough for a car, with low apartment blocks facing the wall opposite. It is dispiriting, intimidating, oppressive and otherworldly. Homes and high walls are not supposed to be this close to one another.

Crossing the border is a thoroughly depressing experience, but doubly so when you do so at the parts made of concrete, as most outsiders do. These are the sections placed next to urban areas to prevent sniper fire from taller buildings. Much of the rest of the 440-mile-long barrier is a fence.

Despite the fact that only 3 per cent of the ‘separation barrier’ between Israel and the Palestinian West Bank is made of concrete, it is routinely referred to as ‘The Wall’. Why? Because the 3 per cent is far more visually arresting than the other 97 per cent. What TV crew or photographer would use a barbed-wire fence as a background when there’s a 26-foot concrete barrier overseen by watchtowers and covered in graffiti upon which to focus? This is understandable for reasons of human interest, and because of the visual impact of the starkness of a wall, and what it says about a conflict and a divide. Whatever the barrier is called, it remains a monument to one of the world’s most intractable disputes.

At the concrete sections, the British propaganda artist Banksy has made use of the strange juxtaposition of the wall and daily life. For several years he has been painting murals on the Palestinian side. Some are now famous: a little girl frisks an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier for weapons, a white dove wears a bulletproof vest, a girl is carried over a wall by balloons. There is a (possibly apocryphal) story that a Palestinian man said to the artist that he had made the wall look beautiful. Banksy thanked him, only to be told, ‘We don’t want it to be beautiful. We hate this wall. Go home.’

A less ‘beautiful’ image often found on sections of wall is that of Handala, a forlorn barefoot ten-year-old refugee boy. Handala, originally drawn by the late Palestinian artist Naji al-Ali, usually has his back to us – suggesting he will not turn around until there is justice for the Palestinians. Al-Ali, who also criticized Arab leaders, himself left and never returned to Palestine. He was shot in the face in London in July 1987 and died five weeks later. A Palestinian man the British police said was a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was arrested in connection with the assassination, but never charged.

Recalling al-Ali and Handala, I was reminded of a Palestinian friend back in London. He is from Bethlehem but left in the late 1980s, and says he would not ‘turn around’, meaning return. ‘I cannot face going through the Israeli checkpoints to get to my own home,’ he told me. ‘It would be like an admission of their authority.’

Banksy returned, though, and went several steps further. To mark the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised Jews a homeland in what was then called Palestine, he opened the ‘Walled Off Hotel’ in the West Bank. All ten bedrooms face the wall, which is 4 yards across the street. It has, said Banksy, ‘the worst view of any hotel in the world’, but it ‘offers a warm welcome to people from all sides of the conflict and across the world’. It has become a view many visitors to Bethlehem now want to see, creating what critics describe as a version of ‘conflict tourism’; but supporters say it is playing a part in building bridges between Palestine and the outside world. Nevertheless, Banksy tours, Banksy memorabilia and selfies with Banksy art are now de rigueur for many tourists visiting the birthplace of Jesus.

At the hotel a narrow terrace houses chairs and tables where drinks are served to tourists who have ventured away from the usual historical Christian sites. From the terrace you can read graffiti on the wall, from the whimsical ‘Make Hummus Not Walls’ to the hopeful ‘God Will Destroy This Wall’ to swastikas formed from the shape of the Star of David. The hotel’s interior is decorated with icons of the Palestinian resistance to Israeli rule, such as slingshots and damaged security cameras. The bedrooms feature Banksy murals, including one of an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian protestor having a pillow fight. Downstairs there’s a small museum outlining the history of the conflict, and at its entrance a life-size model of the British diplomat Arthur Balfour. At the click of a button his mechanized right arm begins to move as he signs his famous declaration.

However, what is missing from the artwork is anything depicting the Israeli rationale for the stark ugliness facing the hotel. There’s no room in the narrow street for an artistic depiction of a bombed-out Israeli bus; then again, there isn’t any requirement for art to be neutral. But on the wall, one piece of graffiti, perhaps unintentionally, hints at one aspect of the other side’s view: ‘This wall may take care of the present, but it has no future.’ In politics, the present is often more important than the future, especially when you want to be elected.

Why the wall exists, and what it achieves, is a matter of dispute. But then, the border between the two countries has been a matter of violent controversy ever since Israel came into being, starting with the Arab–Israeli War in 1948. At the end of that conflict a ceasefire line was agreed, in the form of the Green Line. But in 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, as well as seizing the Sinai region and the Golan Heights. After two decades of living under Israeli rule, Palestinian frustration and anger spread across the Palestinian territories, leading to violent uprisings and protests in the First Intifada (1987–93). ‘Intifada’ derives from the Arabic word nafada, meaning a shaking-off, and in this sense translates as freedom from oppression. After some years of fragile peace, during which Israel continued to occupy Gaza, the decades-long land dispute exploded in sustained violence again in 2000, and it was at the outbreak of this Second Intifada that the wall started to go up.

The Palestinian view is that the barrier is an excuse for a land grab and to put ‘facts on the ground’, carving out the contours of a possible two-state solution but on Israeli terms, which would result in Palestine losing at least 10 per cent of the West Bank land, as the wall’s current position lies well inside Palestinian territory. Israel cites topographical reasons for the path of the wall, but in certain areas it strays east of the Green Line, around Jewish settlements.

There are about 400,000 Jews living in the West Bank. The term ‘settlements’ suggests small encampments, perhaps located on arid, windswept hills. However, although many started that way, some have grown into full-scale towns complete with town halls, supermarkets and schools. The roads that connect them to each other, and to Israel, make it difficult for Palestinians to move about in the West Bank or maintain large regions of contiguous territory. There are also now more than 200,000 Jews living in East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in 1967 but which the Palestinians claim as the capital of a future Palestinian state. Israeli Jews tend to think of East Jerusalem and the West Bank as separate entities; no such division exists in Palestinian minds.

The separation barrier roughly follows the route of the Green Line, established in the 1949 Armistice Agreements, but in several places extends into the Palestinian side.

The issue of the settlements divides Israeli public opinion and there is always a fierce debate about the wisdom, legality and morality of their existence. The religious Jewish settlers claim they can live in the West Bank because it was part of ancient Israel and was promised to them in the Bible. Secular settlers argue that Israel took the territory from Jordan, which subsequently dropped its claim to have the right to occupy the land, and that therefore their presence is not illegal – a view not shared by the international community.

‘Look at those walls!’ says a Palestinian friend, involved in civic society, who prefers not to be named. ‘They are disgusting! It’s all part of a plan to steal land. They move the Wall hundreds of yards into Palestinian land so that later they can say we must negotiate for it even though it was ours all along.’ As we drive alongside the wall he gestures angrily towards Palestinian areas, which were once populated by olive trees, now uprooted to create a no man’s land which he fears will one day be Israeli territory. ‘They have always done this,’ he says. ‘Create what they call facts on the ground, but it’s their facts, and it’s our ground.’

The Israelis, on the other hand, have a very different view of the wall: even the graffiti and artwork on their side of the barrier tells a different story. Some is anti-Palestinian and makes the case for the necessity of the wall; some is pro-Palestinian and depicts their suffering; but a lot consists simply of images of landscapes designed to make the wall ‘invisible’ – and indeed that is what it is to the majority of the Israeli population. Most of those inside Israel have little reason to go near it, or through it. Most don’t go to the Jewish settlements inside the West Bank, and for the settlers who do travel back and forth, it’s just part of a distant terrain through which they get priority passage.

The majority of Israelis are in favour of the wall, and believe that it has had a positive effect. The Israeli government points out that in the three years before it went up, a spate of suicide bombings and attacks by Palestinians had killed hundreds of Israelis. At one point the bomb makers and bombers were operating freely out of towns in the West Bank that were less than an hour’s drive from targets such as Tel Aviv, Netanya and Jerusalem. In the three years following the completion of the first phase of the wall, just over sixty Israelis were killed. This is the Israeli justification for the wall – it is simply a security measure designed to stop the violent killings. There is a minority of people who oppose it; they see the barrier – and particularly the existing route it takes – as an obstacle to agreeing a lasting, peaceful solution with the Palestinians. Most of them are on the left of Israeli politics and they can be very vocal in their protests, but even within the left they are a minority. With the murders of civilians at a relatively low level, many Israelis have psychologically retreated behind the barrier. They have many other problems, and divisions, with which to deal, and ‘safebehind-the-wall’ economics now sometimes trumps security in surveys of national concerns.

David Kornbluth, one of Israel’s most distinguished diplomats, now retired, believes in a two-state solution and says he ‘feels for the plight of the Palestinians’, but when it comes to the security barrier he has a clear-eyed, stark, direct and uncompromising view, echoed by many: ‘The wall is a huge success. It stopped the suicide bombers from killing. There wouldn’t be a security barrier at all if it hadn’t been necessary. It’s a huge cost; nobody wanted it, not the left, not the party in government. In my opinion the unfortunate, unwanted disturbances to the Palestinians do not balance against the prevention of the loss of life the barrier has brought. Of course I feel for their plight, but that has nothing to do with them trying to kill hundreds of our civilians.’ I remind him that those who are against the barrier regard it as a symbol of oppression and the power of the oppressor. ‘It’s nothing to do with being a symbol of power or oppression, if it was we’d have put it up in 1967. It’s there to answer a practical need.’

In a way, it’s putting into practice the ideology of Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky (1880–1940) and his theory of the ‘iron wall’. Jabotinsky was an ideologue in the pre-independence Jewish community in Palestine. He was the principal architect of the strategy for dealing with the Arabs, who vehemently opposed the formation of Israel, from a position of unassailable military strength. Once the Arab side had realized it could not destroy Israel, he argued, only then would it come to the table and deals could be done. ‘It is my hope and belief’, Jabotinsky declared, ‘that we will then offer them guarantees that will satisfy them and that both peoples will live in peace as good neighbours. But the sole way to such an agreement is through the iron wall.’

As the barrier has gradually enclosed the West Bank, suicide bombing and gun attacks in Israel have fallen dramatically, and the Israeli government says there is a direct correlation between the barrier and the statistics; critics, however, disagree. They argue that it was constructed at the same time as Israel’s enemies deliberately lowered the tempo of attacks, having decided that the suicide bombings were harming their cause in the eyes of the outside world, and that they weren’t worth the high cost of the Israeli responses. Fawaz Gerges, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, believes this to be the case: ‘Hamas and other Palestinian factions have made a conscious decision to desist from carrying out attacks inside Israel because of political and strategic liabilities.’

Nevertheless, Israel maintains that the wall plays a crucial role in the country’s security, along with the other barriers it has constructed to maintain control over its borders. In addition to the one in the West Bank, they built a security barrier on the border with Gaza; begun in 1994, it’s nearly 40 miles long. There is also a 152-mile-long fence along the Egyptian–Israeli border, completed in 2013, which has halted illegal immigration from a variety of African countries. Between 2000 and 2012 almost 50,000 Africans, mostly from Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia, crossed the border after frequently harrowing journeys, often to be shot at by Egyptian border patrols. Most have settled in Israel because of legal barriers to their deportation, and the reluctance of African countries to take them back. A fourth fence, less publicized, is the one built along the Syrian border after that country plunged into civil war. With various Islamist jihadist groups, such as the Nusra Front and Islamic State (IS), advancing close to the border on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, Israel again began shoring up its defences.

So, if Israel is certain that these walls are responsible for the decrease in violence, are they now a permanent fixture? This is a divisive issue, but many people don’t see them as a lasting solution to the problems in the region, merely as a step towards it, and say they should just be a temporary measure. Mr Kornbluth, one of the diplomats involved in drawing the outlines of the barrier, says, ‘The final settlement comes in stages . . . I think the wall will go, and it’s not necessarily on the line of any eventual boundary, that’s not what it’s for, it’s to significantly lower terror . . . it can come down as quickly as it went up, I’m extremely clear about that.’ For that to happen there will need to be agreement not only between the two sides, but also within them – and they are both deeply divided.

Israel is a country that encapsulates the concept of division in many ways, with very different people living side by side – or, in some cases, unable to live side by side.

Israel is a new nation, and a melting pot. It is a small country with a population of 8.6 million, but those people come from many very different ethnic backgrounds. There are a large number of Russians, for example, more than a million of whom arrived in Israel in the 1990s when its population was only 5 million. Reflecting the many rifts in Israeli society, its politics is very split – more so than in most democracies – with left-wing political parties, right-wing parties, Arab parties and religious parties, and further subdivisions within those categories.

The first Israeli census came in 1948, the year the state of Israel was declared. Then, 86 per cent of the total population was Jewish, 9 per cent Muslim, 3 per cent Christian and 1 per cent Druze. By the time of the 2014 census, the Muslim population had almost doubled to 16.9 per cent, the Druze to 2 per cent, while the Jewish proportion had declined to 75 per cent and the Christian to 2 per cent. The remaining 3 per cent is made up of a variety of minorities.

However, even within the Jewish majority itself there are deep divides. Most fall into one of two categories – either Ashkenazi or Sephardi. All ultimately trace their roots back to Israel before the scattering of the tribes by the Romans, but the Ashkenazi are often lighter-skinned, and their more recent origin is European. The Sephardi are named after the Hebrew word for Spain – Sepharad – and are mostly made up of the hundreds of thousands of Jews forced out of the Arab countries following the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948.

The Ashkenazi tended to be the elite and largely dominated politics and business since the state’s inception, partly because so many of them were well educated, and partly because they had arrived in Israel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, decades before the Sephardi fled the Arab pogroms. In recent years, though, the Sephardi have grown in influence, and their religious parties often hold the balance of power and are therefore invited into coalition governments. There are few practical religious differences between the two sects, but the cultural and political dissimilarities influenced by their Middle Eastern and European backgrounds mean that while intermarriage is not rare, it is still not the norm. When it comes to culture the Sephardi are far more Middle Eastern in both music and food choices, while the Ashkenazi diet is rooted in that of Eastern European Jewry.

Whether Ashkenazi or Sephardi, there is another, more stringent religious divide within the Jewish population: that between the secular (49 per cent), traditional (29 per cent), religious (13 per cent) and ultra-Orthodox (9 per cent) – also known as the Haredim, the ones who tremble in awe of God. Across these categories, the majority would list their religion as Jewish: 87 per cent of the secular still attend a Passover service, and half say they light candles on Friday nights. But there are many clear differences between them that are visible throughout society.

All these groups live together in one small country and speak the same language, but they rarely interact socially. In fact many neighbourhoods are divided along these lines, and there are now swathes of Jerusalem, and parts of Tel Aviv and other cities, where whole areas are almost exclusively secular or religious. Intermarriage between the two is very unusual. Many secular Jews say they are as uncomfortable with the idea of one of their children marrying a Haredim as they are with them marrying a Christian. Their children will probably have been educated at segregated institutions – the Haredi at genderseparated Haredi schools, the secular at non-religious schools.

There are mixed religious/secular neighbourhoods in the urban areas, but even here you can tell in seconds who is Orthodox and who is not. Even the type of kippah the religious men wear on their heads can say something about their beliefs. For example, many West Bank settlers have taken up the habit of wearing knitted kippahs, larger than the felt ones worn by modern Orthodox and some Haredim as a badge of recognition. Cognoscenti of these matters can tell which rabbi a Haredi man follows from the type of fur hat he is wearing. The ultra-religious and secular, on the other hand, are almost invisible to one another. This is a two-way street. The Haredi man with a fur hat, side locks, white stockings, wearing what looks to outsiders like a dressing gown, is not about to ask a secular woman for directions, and vice versa.

The difference between the groups is clear in economic terms as well. Israel’s economy does relatively well compared to those of most countries, but its prosperity is very unevenly distributed and the gaps between different groups are widening. Poverty is widespread – one in five Israelis lives in a household where income is less than half the national average (double the average for the OECD countries) – and the Haredim tend to be worse off in this respect, for a number of reasons. Large families contribute to poverty levels, and the Haredim tend to have more children than the modern Orthodox and secular. In Pew Research polling, 28 per cent of the Haredim said they had seven children or more, whereas only 1 per cent of the secular had this many. The Haredim are also more likely to be unemployed, as large numbers choose to study the Torah rather than work.

You can see these rifts within Jewish society wherever you go, although they are particularly prominent at religious sites. Take, for example, the Western Wall, the supporting wall of the remains of the Second Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. Religious scholars have mixed opinions about how ‘holy’ it is because it was not part of the inner sanctum. Nevertheless, there is no getting away from the fact that it is a place of great importance to almost all Jews, religious or not. Above it is the Al-Aqsa compound, which houses the Dome of the Rock, built in the seventh century and considered to be Islam’s third most holy site. Israeli and Palestinian Muslims, and foreign tourists, are allowed to visit the compound, which the Arabs call ‘the Noble Sanctuary’, but Jews are mostly forbidden entry, a policy the government usually upholds on security grounds.

Approaching the Western Wall you immediately see the divide. A fence running from the plaza to the wall separates the open space into a one-third/two-third split. On the smaller, right-hand side you see women, on the left-hand side the men. There are a few religious movements in Israel with mixed congregations in their synagogues, but they are a tiny minority and have almost no influence on religious matters. The Orthodox synagogues are more powerful, and their congregations are separated by gender; so, therefore, is the Western Wall.

Not all women are happy with the situation; there are some who believe they should be able to pray as a group, and wear prayer shawls, as do men. This has led to a bitter dispute between a group called Women of the Wall (WOW), who have held services at the site, and the Haredim, who have sought – often violently – to prevent them.

The debate has raged for thirty years, ever since the first hundred or so women prayed at the wall and were disrupted by both verbal and physical assaults from Haredi men and women. That set the pattern for a dispute which is still being fought in the courts and at the Western Wall plaza.

When WOW appear for their monthly prayer meeting they are often pushed and spat at by both men and women, and always require police protection. In 2013 buses featuring posters in support of the women had their windows smashed as they drove through ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods in Jerusalem. The Talmud explicitly states that God destroyed the Second Temple because of the hatred of one Jew towards another – an irony that may have been lost on some of the participants.

These differences within society also affect the political sphere. Most in the secular category, for example, see themselves as Israeli first and Jewish second; most Orthodox see themselves as Jewish first and then Israeli; and this can influence and inform political divisions within the country. On the whole, Sephardi Israelis tend to lean to the right in politics, while the Ashkenazi are more split. The more religious sects tend to support mainly religious political parties, while the Haredim will simply vote as their rabbi tells them to. This means that religious political parties are almost always components in coalition governments, and they often hold diametrically opposed views on many key topics, including religious conversion, conscription, the West Bank settlements, marriage, divorce and gender segregation.

The religious parties tend to dominate matters of education and religion, for example, and, as we’ve seen, their views are not necessarily in line with those of the rest of the population. The ultra-Orthodox campaign ceaselessly to keep the right to oversee marriage ceremonies within their jurisdiction, and try to enforce, often violently, their view that no one should drive on the Sabbath, especially not in their neighbourhoods – a belief that is sometimes reinforced by roadblocks to prevent cars passing through. Many oppose any form of compromise on territory with the Palestinians: while 66 per cent of Jewish Israelis overall support a two-state solution to the conflict, around 60 per cent of those who vote for a religious party favour a one-state outcome.

Secular Israelis, meanwhile, bitterly resent the fact that, despite ongoing political and legal battles, the ultra-Orthodox do not have to serve in the military, yet at the same time receive central funding for benefits to support their communities and projects. The secular also fear being outnumbered and driven out of Jerusalem as the birth rate among the religious sects is so much higher – a factor that is also seen as an economic threat to the country, as such a high proportion of the Haredi are unemployed.

Despite all the ‘racial’ religious and class divisions among Israeli Jews, David Kornbluth says that these divides and sometimes contrary positions mask an underlying unity in the face of outside threats, when the population tends to fall into line: ‘Israel is an extremely strong cohesive country at times of war . . . when war comes the country is united. A lot of people say the real threat to Israel is the divisions, that they are what could bring it down. But it remains a seriously strong country.’ Strong maybe; but however united the Jewish Israelis might be there is another divide – that between them and Israel’s Arab population – and this is one that will probably never be bridged unless there is equality inside Israel and an equitable two-state solution with the Palestinians.

Most of Israel’s Arabs, a fifth of the population, do not want to live in an impoverished Palestine, and know that, as Israelis, their living standards are higher than those of most Arabs in the Middle East. But that does not mean they are satisfied with their lot – quite the opposite. While Israel’s Arabs have dramatically increased in number, and their birth rate is higher than that of their Jewish neighbours, they have not kept pace in economic and social terms. As their numbers grow, so might their political clout, as they will be able to elect more Arab politicians to the Knesset (parliament); but in the medium term their limited voting power is unlikely to change the political make-up of Israeli governments.

Israeli Arabs have full citizenship, with social and religious rights guaranteed under law. They run their own political parties, newspapers and broadcast outlets. Arabs sit on the Supreme Court, they play for the national football team. Nevertheless, despite living in the same country as Israelis, and having equality in law, in many ways they live separate lives.

Most Israeli Arab children are educated in Arabic-speaking schools. They live in Arab villages, or, if in urban areas, in Arab districts. Haifa is probably Israel’s most mixed city, but even there you see clear delineations between neighbourhoods. When they grow up they will read Arab newspapers and listen to Arab broadcasts, and even when they watch national TV shows they will find themselves very underrepresented. Almost all will speak fluent Hebrew, but use it only in shared workplaces. Like the Haredim, they are more usually to be found at the bottom of the earnings pyramid, but while many of the ultra-Orthodox choose not to work, the Israeli Arabs often lack access to the higher-paid jobs. Poverty rates are at 50 per cent for Arab families with similarly high levels for Haredim.

For decades public spending on education per child was significantly lower in Arab localities, although a Five Year Plan introduced in 2016 is supposed to be addressing this. The knock-on effect of lower educational standards has contributed to the fact that eight of Israel’s ten poorest towns are Arab. Around 79 per cent of Israeli Arabs believe that they are discriminated against. Successive governments have tried to legislate against this, and there are job quotas for minority groups in the public sector, but they are rarely met, and the laws lack teeth.

The non-Jewish communities are also split along various religious and ethnic lines – between, for example, settled Muslims, Bedouin, Christians and the Druze. Some fare worse than others within the Arab populations: the Christians, for example, tend to find themselves more on the socio-economic level of Jewish Israelis, while the Bedouin are the most disadvantaged of all the indigenous groups in Israel. They try to live apart from everyone but are finding it increasingly hard to so do in the twenty-first century. Land disputes between the state and Bedouin tribes have ensured that almost half the 200,000-strong population now live in ‘unrecognized villages’, some without water or electricity. Their days of nomadic living are almost at an end, and even the few who do still try to move their livestock certainly can’t roam the entire region as they did before the coming of the nation state.

The Bedouins’ experience is slightly different from that of the rest of the Arab community: for one thing, they have less emotional attachment to ‘nationhood’, which is one of the reasons why some volunteer each year to serve in the IDF, despite being exempt from military service, as are their fellow Muslim Israelis. A few non-Bedouin Israeli Muslims do volunteer for military service, along with some Israeli Christian Arabs, and many Druze, but for the majority of non-Jewish Israelis this is a no-go area. Many, probably most, Israeli Arabs self-identify as Palestinian. Because service in the IDF often means operating in the West Bank and at the border crossings, this would be viewed as participating in the oppression of fellow Arabs or fellow Palestinians. The Israeli state would not agree that any form of oppression is taking place, but is wise enough to know that compulsory military service for Arab citizens simply wouldn’t work.

This ‘Arabness’ is the one thing that unites Arabs on both sides of the border – it’s an identity that crosses national boundaries – but, nevertheless, there are many differences between them. We often use over-simplified, broad-brush descriptions such as ‘Israelis’, ‘Arabs’ and ‘Palestinians’. This can be useful shorthand for understanding politics and geopolitics at the macro level, but scratch the surface and you find complexity, and see the micro divisions that constitute what we perceive as the big picture, whether ‘Israeli’ or ‘Palestinian’.

Once we cross into the Palestinian territories, the biggest divide is territorial. There are many barriers to the formation of a single Palestinian state, among them the fact that there is not one single Palestinian territory but two – the West Bank and Gaza. The distance between them is not the real issue. If all sides could agree, the 25 miles of Israeli territory could be overcome with a highway bridge or tunnel. However, the two regions remain separated not just by geography, but also by politics and ideology.

Israel and the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank.

Even if, theoretically, Israel was ready to negotiate, it could not do so because Palestinians are far from united on the topic. The relatively secular Fatah movement is the dominant political force in the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs the 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, and the radical Islamist movement, Hamas, is in charge of the 1.7 million in the Gaza Strip; they have very different ideas about what the policy towards Israel should be. Hamas remains an Islamist movement, which, despite accepting in its New Charter of 2017 the possibility of a Palestinian state built on the 1967 borders, still declares in Article 20 of that document: ‘Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea’, referring to the River Jordan and the Mediterranean, between which lies Israel. The New Charter waters down some of the virulently anti-Semitic language of the original charter, but it does not officially replace the original and the organization remains committed to violence to achieve its aims. It is still considered a terrorist group by much of the West. Fatah, on the other hand, is a secular movement, at least in theory, and officially accepts the concept of ‘two states for two peoples’.

In 2006, the year after Israel withdrew from Gaza, Hamas won elections in Gaza and the West Bank, mostly because voters had lost patience with the rampant corruption of Fatah officials. Various unity governments staggered along, with Fatah stronger in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, until things came to a head in 2007.

Hamas, claiming that security forces loyal to Fatah would not obey orders from a Hamas Interior Minister, had created a new ‘Executive Force’ which then killed a senior Fatah security official in Gaza. President Abbas declared Hamas illegal, and increasingly serious violent clashes broke out, culminating in June when Hamas forces seized control of all of Gaza’s government buildings and murdered many Fatah supporters. The factional fighting killed hundreds of Palestinians before Fatah security forces fled towards the Israeli border. President Abbas denounced the events as a ‘coup’ and cracked down on Hamas centres of power in the West Bank. Despite repeated efforts, the two sides have been unable to bridge the divide between them. Neither is prepared to cede authority, but neither enjoys full support either. In October 2017 they signed a reconciliation deal, which President Abbas hailed as a ‘declaration of the end to division’. However, this soon ran into difficulties with both sides still claiming legitimacy. Nevertheless, a degree of unity is required for any new Middle East peace deal to even get off the ground.

Hamas, whose full name translates as ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’, has enforced its version of Islam in Gaza and is trying to dominate all aspects of life. This has alienated not just the remaining Fatah supporters, but also some of the more moderate population. The small Christian community, numbering perhaps fewer than 3,000 people, feels under pressure and many are trying to leave, like so many embattled Christians across the Middle East. Hamas has continued to fire rockets indiscriminately into Israeli civilian areas, or has failed to prevent other groups from so doing. This has also split opinion between those who support what they see as resistance against ‘the Israeli blockade’ and those who believe that the retaliation this draws from Israel is not worth the largely futile acts of defiance.

Despite the Israeli withdrawal, the Gazans remain trapped between the 40-mile-long barrier built by Israel and a fence on the Egyptian border. To the west, the Gazans can look out across the Mediterranean, but in the distance they usually see an Israeli patrol boat or warship. There is no safe route out that way either. Both Israel and Egypt restrict movement in and out of the Strip, which causes great hardship, but both states argue that they believe Hamas and others would project intolerable levels of violence out of Gaza if there were free passage. Egypt is as concerned about this as Israel because Hamas originally grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) movement in Egypt. The military-dominated government in Cairo, having overthrown the short-lived MB government in 2013, does not wish to see Hamas operating in its territory.

Israel allows hundreds of truckloads of food, medical and energy supplies into Gaza each day, but these imports are restricted when cross-border hostilities break out. Hundreds of smuggling tunnels, built under the border with Egypt, ensure a thriving black market in all sorts of goods and a passage out for those who brave the risks of the tunnels collapsing. I have even seen a tractor pulling a brand-new Mercedes through, and the car showrooms in Gaza are full, but this is hardly a basis for a normal economy. The Egyptians have re-enforced their fences over the years and sometimes flood the tunnels to prevent arms and fighters being smuggled into the Sinai, which suffers from frequent terror attacks. Egyptian and Israeli action against the tunnels does reduce the potential for violent incursions, but there is also a cost to the black-market economy, without which the trapped population suffers intensified hardships. In 2016 Israel announced a plan to build an underground wall, more than 100 feet deep, in order to prevent armed groups emerging from tunnels to attack Israeli border towns.

Across in the West Bank life is hard, but easier than in Gaza. Palestinians here can cross into Israel or Jordan, albeit sometimes with difficulty, and make their way onwards. Each year tens of thousands are treated in Israeli hospitals because the healthcare in the West Bank is of a lower standard. Work permits are far harder to obtain. In the late 1980s Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza made up about 8 per cent of the Israeli workforce; now the figure is about 2 per cent. This decline in numbers is partly because of security issues during the First and Second Intifadas, and partly because workers from other countries, mostly Asians, have taken their place.

So, behind the great security barrier live 2.5 million Palestinians asking how this state of affairs came about. In previous decades there was little debate: it was because of the partition of Palestine, supported by the outside world; then the ‘Nakbha’, or catastrophe, of losing the war to prevent the state of Israel coming into existence in 1948; followed by the disaster of 1967 and the occupation. These factors remain the root-cause explanation for Palestinians, but they are no longer enough.

Many younger Palestinians are asking, without any softening of feeling towards Israel, why their own leadership has failed them for generations. It is generally accepted that much of the Palestinian Authority is corrupt and there is now very little support for the generation of politicians who rose to power during the Arafat and then Abbas years. Some people have turned to Hamas, still believing that force will one day turn the tide, and the divisions between Fatah and Hamas threaten a serious recurrence of the fighting of 2007 – but this time in the West Bank. More are heartily sick of both major factions, and in the West Bank it is not unusual to hear it spoken, quietly, that the PA’s co-operation with Israel on security makes it a ‘sub-contractor’ of the occupation.

But what to do; where, politically, to go? Palestine is hardly an open society. Dissent can lead to arrest and torture, as many Palestinian journalists can verify. Liberal democracy, as understood in the West, does not exist in Palestine. A moderate liberal party, espousing gay rights, for example, would get little traction and would be operating in an environment in which propagating such views publicly would be dangerous. The few rainbow flags painted on the wall/separation barrier are always quickly covered up.

This is not surprising: the Middle East tends to be an extremely conservative region compared to Europe and North America; but the chances of a liberal democracy emerging in Palestine are also hamstrung by the Israeli occupation. Conservatives can, and do, say that the struggle for national self-determination must take priority over everything else. For these reasons the widespread dislike for the current West Bank leadership will not necessarily translate into a push for genuine liberal democracy, and the tensions between the West Bank and Gaza ensure that Palestine will remain a house divided.

The Palestinians can expect little help from their Arab neighbours. Governments in the Middle East have only ever used the Palestinians as political tools, while discriminating against the refugees they host and ensuring that they remained in squalid camps. In most Arab countries they, and their children, even if born in the country, cannot become citizens, vote or run for office in national elections. Jordan has been more flexible than most, but even there those of Palestinian descent face discrimination and are under-represented in parliament. In Lebanon, where more than 400,000 or so Palestinians live, about fifty categories of jobs remain forbidden to them: for example, they cannot become lawyers, journalists or doctors. In both Lebanon and Syria, they are not allowed to own property and must live in the camps. Those who have circumvented the laws cannot pass on property to their children.

The rationale behind some of the discrimination is that all Palestinians, even those who are the great-grandchildren of refugees who fled in 1948, have the right of ‘return’. This does not negate the obligation to grant them human rights, but it has been convenient for the Arab governments to keep the Palestinians in a state of poverty so that they cannot enter the mainstream of the body politic, and in order to highlight their plight so as to deflect criticism from their own failed domestic policies.

While there is so much division within the populations, as well as between them, there seems little likelihood of establishing a two-state solution that is acceptable to all parties in the near future, even though many people support the concept. There are so many challenges and stumbling blocks – where would the border lie, how would both settlers and refugees be dealt with, what would happen to Jerusalem – that neither country seems able to put together a coherent policy that everyone endorses within its own borders, never mind one that both sides can agree on. And so for the moment the barriers remain, in an attempt to contain the violence that has erupted so fiercely and frequently since Israel came into being.

The modern state of Israel was born in violence, and feels it has been forced to fight during every decade of its existence. But whereas Israel was once perceived as being at the centre of a boiling cauldron, it is now seen by many as a relative oasis of peace in an increasingly turbulent region. This view is what led the former prime minister, Ehud Barak, to describe his country in somewhat belligerent terms as ‘a villa in the jungle’ – and has partially driven the huge increase in barrier-building.

And, for the moment, it is fairly stable – at least in comparison with the rest of the Middle East. In recent years, as the Arab world has been convulsed with revolutions and conflict, the spotlight has not been shining on Israel. However, the Israelis know this will change. Hezbollah, Hamas and many other groups and organizations have not finished with Israel yet. The situation is a fragile one and it doesn’t take much to reignite the conflict, as we saw at the end of 2017 when President Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, sparking unrest throughout the region. For the moment, all sides are building for the future. The walls are containing the violence – for now.

CHAPTER 4

THE MIDDLE EAST

‘Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption.’

– Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

A route leading to the fortified Green Zone area in Baghdad, Iraq, 2016.

THERE ARE SMALL WALLS ALL OVER THE MIDDLE EAST. EACH one is a testament to the terrorist violence now endemic across

the region. You can see them in Baghdad, Damascus, Amman, Sana’a, Beirut, Cairo, Riyadh – indeed, in almost every capital city. These are the concrete barriers and blast walls that have sprung up around embassies, charity headquarters, international organizations, police stations, army barracks, government buildings, housing compounds, churches, hotels and even whole neighbourhoods.

On one side is normal life, car horns hooting, street vendors hawking their goods, pedestrians going about the business of a busy capital city; on the other is a version of normal life, with office workers, government officials, civil servants, diplomats. They too are going about their daily routine, but in the knowledge that without the concrete blocks outside their windows, the guards at the entrance to the premises, and possibly a checkpoint at the end of the street, at any moment a truck bomb could bring down their building, or a group of terrorists could burst into their place of work.

It is no idle threat. The list of attacks that came before the walls went up is long. There have been more than 150 in the wider Middle East this century, including compounds in Riyadh housing foreign workers; hotels across Egypt’s Sinai province and in Jordan’s Amman; oil facilities in Yemen and Algeria; churches in Baghdad; the US Consulate in Benghazi; the Bardo Museum in Tunis; and the Iranian Parliament and shrine of Ayatollah Khomeini.

The walls went up in these at-risk urban centres in response to the many attacks. The template for this type of wall construction was the ‘Green Zone’ in Baghdad, whose perimeter was built after the 2003 invasion of Iraq to protect the American-led ‘Provisional Government’ in the post-Saddam years. Comprising a huge area of central Baghdad, the Green Zone was ringed by giant concrete slabs, similar to those we see in the walled section of the West Bank. In the Green Zone you got used to hearing explosions from indirect rocket fire landing within the perimeter, but a more frequent sound was that of the distant dull thud of a mass-casualty car-bomb explosion or suicide attack on the outside, a constant reminder of what life was like for ordinary Iraqis and the American troops in the real world.

Some of the main roads leading from the airport down into the Green Zone were lined with concrete blocks in a bid to prevent roadside bombs. As the threat grew, so did the extension of the blocks to secondary routes. They became so common that the military had official names for the different types. They were named after US states: a ‘Colorado’ was medium-size, at 6 feet tall and 3.5 tons, the ‘Texas’ was large, at 6 feet 8 inches and 6 tons, and the ‘Alaska’ came in at 12 feet and 7 tons. There was a cost, in blood and treasure. The barriers certainly saved lives, but were far from foolproof in the face of the ‘shaped’ roadside bombs, which projected the force of a blast in one direction and could penetrate some walls. And each block cost more than $600. Multiply that by thousands and eight years of occupation – the financial cost was in the billions.

Nevertheless, the walls came to be part of fighting an urban war, and building them an inherent part of America’s military planning. Soldiers became adept at the skills required and could put up over a hundred blocks in a single night, sometimes under fire. As religious tensions between the Sunni and Shia populations grew, and were deliberately exacerbated by militias on both sides, whole neighbourhoods began to be walled off. The concrete saved lives, reducing the ability of the Sunni and Shia militias to get at civilian populations and foreign workers, but each slab was like a headstone and played its part in burying the idea that overthrowing Saddam would result in a stable Iraq.

Instead the invasion of Iraq contributed to the destabilization of several countries, the growth of violent Islamist ideology, and eventually the creation of a vast lawless space from which violence was projected in all directions. The subsequent Arab uprisings that started in 2011 in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (which many wrongly called the Arab Spring, expecting that it would lead to large-scale reform across the region) may well have occurred anyway – we can never know; but when they did happen, each country had a coterie of jihadists trained in Iraq.

Many people used to believe that solving the Israeli–Palestinian issue would result in greater stability in the wider region, but that theory has been blown apart by the convulsions of the Arab world over the last few years. Now, with the conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt and Yemen, we have seen that the instability across the region has very little to do with the situation in Gaza City, Ramallah, Tel Aviv and Haifa.

In 2014 just 5 per cent of the global population lived in the Arab world but suffered 45 per cent of the world’s terrorist attacks, 68 per cent of conflict-related deaths, and housed 58 per cent of its refugees. In some countries the whole nation has fallen apart; in others the cracks are showing; and there are those where the divisions are hidden beneath the surface and could reappear at any moment. The wars and uprisings have laid bare the huge rifts in the Arab-dominated countries. There remains a sense of Arab unity, in so far as they share a space, a language and, to an extent, a religion; but the prospect of pan-Arab unification remains a distant dream.

Religion is one of the biggest divisive factors. In 2004 King Abdullah of Jordan coined a controversial phrase when speaking about a ‘Shia crescent’. He was referring to the expansion of Iranian influence, following an arc from Shia Iran’s capital, Tehran, running through the now Shia-dominated Iraq capital, Baghdad, on to Damascus in Syria, where the ruling Assad family was descended from a Shia offshoot sect (Alawites), and ending in the Shia Hezbollah stronghold of South Beirut in Lebanon. This was highly unusual language in a region in which everyone knew about the sectarian tensions that existed, but preferred not to highlight them. King Abdullah was aware of the risks that sectarianism posed, however. In a 2007 newspaper interview, four years before the war in Syria broke out, he gave a prescient warning of what might be coming: ‘If sectarianism deepens and spreads, its destructive effect will reflect on everyone. It will foster division, polarization and isolationism. Our region will drown in a conflict whose outcome cannot be foreseen.’

The Sunni/Shia split within Islam has been present since the seventh century, and thus is almost as old as the religion itself. The schism was about who should lead Islam after the death of Muhammad in 632. The ‘Shi’at Ali’ or ‘partisans of Ali’ are what we now call the Shias. They held that leadership must remain in Muhammad’s family line and supported his cousin and son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib as caliph. What we now call Sunnis are those who disagreed, arguing that leadership should come from learned men within the community. They prevailed after killing one of Ali’s sons, Hussein, at the Battle of Karbala (680) in what is now Iraq.

Ever since, each tradition holds that the other is not the true way of Islam; the Shias, for example, only recognize religious leaders who they say are descended from the Prophet through Ali and Hussein. Fast-forward 1,400 years and that difference is now manifest in many small but, to the believer, important ways that mark one sect from the other.

None of this is Koranic law, but, just like everywhere else in the world, as the centuries pass and communities group together in separate neighbourhoods, differences grow – and small differences in daily life can be writ large when it comes to politics. The names given to children are mostly not exclusive to one side or the other, but there are generalizations that can be made. For example it’s unlikely someone named Yazid would be Shia, as Yazid is said to be the man who killed Hussein. In some countries the way a person dresses or the length of a man’s beard would suggest whether they were Sunni or Shia, and when you enter the homes of religious families you can see paintings and posters indicating which sect they adhere to. The Sunni and Shia clerics wear different garb – it is unusual, but not impossible, to see a Sunni cleric wearing a black turban. The manner of praying also differs: Sunnis tend to fold their arms at times in the service when the Shias have their arms by their sides.

The majority of Arabs are Sunnis, but the Shias are a majority in Iran, Iraq and Bahrain, and they form a substantial minority in Lebanon, Yemen, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, where they are concentrated in the east of the country. What unites them – belief in the Five Pillars of Islam – is usually enough for them to live in peaceful coexistence, but those who find themselves in a minority do sometimes complain that they are being discriminated against, and are shut out of government and other aspects of public life. And there have always been periods of tension that have at times led to sustained outbreaks of violence at both local and regional level. We are living through one such outbreak now.

In the Saddam era, Iraq was dominated by the minority Sunni population, but after he was overthrown Shia groups became more powerful; militias on both sides have carried out multiple bombings and shootings to further their political aims. Iraq suffers from more terrorist attacks than any other country – nearly 3,000 incidents in 2016, with over 9,000 dead – Islamic State (IS) being responsible for the worst of them. Having originated in Iraq following the 2003 US invasion, IS became one of the most notorious and widespread terror organizations, extending its presence across the Middle East, including Syria, Libya, Yemen and Egypt. Most governments in the region are aware that IS could filter into and destabilize other areas with its extremist views and violent activities, and are keen to prevent that happening.

Proportion of Sunni Muslims across Middle Eastern countries.

In Yemen, civil war broke out in 2005 between rebel Shia Houthi forces and the Sunni-led government, with Iran backing the Houthis while Saudi Arabia, among others, supports the Sunni groups; both IS and Al Qaeda have also been active in the conflict. The violence intensified and spread across the country after 2015, killing thousands and displacing over 3 million. By November 2017, the situation was described as ‘the world’s worst humanitarian crisis’ by UNICEF, exacerbated by widespread famine and cholera outbreaks.

Proportion of Shia Muslims across Middle Eastern countries.

Syria has split along mostly sectarian and ethnic lines: Sunni, Shia, Alawi, Kurd, Christian, Druze and so on. President Assad’s father, Hafez, had bound the country together under a vicious secular dictatorship, but once the violence began in 2011 those shackles were quickly cast off. The civil war in Syria is one of the most violent and complicated conflicts in the world, with multiple players involved (including foreign military intervention from Russia, Turkey, the USA and others). Iran backs the Assad regime while Saudi Arabia supports some of the Sunni rebel groups. IS has again had a major role in the conflict, although by the end of 2017 had lost almost all the territory it had previously gained in both Syria and Iraq. Atrocities have been committed by all sides; the government has even been accused of using chemical weapons against its own people. As a result of the widespread violence millions have been displaced within the country, and millions have fled as refugees.

These and the other Middle Eastern conflicts have other underlying causes, but there’s no getting away from the fact that religion is a major factor in the increasingly bitter divisions. And the one between Sunni and Shia is wider now than it has been for centuries. This is partially driven by state politics: the fierce regional rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran has exacerbated the problem as both vie for influence. The differences between them are also down to ethnicity, one being Arab, the other majority Persian, and to the usual rivalries between powerful states, but there is a clear sectarian edge to the language used by both sides. Hardline Sunni now talk of the ‘safawis’ – the Arabic name for the Persian (Iranian) Safavid dynasty which faced off against the Sunni Ottoman Empire. Both want to be the leading power of the Islamic countries; they have conflicting economic policies, for example in oil production and sales, and, as we’ve seen, they take opposite sides in religious conflicts that break out in other countries across the region. Both have also accused each other of supporting terrorist groups and their activities. In response, across the Middle East and North Africa, this era of division is giving way to an age of walls.

Saudi Arabia has built hundreds of miles of fence along its northern and southern borders, Kuwait has fenced off its frontiers, and Jordan has fortified its border with Syria; to the north the Turks have built a wall 10 feet high and 7 feet thick, while the convulsions in Libya have led Tunisia and Egypt to construct fences along their frontiers.

The barrier-building in Jordan is the most technologically impressive, even if the reasons for it are the most depressing. The wars in Syria to its north and Iraq to its east have resulted in hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding into the country. The Hashemite Kingdom began shoring up its defences in 2008, aware that the violence and chaos in Iraq might spread. This was three years before the Syrian war broke out, but, even then, the region’s instability and the growth in international terrorism induced the Obama administration to offer assistance to its ally. At first the initiative was modest, with plans to build watchtowers along a sensitive 30-mile stretch of the Syrian border sometimes used by smugglers. As Syria descended into chaos and IS threatened to bring its terror into Jordan, the project expanded, as did the costs. Jordan is 95 per cent Sunni and IS intended to promote its extreme beliefs in a fragile and religious country.

Washington DC funded the ‘Jordan Border Security Program’ out of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the Raytheon company being awarded most of the contract. There is now a 160-mile-long high-tech security fence along the Syrian frontier. It has watchtowers, night-vision cameras and ground sensors that can detect movement 5 miles each side of the border. A similar structure covers 115 miles of the Iraq border. The DTRA’s website says the world ‘can be downright scary’ and notes the use of WMDs in both Syria and Iraq. Its work on the fence, it says, ‘is a great example of how we are Making the World Safer from weapons of mass destruction’.

What it doesn’t say is that the barrier is also helping to keep American military personnel in Jordan safer. Officially there are only a few dozen US military based in Jordan; in reality there are usually at least several hundred, but they work mostly out of sight in Jordanian military bases. These fictional low numbers can be sustained in official documents so long as those in the country are ‘deployed’ and not ‘based’ there. Jordan may be an American ally, but the government prefers not to be seen to be too close to the superpower to avoid inflaming anti-American sentiment among the minority of its population considered to be Islamists.

The border fences constructed by the Saudis are even longer, and costlier, than those in Jordan, but they are also built with American assistance. The Northern Border Project covers over 550 miles of the Iraq frontier. It has a triple fence, a giant sand berm, thirty-two ‘response stations’ linked to seven command and control centres, all backed up by 240 quick-response vehicles.

Relations between Saudi Arabia and Iraq are difficult. Many Iraqis blame Saudi Arabia for exporting its fierce interpretation of Sunni Islam and thus helping to create IS, which has caused so much bloodshed in their country; and since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a Shia-dominated Iraq has grown closer to Iran. However, in 2017, in an effort to draw Iraq away from Iran, Riyadh began a charm offensive and even invited high-profile Iraqi politicians to visit. Relations between the two countries have improved in recent years, but for now Iraq remains more closely aligned with Iran.

To its south Saudi Arabia has fenced off part of its border with Yemen. This project began in 2003 and, as with Jordan’s original plan for the Syrian fence, was originally designed to reduce arms- and people-smuggling from dirt-poor Yemen into the far richer Saudi Arabia. At first the Saudis concentrated on stopping vehicles by placing sandbags and concrete blocks in the crossing areas in the mountainous terrain to the south-west. However, in 2009, after Shia Houthi rebels from Yemen staged a cross-border raid and killed two Saudi guards, Riyadh sanctioned the building of fences with electric sensors to prevent people crossing on foot along a stretch of frontier about 100 miles long. The Houthis’ military campaign was aimed at achieving greater autonomy in Yemen, but on occasion it spilt across into Saudi Arabia’s Jizan province, turning the Saudis against them. This hostility increased once the Saudis perceived that their main regional rival, Iran, was assisting the Houthis.

When the Yemen civil war broke out, Al Qaeda was able to strengthen its position in the country and use it as a launching pad to move people into Saudi Arabia. So now Saudi Arabia had the triple problem of Shia Houthi fighters and cross-border raids, migrants crossing illegally and Al Qaeda, which is sworn to overthrow the royal family, all pressing up against its southern frontier; so the fence was deemed even more necessary. The fence still leaves hundreds of miles of the border open in the desert areas to the east, but here the distances are so great, and the conditions so brutal, that it is harder to evade patrols and there are fewer crossings.

As well as the problems along its borders, Saudi Arabia is also aware of the threat of internal division. Although the country is utterly dominated by Sunnis, with Shias comprising at most 15 per cent of a population of 33 million, that minority is largely concentrated in the eastern provinces, where most of Saudi Arabia’s oilfields are located. The Shia-dominated provinces are growing restless: they say that their communities are grossly underfunded and that they are shut out of national life – charges the government denies. Given this potential source of trouble, the ongoing instability of Yemen and the fractures in Iraq, Saudi Arabia is in no mood to consider tearing down the barriers it has put up and constantly looks for ways to improve them.

Kuwait is also keen to maintain a buffer between it and Iraq, despite the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, as the two countries have a long history of conflict. Kuwait was established as a sheikdom in the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1913, but Iraq’s governments have never accepted what are essentially British-drawn borders and at various times claimed the oil-rich state as its nineteenth province.

Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait in 1990 but were driven out by a US-led coalition. Kuwait then constructed, literally, a line in the sand between the two countries. A 6-mile-deep barrier consisting of three parallel sand berms arose along the entire length of the border. Parts were topped with barbed wire and had tank ditches in front of them. It was meant to keep the Iraqis out, but in 2003, during the next US-led invasion, it was a hurdle the Americans had to cross to get in. This was a major operation that required breaching the berm in several places simultaneously and at such speed that the defending Iraqis couldn’t attack columns of single-file vehicles and halt the advance in its tracks. They pulled it off and 10,000 vehicles came through, heading, ultimately, for Baghdad.

The following year, Iraq may no longer have been a strategic threat to Kuwait, but the Kuwaitis still wanted a new, better barrier between them. Under UN legal supervision, a location was agreed by both sides and a 135-mile-long fence has since been erected from the Iraqi border town of Umm Qasr along to the joint border triangle where Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia meet. Like so many other countries in the Middle East, Kuwait is trying to guard itself against the proliferating violence in Iraq, and also stop illegal immigration into its much wealthier economy.

Turkey, meanwhile, is more concerned by the threat posed by Syria and is building a wall along part of the border. It is supplemented by trenches, a floodlighting system, watchtowers, surveillance balloons, thermal imaging, radar, a targeting system and small armoured vehicles called Cobra II which drive along the wall using cameras mounted on angled cranes to peer over the top. Having sided with the opposition to Assad and taken an active role in the conflict, Turkey is now trying to stop refugees and terrorists entering from Syria. But Turkey has another concern in the Syria conflict, and that is the growing strength of Kurdish groups taking part in it.

When we talk about the Middle East we often think of ‘the Arabs’ as if they are interchangeable, or a monolith, whereas in fact the region is home to numerous peoples, religions, sects and languages, with minorities such as the Kurds, the Druze, the Yazidis and Chaldeans.

The Kurds are the biggest minority; there are about 30 million in the Middle East. Estimates vary, but suggest that there are about 2 million in Syria, 6 million in Iraq, 6 million in Iran and 15 million in Turkey. It’s often said they are the world’s largest nation without a state, although these national subdivisions are further divided into about a hundred tribes that adhere to different religious sects and speak a number of languages, which are also split into different dialects and alphabets or scripts.

There certainly is a movement to create a nation state of Kurdistan, but, given their differences, geographical location and the opposition of existing states, the Kurdish people are unlikely to be unified by one state. The 2017 non-binding referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan, backing independence, was supposed to be a step towards the great Kurdish dream, but Turkey and Iran will not permit a united Kurdistan that includes an inch of their own territory. In Iraq, the central government responded to the independence vote by sending in the army to seize the Kurdish-controlled oil city of Kirkuk, sending a message that neither plans for independence nor expansion out of traditionally Kurdish-dominated areas would be permitted. The Kurds themselves are also split within Iraq into two tribal configurations with similar fissures in other areas. In the meantime, the Kurds suffer discrimination within the countries they find themselves split between. Those in Iraq have particularly bad memories of Saddam Hussein’s ‘socialist’ Baath Party. It gassed thousands of them during the brutal Anfal military campaign of the 1980s, and killed thousands more in the following decade.

This brutal authoritarianism wasn’t at all unusual for governments across the Middle East, and many – not just the Kurds – have suffered the consequences.

What went wrong in the Arab world? Just about everything. What has been tried as a solution to the problem? Just about everything.

Many reasons are given for the problem. Religion, for example, has caused great rifts, as we have seen. Colonialism resulted in the creation of nation states whose boundaries ignored traditional cultural divisions – peoples who once thought of themselves as different, and who had been governed differently, were now expected to pledge loyalty to an entity some felt they had little in common with, while others who had previously identified as a single community were split down the middle. The geography of the region provided most areas with little natural wealth, and not all those blessed – or, depending on your view, cursed – with oil shared its profits equitably. What wealth there is often seems to be squandered by the elite, and so there is widespread poverty and a general lack of economic and social progress.

The ‘Arab Human Development Report 2002’, written by a group of eminent Arab intellectuals led by the Egyptian statistician Nader Fergany and sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme, best summed up the situation for the twenty-two Arab countries. The report noted that education levels and life expectancy were up, and child mortality rates down, but that was just about the sum total of the positives. The authors removed from their statistics a traditional measure of success, ‘income per head’, on the grounds that the massive energy wealth of a few countries, which trickled down to only a few people, skewed the numbers. They then added internet access and freedom levels to create the ‘Alternative Human Development Index’. In a cutting sentence they concluded that ‘the region is richer than it is developed’.

In particular, they highlighted what they called the ‘Three Deficits’ that were holding the region back: first, because it lacked certain freedoms, the Arab world had failed to keep up with global knowledge in science, political thought and comparative religion. Relatively few books translated from languages other than Arabic are freely available across the region. Second, and related to this, was the failure to embrace developments in communications in order to disseminate what knowledge was available. Third, women’s participation in politics and work was the lowest in the world.

The lack of civil rights and freedom of speech and the blatant censorship manifest in most Arab countries in turn meant that, despite reasonable spending on education, the money was misused and the results were poor. The report said that in the past 1,000 years fewer books have been translated into Arabic than are translated into Spanish in Spain in one year. Internet use was restricted to just 0.6 per cent of the population.

A generation of progressive Arab intellectuals and politicians took the report as a wake-up call, but progressives are a minority in the Arab world and there were not enough in positions of authority to bring about positive change. Almost twenty years on, things are worse. By 2016, according to the UN’s ‘Arab Development Report’, internet penetration had massively increased to above 50 per cent, but overall the Three Deficits were still holding the region back. Arab regimes remained ruthlessly aggressive against dissent, individual liberties were still curtailed, many of the ideas of the outside world continued to be unwelcome, and eleven Arab countries were suffering internal conflicts.

Many Arab secularists blame the problems and lack of freedom on what is sometimes referred to as ‘the closing of the Arab mind’. This is a reference to the ending of the practice of ‘ijtihad’. The direct translation of the word is ‘effort’, but it relates to the interpretation of religious problems not precisely covered by the Koran or the Hadith – the reports of what the Prophet Muhammad did and said. For several centuries any learned Muslim scholar could come up with original thinking on religious questions, but by the end of the Sunni Abbasid caliphate (750–1258) it was declared that the gates of ijtihad were closed. There was now to be no questioning of the laws and interpretations laid down by the great men of previous generations.

It is argued that this ‘closure’ has held the Arab world back, and in modern times has become one of the great divides within Arabic societies between those seeking reform and those holding firm to tradition. If this theory is true it would go some way to explaining why other cultures, which share lack of freedoms and human rights, have managed to develop and challenge the Western countries in terms of technology and economic progress; Singapore and China come to mind. It is certainly true that Arab culture is deeply respectful of tradition and authority, and less open to change than that of many other regions. One man seemingly trying to change this is the new Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (widely referred to as MbS). In what appears to be a carefully thought-out plan, the King of Saudi Arabia, Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud, bestowed the title of crown prince and significant powers upon his thirty-two-year-old son. Both men appear to have concluded that the kingdom will not survive with its current economic base and societal norms. The Crown Prince unveiled his Vision 2030 economic model, diversifying the economy away from its reliance on energy. Part of this was the hugely controversial reform to allow women to drive by the middle of 2018 as he realized a modern economy cannot ignore 50 per cent of its workforce. As 2017 ended he followed this up with a purge of hardliners. The Crown Prince, along with other Gulf State allies such as Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is trying to break out of the traditional straitjacket but knows he must tread carefully. In this the princes are mostly supported by the younger generations in their societies.

Politically, the Arabs have tried nationalism and faux socialism, and they have experienced the strong leader. Life under jihadist rule in the shape of IS is another failed system, while some live under the hereditary power of royal families. Of all these regimes the last has tended to be the most stable and, starting from a shockingly low base, relatively benign, but no system the Arabs have yet tried has succeeded in uniting them in a successful nation state at peace with itself, nor as a united region, despite the unifying factor of language.

The great dream of a united Arabia was evident in the proclamations of the 1916 Arab Revolt. But it was only ever a dream, and the divides between its peoples almost certainly mean it will never be realized. The Arab Professor Fawaz Gerges admits that the outlook is gloomy: ‘Time and again Arab rulers battle each other for influence and power and frequently interfere in the affairs of each other . . . these fierce rivalries have had debilitating effects on the Arab state system and have caused mayhem and civil wars. The system is broken.’

There is no solid democratic platform upon which to build, and the Arab nation states have failed to gain the loyalty of the majority of the people. As the 2016 UN report says, ‘Young people are gripped by an inherent sense of discrimination and exclusion’, thus leading to a ‘weakening [of] their commitment to preserving government institutions’.

We’ve seen the cracks appear in the edifice of the European Union, and there they are leading to a partial retreat into nationalism. The difference in the Middle East is that the Arabs are less rooted in the concept of the nation state, and have not fully embraced ideas about individual liberty; therefore, when government institutions break down, many people retreat to the precursors of the nation state – religion, ethnicity and tribe.

As the Sunnis, the Shias and the tribes and ethnicities withdraw behind their physical and psychological walls and the nation states weaken, their religion offers them self-respect, identity and certainty. On this basis the Islamists can construct a world view according to which socialism, nationalism or even the nation state itself is a cancer and that Islam is the answer. They build ideological barriers around themselves that become so high that those behind them can no longer see beyond them. Thus imprisoned in narrow minds, some come to see the ‘other’ as ‘infidel’, ‘kafir’, ‘unbeliever’, ‘safawi’, worthy only of being subjugated or killed. Once immured, it is very hard ever to come back.

One explanation for this is poverty and poor education. Neither factor can be ignored; however, too much importance is attached to them, giving rise to the belief that if you eradicate poverty and improve education, you eradicate Islamist ideology. This does not take into account the huge numbers of highly educated jihadists, whose ranks are each year swollen by university graduates, especially those with engineering degrees. Nor does it explain why some of the most violent ideology springs from the richest country in the region – Saudi Arabia. Without question, better living standards and higher-quality secular education are part of the solution, but, ironically, another wall is needed here, the one built in most successful modern societies – that between religion and politics.

Because Islam is an all-encompassing way of life many practitioners find it difficult to take religion and ethnicity out of politics. There is nothing in the Koran along the lines attributed to Jesus – ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s.’ Without this disconnection, religious law tends to underpin or even dominate secular law, and the prevailing religion or sect will ensure that its version of religion and law is the one adhered to.

In contrast, in Europe the formation and organization of political parties along ethnic or religious lines has largely been eradicated. Most political parties attract support across wide and varied sections of society, and religion doesn’t play much of a role in government and policy-making.

However, in the Middle East memories of ‘secular politics’ are those of despotic rule – the Baath Parties of Syria and Iraq are examples. Both pretended to be secular socialist parties above ethnic and religious divides, but both brutally suppressed their populations. This has led some people to mistrust the ability of secular parties to defend their interests, and they turn instead to the party that supports their religion.

For now the Arab countries and peoples remain divided and ravaged by conflict, both within and between countries. The Saudis and Iranians play out a geopolitical regional battle, which, when it reaches local level, manifests itself in the ancient Shia/Sunni rift, which in turn also plays out in conflicts beyond their own borders. So many of the conflicts across the region – such as the war in Iraq – allowed similar fissures to surface, with the ensuing violence and extremism rippling across borders. Caught up in the maelstrom are minorities such as the Christians, Yazidis and Druze.

The dream of pan-Arab unity has turned into the nightmare of pan-Arab divisions. Once these sectarian demons are unleashed the suspicion and fear of ‘the other’ take years, sometimes generations, to be reversed. The patchwork quilt of nation states such as Syria have been ripped up, and the designs of any new entities are still unclear.

There is a generation of young educated urban Arabs seeking to put the divisions behind them, but the weight of history holds them back.

The Egyptian president Anwar Sadat said the following words in a speech at the Israeli Knesset in 1977, referring to the Arab–Israeli conflict; but more than forty years on they still apply, right across the region: ‘Yet, there remains another wall. This wall constitutes a psychological barrier between us; a barrier of suspicion; a barrier of rejection; a barrier of fear, of deception; a barrier of hallucination without any action, deed or decision.’

CHAPTER 5

THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT

‘Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it

depended upon which side you were on.’

– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

An Indian Border Security Force soldier stands guard at a gap in the border fencing between India and Bangladesh.

ON INDIA’S FRONTIER WITH BANGLADESH IS THE LONGEST border fence in the world. It runs along most of the 2,500-mile boundary which India wraps around its much smaller neighbour; the only part of Bangladesh completely free of it is its 360-mile-long coast at the Bay of Bengal. The fence zigzags from the Bay northwards, along mostly flattish ground, up towards the more hilly country near Nepal and Bhutan, takes a right turn along the top of the country, then drops down south again, often through heavily forested areas, back to the sea. It passes through plains and jungle, beside rivers and over hills. The territories on each side are heavily populated and in many areas the ground is cultivated as close to the barrier as possible, which means the crops grown often touch the divide.

Hundreds of miles of this barrier are double-layered, parts of it are barbed wire, parts are walled, parts electrified and parts floodlit. In some stretches, West Bengal for example, which comprises about half of the border length, the fence is fitted with smart sensors, direction finders, thermal-imaging equipment and night-vision cameras connected to a satellite-based signal command system.

The Indians are trying to move from a system that used to rely on large numbers of troops patrolling long stretches of border almost constantly to one in which they can easily pinpoint breaches in the fence and despatch quick-reaction units. As with other frontiers around the world, technology has simplified what previously would have taken hundreds of man-hours to monitor, report and act swiftly upon. Even if a sensor is tripped miles away from a control room, within a minute a drone can be overhead and a patrol on its way; the technology becomes more sophisticated each year.

Despite these measures, the Indian fence fails to stop people from trying to cross. They continue to do so despite the barbed wire, and despite the fact that border guards have shot dead hundreds of people attempting to get into India, as well as many others wanting to return to Bangladesh surreptitiously after being in India illegally. Among them, in 2011, was fifteen-year-old Felani Khatun.

Felani’s family had been working illegally in India without passports or visas, due to the legal complexity and costs of obtaining either. In order to return home for a family visit Felani and her father had paid a smuggler $50 to get them across. Just after dawn, with the border fence shrouded in mist, she began climbing a bamboo ladder placed against it by the smuggler. Her shalwar kameez snagged on the barbed wire. She panicked and began to shout to her father for help. Following a number of terrorist infiltrations, India’s Border Security Force (BSF) was under orders to shoot to kill, and a border guard followed orders. It was a slow death. She remained dangling on the fence, bleeding but still alive, for several hours. As the sun rose and the mist lifted, she could be seen and heard crying out for water before finally succumbing to her wounds. The shockingly violent drawn-out death of such a young girl drew international attention and condemnation at the shoot-to-kill policy. Inevitably attention waned, but the politics remain, and so does the fence. Her death stands as testimony to the human cost of such barriers. India is not unique in this; there has been an increase of such deaths around the world. Dr Reece Jones points out that ‘2016 set the record for border deaths (7,200 globally) because of the increase in border security’.

The justifications for the fence on India’s border with Bangladesh include the prevention of weapons- and contraband-smuggling and deterrence of cross-border insurgents; but primarily the fence is there to prevent illegal immigration at levels that have resulted in riots and the mass killing of foreigners. Its main purpose is to keep people out. But this is a turbulent region, and migration is not the only issue here. The divisions across the subcontinent, as we find so often around the world, stem partially from borders drawn by colonial powers, compounded by regional religious and ethnic prejudice and political realities. Many of the religious rifts can be traced back to Muslim rule over India in medieval times.

Following the first Islamic invasions from Central Asia, there were mass conversions of the predominantly Hindu population; but the sheer size of India created problems for the invaders: as with China, it is almost impossible for an outside power to fully control India without building alliances. So although tens of millions of people were converted to Islam, that still left hundreds of millions as Hindus. Even under the Mughal dynasty (1526–1857), when Muslim power expanded over almost all of India, the conquerors realized what the British would later discover: in order to take advantage of the subcontinent’s riches, it was easier to divide and rule the various regions than to seek absolute power. A majority of people were converted to Islam west of the Thar Desert and in the Ganges Delta basin (the same regions that now comprise Pakistan and Bangladesh), but almost everywhere else the majority of people remained Hindu.

In 1947, as the British withdrew, India’s founding fathers, especially Mahatma Gandhi, had a vision of creating a multi-faith democratic state stretching east to west from the Hindu Kush to the Rakhine Mountains, and north to south from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean. But Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who would go on to become Pakistan’s first leader, believed that because Muslims would be a minority in this state they required their own country. He wanted ‘a Muslim country for Muslims’ and helped invent a border which was partially drawn along religious, not geographical, lines. The borders were drawn – by the British – to separate off areas that had a mainly Muslim population. And so that year two states came into being, India and Pakistan, the latter comprising West and East Pakistan. The religious divisions had become geographical ones, marked in the mind and on the landscape.

But often the border bisected existing communities, and of course all areas were mixed to some degree, so many people were compelled to move. The great division of the subcontinent in 1947 was accompanied by a wild bout of bloodletting. Millions were killed during the mass movement of peoples as Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims headed for regions where they would feel safe. Psychologically, none of the countries involved has ever recovered; the divides between them are as great as ever and are now increasingly manifested in concrete and barbed wire.

India is a magnet for migrants. It is a democracy, there are laws to protect minorities, and compared to its neighbours it has a thriving economy. Refugees and illegal immigrants have flocked there from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), Tibet, Pakistan and Bangladesh. There are at least 110,000 Tibetans who have fled since China annexed their territory in 1951, around 100,000 Tamil Sri Lankans who arrived during the island’s civil war earlier this century and the upheavals in Afghanistan have seen a steady flow of people to India. But by far the greatest number of immigrants are from Bangladesh, which is surrounded by India on three sides.

Since the partition of India in 1947 waves of people from what was then East Pakistan had crossed into India to escape persecution, intolerance and economic hardship, but the number increased following the violent conflict with West Pakistan. A glance at the map quickly shows why the two were never destined to remain a single country.

There are mass migrations across the Indian subcontinent, with people fleeing poverty, the effects of climate change and religious persecution.

They are situated 1,300 miles apart in different geographical and linguistic locations. After years of discrimination from West Pakistan, in 1971 the Bengalis in East Pakistan started agitating for independence. The Pakistani government attempted to suppress them ruthlessly, and in the ensuing violence, in which millions were killed, millions also fled to India. And today it is thought that many thousands continue to cross the border every year.

Life is hard for many in Bangladesh. Around 12.9 per cent of the population live below the national poverty line, as defined by the Asian Development Bank. Huge inroads have been made into the problem, but life remains extremely harsh for tens of millions of people. In rural areas the work consists of back-breaking farm labour, and in the growing cities massive slums have developed to house those arriving to find factory work. The minority groups, such as the Hindus and Christians, say they are persecuted, and overall there is a growing religious intolerance fuelled by radical Islamists. There are numerous reports of forced conversions of Hindus to Islam and of the kidnapping of young girls. The Bangladeshi constitution does not recognize minorities. Article 41 guarantees freedom of religion, but in practice the past few years have seen extremist groups attacking dozens of Hindu temples, burning hundreds of homes and assaulting thousands of people. Naturally, many have fled towards Hindu-majority India. Add to this Bangladesh’s annual storms and flooding, and it is easy to see why so many people choose to cross the border.

For many people, however, it is not simply a case of migrating for work or fleeing persecution: the Indian–Bangladeshi border split communities which for centuries lived without physical divides. Some share linguistic and cultural similarities – the idea that their neighbour is of a different nationality is alien to them – and ever since partition they have continued to travel across the region.

Accurate figures are difficult to come by, but most estimates put the number of people who have moved permanently from Bangladesh to India this century at over 15 million. This has caused massive problems in the Indian states closest to the border – West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura – where the majority of (mostly Muslim) Bangladeshis have settled, but illegal Bangladeshi migrants are to be found in all the major cities. One of the most affected states is Assam in the north-east of India. During the Bangladesh War of Independence the majority of people fleeing into India were Hindu, but soon increasingly large numbers of Muslims joined them. Between 1971 and 1991 the Muslim population increased by 77 per cent, from 3.5 million to 6.3 million, prompting a major ethnic backlash against them in Assam, where locals complained that not only was pressure being put on jobs and housing, but also that their identity and culture were being challenged. Some Hindus fell prey to blaming all ills on the newcomers no matter what their background because they were not Assamese, but Muslims suffered the most in the backlash. What are essentially small differences, say in the eating of pork or beef, became magnified as tensions rose.

In 1982 mass anti-Bangladeshi demonstrations began, leading to the formation of militias and eventually to rioting in which thousands of non-Assamese were slaughtered. Muslims suffered the most, but in many cases, again, people didn’t bother to differentiate between ethnic or religious groups. Indira Gandhi responded with plans for a barbed-wire border fence, which the subsequent government of Rajiv Gandhi promised to implement.

Assam is useful in understanding the wider problems India faces. As elsewhere, the nature of Assam’s terrain makes it almost impossible to secure the border fully. It shares only 163 miles of frontier with Bangladesh, but some of this is the Brahmaputra river, which floods each year and changes course, making it difficult to fix a permanent boundary marker.

Since 1971, Assam’s population has more than doubled, from 14.6 million to over 30 million, much of which is due to illegal immigration. Hindu nationalists have argued that the area might have a Muslim majority by 2060. In 2015 there were 19 million Hindus and 11 million Muslims, nine of the twenty-seven districts being Muslim-majority. Equally importantly, the 2017 census showed that people who are ethnically Assamese are now a minority in the state as a whole, and as people continue to arrive their proportion will continue to drop.

After the murderous riots of 1982, parliament passed the Assam Accord in 1985, co-signed both by the national and state governments and by the leaders of the violent movements that had helped agitate the unrest three years earlier. The Accord was intended to reduce the number of migrants in the area, and referred back to the Pakistan war of 1971. Those who had arrived before 1971 could stay on certain conditions, but all foreigners who had entered Assam on or after 25 March of that year – the day on which the Pakistani army began full-scale operations against civilians – were to be traced and deported, as by 1985 Bangladesh was considered to be sufficiently stable for refugees to return.

It didn’t work. Of the 10 million who had fled Bangladesh during the war, millions remained in India, and more kept coming. As a result, over the years the fences have become longer, taller and increasingly high-tech. Central government has focused on wall-building rather than enforcing the Accord and creating a legal framework for a solution. All the while the human cost has been rising: according to Human Rights Watch, in the first decade of this century BSF personnel gunned down an estimated 900 Bangladeshis as they attempted to cross the border.

Most people willing to take the risk do make it into India. But, once there, they find themselves in a legal nightmare. India has no effective national refugee or illegal-immigrant laws. It has not signed the 1951 UN Refugee Convention on the grounds that it doesn’t take into consideration the complexities of regional problems. Instead, all foreigners come under the 1946 Foreigners Act, which defines a foreigner as ‘a person who is not a citizen of India’, which may have the benefit of succinctness but is of limited use in deciding who is a genuine refugee, who qualifies for asylum and who is an economic migrant.

The ongoing problems – the resentment on the part of the Indian population, the murky status of the immigrants themselves – highlight the difficulties faced anywhere in the world when proper systems aren’t in place to deal with large population influxes, but especially when moving from one developing country to another.

Sanjeev Tripathi, the former head of India’s foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, argues that India needs a new law to define refugees and illegal immigrants. It must also come to an agreement with Bangladesh that Dhaka will take back Bangladeshis and issue them with documents, and that ‘this would have to be followed by concerted action to detect Bangladeshi immigrants, assign them to separate categories of refugees and illegal migrants, resettle or repatriate them, and prevent any further influx’. As he says, the current system has ‘substantially contributed to changing the demographic pattern in the north-eastern states of India, where the locals feel overwhelmed by the outsiders. This has adversely affected their way of life and led to simmering tension between the two sides.’

The legal aspect of this is achievable through domestic political will; however, the diplomatic co-operation required from Bangladesh is more problematic. It not only prevaricates regarding the administrative paperwork sometimes required to take back migrants, but there are myriad stories of Bangladeshi guards pushing returning Bangladeshis back across the border into India, especially if they are from the Hindu minority.

There is the added problem of rounding up those deemed to be illegal. There are millions of them, and they are well embedded inside India; they often hold identity cards called aadhaar which do not distinguish them from Indian citizens for simple identification purposes, although they cannot be used to access all the facilities afforded an Indian citizen. Furthermore, in regions such as West Bengal the problem is compounded, as the features and dialect of a Bangladeshi and a West Bengalian are hard to tell apart.

There’s also an ongoing battle in Indian politics over whether Bangladeshi Hindus should be granted citizenship on the grounds that they have fled persecution. When the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) gained power it took this issue into account: after all, the 2014 party manifesto included the words, ‘India shall remain a natural home for persecuted Hindus and they shall be welcome to seek refuge here.’ However, the BJP has dragged its heels, well aware that, although Muslim immigration is the greater concern for many voters in the border states, there are degrees of hostility to all outsiders.

Many supporters of the BJP government take a robust view of what is required and demand policies that might appear harsh to some people. These include criminal proceedings against anyone harbouring an illegal immigrant, and banning illegal immigrants from working if they do not voluntarily register themselves with the authorities. In the 2014 national election campaign Narendra Modi, the BJP leader, repeatedly promised that he would tighten border controls and warned illegal immigrants from Bangladesh that they needed to have their ‘bags packed’. He went on to become prime minister.

In 2017 the BJP president, Amit Shah, accused politicians in the opposition Congress Party, who are against deportations, of wanting to make Assam state a part of Bangladesh. And many in government see the problem in national security terms. Seen through the Indian security lens, the problem looks like this: Pakistan has never forgiven India for helping Bangladesh gain independence. To sow discord, it promotes a strategy known as ‘forward strategic depth’. It encourages illegal immigration and sponsors cross-border terrorism from Bangladesh, supporting the activities of groups such as Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh and the movement of hundreds of their fighters into India. The theory continues that by changing the Hindu–Muslim demographics in Indian regions bordering Bangladesh, political parties will form that will demand autonomy and eventually independence, thus creating a new Muslim homeland. There is even a name for this imagined future state formed out of West Bengal: Bango Bhoomi. Thus, the theory concludes, India is weakened and Pakistan gains a foothold next to Bangladesh.

Supporters of the idea that there is such a plan struggle to find hard evidence of it, but point to the changing demographics to bolster their argument. At state-to-state level, relations between India and Bangladesh are cordial but the fraught internal politics of the post-Partition subcontinent, of Hindu and Muslim nationalisms, means that politicians often pander to the emotions of identity.

Whether or not the Bango Bhoomi theory is true, many nongovernment experts in border control argue that walls and fences are of limited use in preventing the flow of people, and that they are especially ineffective in combating terrorism. On this point Dr Reece Jones says that despite the vast sums spent on building the new high-tech India–Bangladesh fence, it ‘likely has no impact’ on terrorist infiltration because ‘a terrorist often has the funds to pay for fake documents and simply cross the border at checkpoints or travel with valid documents’. He also observes that ‘the threat of terrorism is used to justify walls, but the underlying issue is almost always unauthorized movement by the poor’. In any case, such talk of Bango Bhoomi is naturally not welcomed in Bangladesh, which views the Indian fence-building as an act that is arrogant, aggressive and damaging to their relationship.

Unsurprisingly, many Bangladeshis feel hemmed in: to their east, west and north is the Indian fence, and to their south, in the Bay of Bengal, the sea. And the sea is getting closer every year.

Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. It is smaller than the US state of Florida but is home to 165 million people, compared to Florida’s 20 million, and the population is growing rapidly. Most of the country is situated at sea level on the Ganges Delta. It has hundreds of rivers, many of which flood each year, displacing millions of people. Most of them do eventually return to their land as the waters subside; however, many climate experts predict that within eighty years there will be at least a 2°C rise in land temperature and a 3-foot rise in the sea level. If that happens, a fifth of Bangladesh will disappear under the waves. Some of the areas most at risk are in the coastal regions that abut India such as Khulna, Satkhira and Bagerhat, but around 80 per cent of the country lies just above sea level.

Bangladesh contains hundreds of rivers, and much of the land is at risk of flooding.

Upriver, reduced glacial melt from the Himalayas has already turned some of Bangladesh’s precious fertile land into desert. This is expected to continue, and is driving hundreds of thousands of people from the rural areas into the cities, sometimes simply to find fresh water after their supplies are contaminated by the sea encroaching into the rivers. The rapidly growing urban areas are ill prepared to accommodate them. The International Organization for Migration estimates that 70 per cent of Dhaka’s slum population arrived in the capital because of environmental disasters such as flooding or hurricanes.

There are already ‘climate refugees’ in many parts of the world, and there are destined to be tens of millions more, most heading for urban areas, as even small changes to climate can have catastrophic results for local populations. In Africa, for example, droughts over the last few decades have created severe famine in many regions, while the Sahara Desert is also expanding slowly southwards. But in Asia climate refugees are mostly trying to escape the floods. A 2010 study published by the London School of Economics suggests that of the top ten coastal cities most exposed to flooding, nine were in Asia. Dhaka was third behind Kolkata and Mumbai.

When you apply this predicted future to a country such as Bangladesh, where modern healthcare is scarce and education levels low, it is obvious that if a fifth of the land is flooded, and some of the rest is no longer fit for agriculture, then huge numbers of people will move. Some will try to get to the West, but millions, especially the poorest, will head for India and run up against the fence and the border guards. At this point India would have an even greater humanitarian and political problem on its hands than it already struggles with.

Muslims make up about 15 per cent of Indians, getting on for 200 million in number. But in Bangladesh about 90 per cent of people are Muslim. A crisis of mass migration would throw up a number of questions. Given the existing tensions with illegal immigrants, how many Bangladeshis would India take? How many would the majority population accept, especially in the border states, without riots breaking out and political parties rushing to extremes? Would India give preference to the Bangladeshi Hindus on the grounds that they suffer the most, given the levels of religious discrimination they claim to endure? These are issues with which both countries already struggle, but the worst-case scenarios of flooding would hugely exacerbate them: climate change and demographics cause further movement of people, who are displaced and not easily integrated culturally and economically into other nations.

Bangladesh has its own difficulties in this respect. The Rohingya people in Myanmar are a minority group of Muslims in a majority Buddhist state. About 750,000 live in the region of Arakan, which borders Bangladesh. They are ethnically related to the Chittagonians of southern Bangladesh, and they have a problem. The Rohingya are stateless, having been denied citizenship on the basis of ethnicity. In 1982 the Myanmar dictatorship drew up a Citizenship Law listing the 135 national ‘races’ it claims were settled in the country prior to the beginning of British colonization of the Arakan region in 1823. Despite evidence that the Rohingya were present in the area as long ago as the seventh century, the junta classified them as not being from Myanmar. The Rohingya endure severe travel restrictions, find it difficult to get into business, and face an often fruitless struggle to register the births and marriages of their communities, thus being further isolated.

In the early 1990s up to 250,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh amid reports of religious persecution, murder, rape, torture and forced labour by the Myanmar military. The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) regarded them as refugees and at first Bangladesh accommodated them. But, faced with ever-increasing numbers, it started to forcibly deport tens of thousands back across the border, often amid clashes between the refugees and the Bangladeshi military. By the middle of the decade all but about 20,000 were back in Myanmar. However, it is impossible to know for certain how many there are as the Bangladeshi government stopped registering them, and subsequently asked aid agencies to desist from helping the unregistered – on the basis that it wanted to discourage others from coming. Despite being one of the poorest countries in the world, Bangladesh has taken in up to half a million refugees this century but is woefully ill-equipped to deal with them.

In 1998 the UNHCR wrote to the military government in Myanmar demanding equal treatment for the Rohingya following allegations of widespread discrimination and ill-treatment. The junta wrote back: ‘They are racially, ethnically, culturally different from the other national races in our country. Their language as well as religion is also different.’ In recent years anti-Rohingya violence increased again, with villages and mosques set on fire and people murdered, particularly in response to an attack on border police by a Rohingya militant group in August 2017. The number of people trying to get into Bangladesh has consequently risen dramatically again: over 600,000 were on the move in the second half of 2017 alone.

There are now hundreds of thousands of Rohingya living in shanty towns around the Bangladeshi port town of Cox’s Bazar or in UNCHR camps. In a poor, overcrowded country that struggles to take care of its own citizens, humanitarian resources are spread very thinly, and these immigrants are often feared as a source of lawlessness and crime, being outside society with no legal way of working. Some in Bangladesh have demanded tighter border controls in the wake of the latest influx of refugees; however, there have also been calls for a stronger humanitarian response. There are also fears that the unrest in the region could attract terrorist organizations that would take advantage of the conflict, playing on the religious and ethnic divisions and spreading extremist ideas among the affected minority groups. The region could become a hotbed for radicalization, further inflaming the violence that has erupted there.

Bangladesh is set on returning the refugees as soon as possible; Myanmar has tended to prevaricate, suggesting that on the one hand refugees will be taken back, while on the other planning to upgrade and expand the barrier along the 170-mile border. There have also been allegations that landmines have been laid to prevent people from returning. Furthermore, it’s unclear what the Rohingya could expect to return to: more than 200 villages have been burnt to the ground and systematic discrimination against them still exists.

There is no obvious solution in sight as long as the Myanmar state continues to hound its minorities; another border, therefore, looks set to remain a source of tension and instability.

The surging populations of the subcontinent are facing the challenges of the twenty-first century in a man-made geography of fences and national borders that has little respect for history.

To the south of Assam, the Rakhine Mountains separate India from Myanmar and are covered in dense jungle. People have made their way through the jungle to try and claim asylum in India, but not in such great numbers as to make it a national issue. Of more concern is the insurgency being fought by the tribal Naga people within Myanmar which sometimes spills over into India, and has led to the construction of a fence, not by the Indians but by Myanmar, along parts of that section of the border.

The Nagas are a collection of forested hill tribes. They have cultural traditions in common, although their language is very varied – most speak different dialects of the Naga root language which are unintelligible to outsiders and sometimes even to each other. Some tribes gave up head-hunting only a few decades ago after converting to Christianity, but they remain tied to many original cultural practices and do not see themselves as being from either Myanmar or India.

Following the declaration of the state of India in 1947 and the state of Myanmar (Burma) the following year, the Naga people found themselves divided by the newly declared sovereign borders. An armed struggle broke out in the 1950s, when some Naga tribesmen on the Indian side of the border began to agitate for independence from New Delhi. The creation of the state of Nagaland (India’s smallest) in 1963 reduced the level of violence but did not result in a permanent settlement. By the 1970s the militants had been driven into Myanmar, but continued their struggle from there alongside other Naga tribes. There are now an estimated 2 million Nagas spread across each side of the frontier, an area that Naga nationalists want to turn into a united homeland.

The Myanmar government, which is at any given time usually dealing with several internal insurgencies, did little to prevent the Nagas from using the region to train and equip their militias and conduct frequent cross-border raids. Naturally this has been a major source of irritation to the national government in India and the state governments in Assam, Manipur and Nagaland. In 2015, following a raid that killed eighteen Indian soldiers, the Indian military conducted a lightning night-time cross-border operation, the first for many years. Helicopters dropped Indian commandos at the border who pushed several miles into Myanmar before attacking two Naga rebel camps. New Delhi claimed that around thirty-eight rebels were killed, although that figure is disputed.

Publicly the Myanmar government had to pretend to be angry about the incursion, but in reality it had occasionally crossed into the Indian states of Manipur and Mizoram in hot pursuit of ‘terrorists’ from the Chin and Arakanese rebel groups, and so in private tolerated the incursion into its sovereign territory. Undiplomatically, the Indian government trumpeted the whole affair, causing Myanmar to think hard about how to prevent further such actions. An added impetus was China’s increasing influence in Myanmar, something that could be counterbalanced by forging stronger ties with India.

In early 2017, with Indian army operations continuing against the insurgents, Myanmar began to construct a short border fence in the ‘Naga Self-Administered Zone’, a region where the Naga people enjoy limited autonomy. Officially, India is not involved with the fence; however, New Delhi does give Myanmar $5 million a year to promote ‘border areas development’ in the region. The fence is there in the name of mutual national security, both to prevent the Naga militia from entering India and to ensure that no one from India constructs any buildings on Myanmar’s side of the frontier. The government says that its purpose is not to restrict the movement of ordinary people, but it does nevertheless threaten to split up communities and families, who until now treated the nation-state borders as imaginary. The two governments had acquiesced in this with the Free Movement Regime, which allowed the Nagas to travel up to 10 miles either side of the border without requiring visas. This helped to grow border markets, where the Myanmar Nagas could buy Indian products mostly unavailable at home and which had previously been smuggled across. All of this is now under threat and will further divide a people who regard themselves as neither Indian nor Myanmar, but as Naga.

Not all of India’s borders are so troubled that they’ve been fenced off. India and Bhutan have a close relationship, and because India accounts for 98 per cent of Bhutan’s exports, neither side is contemplating ‘hardening’ the border. And although India’s relations with Nepal are more strained, especially after a four-month ‘blockade’ of the border in 2015, New Delhi does not see the need to fence what is a 1,000-mile frontier, especially as it is keen to maintain influence in the country and not permit a vacuum it knows the Chinese would fill.

When it comes to China, there is a natural barrier – the Himalayas – that separates the two countries along much of their 2,500-mile-long shared frontier, so they are pretty much walled off from each other. There is a bone of contention between them in the form of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is claimed by China, but the dispute has not resulted in a hostile border. Nevertheless China does monitor the frontier using dozens of satellites in space.

Where we start to hit trouble again is along the Indian border with Pakistan. Since partition, relations between the two countries have been fraught, and this is very much a ‘hot’ border. India has built a 340-mile-long barrier along the disputed ‘Line of Control’ (ceasefire line) inside Kashmir, a region both countries say is their sovereign territory. Most of it is 150 yards inside the Indian-controlled side and consists of double-row fencing up to 12 feet high. It is similar to the West Bengal–Bangladesh fence, with motion sensors and thermal-imaging technology linked to a command system to warn rapid-response border troops of any incursions. The strip of land between the two fences is mined.

In 1947, under the Indian Independence Act states were given the choice of joining India or Pakistan or becoming independent. Maharaja Hari Singh, the ruler of Kashmir, was Hindu, whereas most of his people were Muslim. The Maharaja chose neutrality, sparking a Pakistan-encouraged Muslim uprising, which in turn led the Maharaja to cede Kashmir to India. That sparked a full-scale war: as a result the territory was divided, but on both sides the majority of the population is Muslim. Another war followed in 1965, and there were serious clashes in 1999 between Indian forces and Pakistani-sponsored groups. By this time both nations were nuclear-armed, and the prevention of conflict between them became even more important. A low-level insurgency continues in the Indian-controlled side of Kashmir and this, the bitterest dispute between the two powers, sporadically threatens to worsen. Talks come and go, gestures of friendship are made, often through cricket matches, but India has come to the conclusion that until the issues are resolved, one way to keep the peace is to build barriers to prevent infiltrations by insurgent groups that could spark full-scale fighting.

It is a vast project that has taken decades, but New Delhi is now filling in the gaps in its north and western border defences, having already fenced parts of the Punjab and Rajasthan in the 1980s and 1990s, and is working to ‘seal’ its entire western border, from Gujurat on the Arabian Sea right up to Kashmir in the Himalayas, with what it calls a Comprehensive Integrated Border Management System (CIBMS). Some of this terrain is already difficult to cross due to swampland in the south, and to the north the Thar Desert.

The CIBMS is a similar system to that on the Bangladesh frontier, but this is a much more active border and the danger of military action between India and Pakistan is ever present. The new barriers going up all have radar, thermal imaging, night vision and other equipment linked to control rooms that appear every 3 miles. There are plans for 200,000 floodlights, and the 130 sectors that are riverine will have underwater lasers linked to the control centres. The Indian military is also looking at buying in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capable of identifying a newspaper from 60,000 feet, as well as equipment that can detect human movement tens of miles away. Pakistan has criticized the building of the barriers, saying they violate UN resolutions and local agreements; but the Indians say that incidents of cross-border shelling and militia raids are being lessened by the measures it is taking.

Issues like this are open to interpretation. While India might see the construction of a fortified lookout post as a defensive measure, Pakistan could regard it as a launch pad for an offensive move. The India Pakistan Border Ground Rules Agreement (1960–61) sets out how to accommodate both points of view, but it has never been signed by either side, and in practice such agreements are arrived at on an adhoc basis. Each year can throw up a new matter of contention that had not necessarily been clarified in the early 1960s. For example, in 2017 India erected a 360-foot-high flagpole at the Attari border in Punjab. Pakistan immediately accused India of violating the agreement and said that the flagpole, which could be seen from the city of Lahore, might have been fitted with cameras to allow India to spy on Pakistan.

The situation in Kashmir is more formal. Even though there is no agreement on where the border should be, in theory behaviour on each side of the Line of Control is regulated by the Karachi Agreement of 1949. It says that there should be no defence construction within 500 yards of each side of the line, a stipulation frequently ignored by both sides. The fragile ceasefire is also frequently broken. There are not only cross-border shootings between Indian and Pakistani regular forces, but New Delhi accuses Islamabad of sponsoring terrorist groups to cross into the Indian-controlled side in order to foment violence and even carry out attacks in Indian cities. Since the early 1980s the two countries have engaged in sporadic artillery duels high up on the Siachen Glacier close to the Line of Control. Located on the Karakoram range in the Himalayas, this is the world’s highest combat zone. At almost 20,000 feet above sea level Pakistani and Indian soldiers face off against each other in one of the most climatically hostile areas possible. Tours of duty at the higher levels are only twelve weeks long as lack of oxygen can prevent sleep and cause hallucinations. The soldiers exchange fire, but there are more casualties from frostbite than from high explosives.

Kashmir remains the biggest issue between the two countries. They share a border drawn by outsiders; it divided communities and now stands as a fortified monument to the enmity between two nucleararmed nations.

Pakistan’s 1,510-mile-long western border with Afghanistan was also shaped by outsiders. The original Muslim conquerors used Afghanistan as a jumping-off point from which to invade India, and the British then used it to delineate the western periphery of the jewel in the crown of their Empire. The border is still known as the Durand Line, after Sir Henry Mortimer Durand. In 1893 he and the Afghan emir Abdur Rahman Khan drew the line that effectively established Afghanistan as a buffer zone between British-controlled India and Russian-controlled Central Asia.

It was, is, and will remain a problematic frontier. It separates Pashtuns each side of it into citizens of different countries, a separation many do not accept. For that reason, and because Afghanistan claims some territory east of the line, Kabul does not recognize the border.

Pakistan, desperate to prevent Pashtun nationalism leading to secession, prefers a weak Afghanistan. This, in part, is why sections of the Pakistani military establishment covertly support the Taliban and other groups inside Afghanistan – even though this has come back to bite them east of the Durand Line. There are now the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan Taliban, which have close ties and similar views, and both of which kill Pakistani civilians and military personnel.

By the spring of 2017 things had become so bad that Pakistan announced plans to build a fence in two districts along the border in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. This, it was said, was to combat cross-border operations by the Taliban. However, even if the Pakistanis manage to construct fencing in this difficult and mountainous terrain, the genie is out of the bottle: the Taliban are inside the country and able to move around.

Meanwhile, to the south of the Durand Line is the Pakistan–Iran border, and here it is the Iranians who are engaged in wall-building. A 10-foot-high, 3-foot-thick concrete wall is rising along parts of the frontier. This follows years of drug-smuggling, but also the infiltration of Sunni militia groups from Pakistan into Iran, which is a majority-Shia country. As a result, in 2014 Iranian troops crossed the border to take on a militant group; they were then engaged in a firefight with the Pakistani border guards. Relations remain cordial between the two states, but in the age of walls Iran has taken the option of attempting physical separation in order to prevent the situation deteriorating, thus continuing the trend set by India, Bangladesh and other nations in the region.

All of the above examples fly in the face of the dream of some politicians, and many people in the business community, of creating a vast open trading zone in the subcontinent. India in particular has been reaching out to Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh to develop plans for easier travel and trade across the region. Transnational road and rail links are envisaged, with streamlined crossing points and even, eventually, a huge reduction in border controls similar to those in parts of the EU. Progress, however, is slow, and the border-building programmes now seen in most of the countries go against the practicalities and spirit of regional co-operation.

It is on the India–Pakistan and the India–Bangladesh borders where we see the deepest divide, because this is, at heart, a religious one. India is a Hindu-majority country with a secular democratic system and traditions, but in recent years it has seen a sharp growth in Hindu nationalism. Pakistan is an Islamic republic with a troubled democracy and a history of military rule, while Bangladesh, although nominally a secular republic, has become increasingly religious in both the state sector and public life, with minorities and atheists at serious risk of being murdered for their beliefs.

Not all the walls in the subcontinent are made of stone or wire; some are invisible, but they are present all the same. India has massive internal divisions on a scale and level of prejudice that, if repeated in some countries would be regarded as a shocking scandal requiring international condemnation – and yet the world is mostly silent about the horrors of the Indian caste system.

There are echoes of apartheid in the system, albeit with significant differences – not least that it is not enshrined in the country’s laws. Nevertheless, it has created a segregated society within which some humans are classified as superior beings and others as impure, and people must remain ‘in their place’. As a result, certain categories of people are denied entry to jobs and have their movements restricted. The system ensures that a ruling caste maintains positions of privilege, and condemns others to a life of poverty in which they are subject to violence without recourse to legal redress. The walls between the castes are mostly invisible to outsiders.

The roots of the caste system are religious and date back more than 3,000 years. Hindus are divided into rigid hierarchical groups based on what they do for a living. This is justified in the Manusmriti – the most authoritative book on Hindu law, which regards the system as the ‘basis of order and regularity of society’. Higher castes live among each other, eating and drinking places are segregated, intermarriage is usually banned, or at least frowned upon, and in practice many jobs are closed to lower castes.

Some pre-industrial European societies were based on the hereditary transmission of occupation, which ensured the class system remained intact, but it wasn’t based on religion and has been massively weakened by modernity. The Indian caste system is also fraying in some places due to the pressures of urban living, but its religious basis ensures that it is embedded in everyday life. India remains a predominantly rural society, and thus the ability to hide your roots and avoid your religious heritage is limited. However, even as the population slowly shifts to the cities, the caste system endures because the religious system does.

There are four main categories of people according to the system: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras. Brahma is the god of creation, and the Brahmins, who dominate education and the intellectual fields, are said to have come from his head. The Kshatriyas (from his arms) are warriors and rulers, while the Vaishyas (from his thighs) are traders, and the Shudras (from his feet) do the menial work. These four categories are split between about 3,000 castes which in turn are divided into 25,000 sub-castes.

Outside of the system are those who used to be known as the Untouchables, but are now mostly called the Dalits (‘broken people’). In India, if you see someone disposing of the corpse of a dead animal or sweeping the streets, chances are they are a Dalit. Anyone cleaning toilets or working in sewers is almost certainly a Dalit. They are much more likely to be victims of crime, especially rape, murder and beatings, although conviction rates for people charged with crimes against Dalits are significantly lower than for crimes committed against other groups. In many rural areas they are still not allowed to draw water from public wells or enter Hindu temples. The caste you are born into dictates the job you will have, and it is commonplace that a ‘lower-caste’ person will find themselves with a broom in their hand even if they have a university education. All of the ‘lower’ castes suffer from discrimination, but at the very bottom are the Dalits.

There is an element of skin colour involved in the caste system that many people like to downplay, but it is there nonetheless. A 2016 genetic study by Hyderabad’s Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology discovered a ‘profound influence on skin pigmentation’ within the class structure, the lighter skin tones being predominantly found among the ‘higher’ castes. National secular laws have in theory banned discrimination, but as the system is dominated by people in the higher castes who want to maintain it, the laws are not enforced. Many politicians are also reluctant to take real action as they rely on block votes from certain castes.

The system is deeply embedded in the culture of the country. For example, Mahatma Gandhi, who was from one of the ‘higher’ castes, said: ‘I believe that if Hindu society has been able to stand, it is because it is founded on the caste system . . . To destroy the caste system and adopt the Western European social system means that Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation which is the soul of the caste system. Hereditary principle is an eternal principle. To change it is to create disorder.’ To be fair to Gandhi, he did later speak out against the caste system and the treatment of the Untouchables. However, he continued to defend the idea of varnas, or social classes. He said everyone was assigned a particular hereditary calling that defined what job they should do, but that this did not imply levels of superiority. Varnas, he wrote, were ‘the law of life universally governing the human family’.

This sense of entitlement and ‘natural law’ remains endemic. The Dalits, and other castes, have been using the secular laws to try to level the playing field. They have had some success, but it has also led to rising levels of violence against them. India’s 2014 National Crime Records showed a 29 per cent increase in crime against lower-caste people over two years as they increasingly resort to the law to seek justice. Dalits owning or buying land is the most common cause of violence against them by local communities determined to keep them at the bottom of society.

Reliable national statistics for caste numbers are difficult to find because the last time the Indian census included caste was 1931. Then the Untouchables constituted 12.5 per cent of the population. Now, despite twenty-seven years of affirmative action, they remain the poorest and most oppressed of India’s people. The major government, judicial, diplomatic and military positions, as well as senior posts in major companies, academia, the media and the education system, are all overwhelmingly dominated by Brahmins despite the fact that they comprise roughly 3.5 per cent of the population. All societies build in social stratification, but even the elite public-school system in Britain’s class-based society does not result in such a rigid, ossified social structure. Given the rural and religious base of Indian culture, it will take a long time for these prejudices to be overcome – should enough Indians even want them to. The system survives partially because its supporters openly argue that it binds society together: India needs to be protected from the fragmentation of society witnessed in Europe after the Industrial Revolution. Its opponents counter that it is immoral and holds the country back as it cannot harness all of its human talents.

Over the decades since independence some Dalits have surmounted the obstacles and risen to prominence, notably K. R. Narayanan, who served as president between 1997 and 2002. With increasing human movement from the countryside to the cities, the invisible walls are beginning to grow weaker: what caste you are is less obvious in the city, some urbanites do not take the system so seriously, and there are now even cases of intermarriage between castes. But P. L. Mimroth of the Centre for Dalit Rights believes that the roots of discrimination are still so deeply embedded in the national psyche that it will take generations until the spirit of the laws against the caste system is truly accepted: ‘We were wrong to believe that education would eradicate untouchability. It will take more than 100 years to change that.’

As the statistics show, the system is still alive and well throughout the country: tens of millions of people are denied basic human rights, not by law but by culture. This is not the image of India most people have. Generations of tourists and student backpackers return from India infused with the spirit of Hinduism, which promotes friendliness, non-violence, spiritualism and vegetarianism. Few see that alongside that is one of the most degrading social systems on the planet.

In 1936 the great Indian intellectual B. R. Ambedkar was invited to deliver the annual lecture of a Hindu reformist group. He submitted his speech, which included among many other challenging statements the words: ‘There cannot be a more degrading system of social organization than the caste system . . . It is the system that deadens, paralyses and cripples the people from helpful activity.’ The lecture was cancelled on the grounds that parts of it were ‘unbearable’. Ambedkar published his work as an essay later that year.

In the twenty-first century Indian society is far from ‘deadened’ – indeed India is a vibrant, increasingly important country, embracing a range of high-tech industries – and yet within it are millions of barriers to progress for tens of millions of its citizens. The walls around India are designed to keep people out, and those within to keep people down.

The divides throughout the subcontinent are becoming ever more apparent, exacerbated by the continuing and growing movement of people escaping poverty, persecution and climate change. If the majority of scientists are correct in their predictions of climate change, then it’s obvious they will continue to be on the move this century. A wall has yet to be built that can withstand that much weight pressing against it. The barriers can and will be built as a partial one-sided temporary holding ‘solution’, but unless prosperity is also built, everyone is going to lose. In an attempt to control the regional demographics, the barriers along the majority of the thousands of miles of frontiers are now being built higher and wider and are becoming more technologically sophisticated. As we’ve seen, though, such barriers don’t stop people attempting to cross anyway – many don’t have any other choice but to try – and increasingly violent policing of borders can lead to terrible human consequences. Felani Khatun paid with her life, and down in the delta plains of Bangladesh are millions more like her.

CHAPTER 6

AFRICA

‘The forces that unite us are intrinsic and greater than

the superimposed influences that keep us apart.’

– Kwame Nkrumah

A Sahrawi girl holding the Sahrawi flag in front of the Moroccan Wall, separating Western Sahara between territory controlled by Morocco and that held by the Polisario Front.

THERE’S A WALL AT THE TOP OF AFRICA. IT IS A WALL OF SAND, of shame and of silence.

The Moroccan Wall runs for 1,700 miles through Western Sahara and into parts of Morocco. The whole construction separates what Morocco terms its Southern Provinces along the Atlantic coast from the Free Zone in the desert interior – an area the Sahrawi people call the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. It is built of sand piled almost 7 feet high, with a backing trench and millions of landmines stretching several miles into the desert on each side of the barrier. It is thought to be the longest continuous minefield in the world. Every three miles or so there is a Moroccan Army outpost containing up to forty troops, some of whom patrol the spaces between the bases, while two and a half miles back from each major post are rapid-reaction mobile units, and behind those artillery bases. The length of the wall is also dotted with radar masts which can ‘see’ up to 50 miles into the Free Zone. All of this is intended to keep fighters from the Sahrawi military force, called the Polisario Front (PF), well away from the wall and the areas Morocco considers its territory.

It is a harsh place. By day the heat can reach 50°C, and at night the temperature can drop to almost freezing. Frequently the sand-laden sirocco wind blows through the arid land, turning the air a mustard colour and restricting visibility. To an outsider it is a hostile, forbidding region, but to the Sahrawi people, it’s home.

Prior to Spain’s withdrawal from the region in 1975 there had already been a Western Saharan independence movement. As the Spanish left, 350,000 Moroccans took part in the ‘Green March’ – they walked into the region and claimed it as Moroccan territory. Spain subsequently transferred control to Morocco and Mauritania; the government in Rabat effectively annexed the territory and sent in 20,000 troops, who were immediately confronted by the PF. The fighting lasted sixteen years and took the lives of tens of thousands of people. Despite their superior numbers and modern military equipment, the Moroccan army could not subdue the guerrilla tactics of the PF. In 1980 they began building what became known as the ‘Wall of Shame’, finishing it in 1987.

And now there is silence. Western Sahara is not so much a forgotten conflict as a conflict few people have ever heard of. The Sahrawi people who live each side of the wall speak the Hassaniya dialect of Arabic, feel culturally different from Moroccans and are traditionally a nomadic people, although now they are mostly urban and tens of thousands live in refugee camps. Moroccan immigration has completely changed the composition of the Western Saharan population as the government has encouraged people to settle there by offering tax breaks, subsidies and one-off payments. The total population of the remaining Sahrawi is not known, but estimates range between 200,000 and 400,000. Until the mid twentieth century they’d had no concept of borders; they simply moved over a vast area, following unpredictable rainfall. Now, 85 per cent of what they would regard as their traditional territory is under Moroccan control. The word Sahrawi means ‘inhabitants of the desert’ and that is what they wish to be – not inhabitants of Morocco. They are, like other peoples we will encounter throughout this chapter, victims of the lines drawn by others – in this case a vast line made of, and in, the sand.

Morocco is not alone in dealing with secessionist movements. Across Africa there are attempts to break away, conflicts that descend into incredibly violent civil wars, such as those we’ve seen in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Why do so many African countries suffer such terrible strife? There are many and varied reasons, but the history of the way in which the nation states across the continent were formed plays a crucial part.

Independence movements struggle for recognition and selfdetermination. The idea of the nation state, having developed in Europe, spread like wildfire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, calling for self-determining government for a ‘nation’ of people – a group who to some degree share a historical, ethnic, cultural, geographical or linguistic community.

When the European colonialists drew their lines on the map and created the nation states that, largely, still make up the continent of Africa, they were treating a vast land mass containing a rich diversity of peoples, customs, cultures and ethnicities with little regard for any of them – and the nation states they created often bore no relation at all to the nations that were already there. These nations – or peoples – are sometimes referred to as tribes. Western writers are often squeamish about using the word ‘tribe’, and some Western and African academics will even tell you the colonialists invented the concept. They are simply playing with words because they are embarrassed that the word tribe has, wrongly, for some people become synonymous with backwardness. Nevertheless, within many nation states in Africa and elsewhere tribes exist – it seems pointless to deny their importance.

I have a friend in London who is from West Africa. The first thing he told me about himself was his name, then that he was from the Ivory Coast, and then that he was from the Mandinka tribe. This was to him a source of pride, and an identification with a people spread across several West African countries in each of which they comprise a significant minority. He is not unusual: huge numbers of Africans use the word tribe to refer to their nation or people, and identify with whichever one they belong to. Within this there will be, to varying degrees, a shared history, customs, food and possibly language and religion. In this the Africans are no different from any other peoples around the world; what does distinguish them is how strong this tribalism remains within many African nation states. An English family abroad, meeting another, may well share a strained conversation along the lines of: ‘Ah, a Brit. Where are you from?’ ‘Milton Keynes.’ ‘Oh, Milton Keynes’, followed by short periods of silence broken possibly by a discussion about which are the best roads into Milton Keynes. A Mandinka from Ivory Coast meeting another from Gambia when visiting Nigeria will have a lot more to talk about.

Classifications are difficult, but Africa is estimated to have at least 3,000 ethnic groups encompassing a huge variety of languages, religions and cultures. Among the largest are the Amhara and Oromo in Ethiopia, which comprise about 54 million people. Nigeria is home to four of the ten largest tribes on the continent – the Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Ijaw, totalling almost 100 million in a country of 186 million people. The Shona in Zimbabwe, the Zulu in South Africa and the Ashanti in Ghana each number about 10 million. There are many smaller groups and sub-groups, however. As a very rough guide, and depending on how they are counted, it is estimated that there are between 250 and 500 tribes in Nigeria alone.

Tribalism can have very many positive aspects, providing a sense of community, shared history, values and customs, a source of support in troubled times. Even with increasing urbanization, these tribal traditions have been able to continue and create new communities as people group together.

The various linguistic regions of Nigeria.

Usually, as a newcomer to a city, you will head to a district where you feel socially accepted and where there are people who will show you the ropes. Frequently that will be among folk who you identify with, which gives you the feeling of safety in numbers – this quickly leads to the recreation of a tribe. We witness this everywhere, in every ‘Chinatown’ in the world, for example, and we see it in African cities such as Nairobi in Kenya, where often people from different tribes around the country settle in districts of the city populated by those of the same tribe. A Luhya from a rural area of Kenya who moves to the capital might more quickly feel at home in the Kawangware district, even if it is one of the poorer parts of town. The Kenyan tribes have carved out extended tribal villages within Nairobi. This has been going on for decades across the continent. In the 1986 novel Coming to Birth by the Kenyan writer Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye the main character, a sixteen-year-old girl named Paulina who is from the Luo tribe, arrives in Nairobi from rural Kisumu and heads for the Makongeni district. Makongeni was, and remains, mostly populated by Luo.

While belonging to a tribe is a positive thing, a source of pride for many, in Africa – as elsewhere – one key question is the degree to which the existence of tribes holds back the forging of the biggest tribal unit, that of the nation state, and the cohesion it is supposed to represent. The problem lies in the way in which the nation states were formed.

Drive several hours east of Lagos and you can find, with some difficulty, the ruins of a massive walled city that was lost to the jungle, and then to history, for centuries. The walls are thought to have been begun in the eighth century to repel invaders. By the eleventh century Benin City was the capital of the Benin Empire, the most highly developed empire in West Africa.

When the Portuguese came across it in 1485, to their astonishment they found an urban area bigger than their own capital city, Lisbon. Situated on a plain about four days’ walk from the coast, the city was surrounded by massive walls up to 66 feet high and exceptionally deep ditches, all of which were guarded. The 1974 edition of the Guinness Book of Records says that ‘the city walls, together with those in the kingdom as a whole, were the world’s second-largest earthworks carried out prior to the mechanical era’. A 1990s article by Fred Pearce in the New Scientist (drawing on the work of the British geographer and archaeologist Patrick Darling) stated that the walls were, at one point, ‘four times longer than the Great Wall of China’, although they used less material. They are estimated to have run for 9,940 miles and encompassed a population of up to 100,000 people.

The design of the city appears to have been laid out according to the rules of what we now call fractal design – a complex repeating pattern exhibiting similar patterns at increasingly small scales. In the city centre was the king’s palace, which oversaw a highly bureaucratic society. From this fanned out thirty main streets, about 120 feet wide, running at right-angles to each other, all with narrower streets leading off them. The city was split into eleven neighbourhoods. Some were lit at night by tall metal lamps burning palm-oil-fuelled wicks that illuminated the extensive artwork to be found across the city. Inside the city were houses, some two storeys high, and walled compounds made of red clay. Outside were 500 walled villages, all connected to each other and to the capital. It had a moat system, which included twenty smaller moats around some villages and towns.

The early Portuguese explorers were impressed with the scale of the city and the stunning works of art and architecture it contained. In 1691 Lourenco Pinto, a Portuguese ship’s captain, observed: ‘All the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see. The houses are large, especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses.’

In 1897 this jewel of West Africa was destroyed by British troops as they tried to expand their control of the continent. After a few years of British attempts to consolidate their power over the region, the situation descended into violence. A force of 1,200 or so Royal Marines fell upon the city, burning the palace and people’s homes and looting religious icons and works of art. Many of the stolen Benin bronzes remain in museums around the world even today. The king escaped but returned a few months later and was exiled to southern Nigeria, where he died in 1914.

By then most of the great city walls had been destroyed as the victorious British stamped their authority on the kingdom, blowing up large sections of the walls and incorporating the city and its surroundings into ‘British Nigeria’. Local people took much of what was left as building materials to make new homes, and slowly the city was depopulated. What remained was mostly forgotten about, except by people in the region. In the early 1960s archaeologists began to explore the area and map what is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as are the remains of a similar complex of walls and ditches in what is called Sungbo’s Eredo, 140 miles to the west.

Although barely anything is left to indicate that the city even existed, it was a prime example of the richness, diversity and wealth of pre-colonial African civilizations. When these kingdoms rose to power they were separate entities; now they are but small parts of a much larger whole – Nigeria. The Europeans’ border lines, like those of ‘British Nigeria’, were often drawn according to how far European explorers had gone, rather than taking into account the existing nations and kingdoms, which had evolved organically around tribal divisions. They forcibly threw together hundreds of nations, or tribes.

The myriad African nations were never democracies, but a ruler was usually from the same wider tribe as his subjects in a system of government originating from within that tribe. When the colonialists withdrew, different peoples were told they were now grouped together in a defined area, and were often left with a ruler who, in the eyes of many, did not have the right to rule them. And there’s a double contradiction in the colonial legacy. The first is that of creating single nation states out of multiple nations and tribes; the second is that at the same time the Europeans bequeathed them ideas of democracy and self-determination. Much of the current discord and conflict we see in Africa is rooted in this experiment in rapid unification.

The first generation of leaders of the independent African states understood that any attempt to redraw the colonial maps might lead to hundreds of mini-wars, and so decided they would work with the existing lines in the hope that they could build genuine nation states and thus reduce ethnic divisions. However, most leaders then failed to implement policies to unite their peoples within these borders, instead relying on brute force and repeating the colonialists’ trick of divide and rule. The many different peoples thrown together in these newly minted nation states had not had the beneficial experience of settling their differences and coming together over centuries. Some states are still struggling with the contradictions built into their systems by colonialism.

The territories occupied by colonial powers in Africa.

Angola is a prime example: it is larger than the US states of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas and Mississippi combined. When the Portuguese arrived in the sixteenth century the region was home to at least ten major ethnic groups subdivided into perhaps a hundred tribes. The Portuguese would have gone further and incorporated even more nations into their colony, but they bumped up against British, Belgian and German claims. The different ethnic groups had little in common – other than a dislike of their colonial masters. By the early 1960s enough of them were able to band together to launch a war of independence. The Portuguese departed in 1975, but they left behind an invented country called Angola that was expected to function as a united nation state.

Imagine for a moment that colonialism had not happened, and that instead, as it modernized, Africa had followed a similar pattern to Europe and developed its own relatively homogeneous nation states. One of the peoples of Angola are the Bakongo, who speak Kikongo, a Bantu language, and who in pre-colonial days had a kingdom of contiguous territory, stretching across parts of several territories including what are now Angola, the DRC and Gabon. They feel kinship with fellow Kikongo speakers in the Republic of Congo and the DRC – together comprising around 10 million people. In the DRC they are the largest ethnic group but in Angola they are a minority, which explains the rise of the Bundu dia Kongo movement, which is present in all three countries and wants a nation state of Kikongo speakers based on pre-colonial ideas of territory. They are still working at forging a unified nation state – as are many others with a similar history.

There is no getting away from the aspiring nationalism of peoples torn apart by the colonial era. They did not agree to join federations given names by Europeans. Then, when they were eventually able to throw the Europeans out, they were frustrated that they were now expected to feel loyalty to a system that had been imposed upon them against their will, and in which too often the main ethnic group dominated all the others. In some countries these divisions can be contained within the political sphere, but in many places the lid has blown off, bringing civil war and the rise of separatist movements.

Take, for example, the Land and Maritime Boundary dispute between Cameroon and Nigeria which began in 1994. Both countries claimed sovereignty over an oil-rich peninsula named Bakassi. The situation deteriorated so badly that there was sporadic armed conflict between them, leading to the emergence of the Bakassi Self-Determination Front (BSDF), which issues videos of members wearing uniforms and clutching assault rifles, and runs a pirate radio station called ‘Dayspring’ which calls for self-rule. And Cameroon has other problems with independent-minded people. It is a mainly French-speaking country, but out of a 23-million-strong population there is a minority of about 5 million who are English-speaking. Some of the latter claim to be discriminated against, and there are now growing calls for autonomy for the two western provinces bordering Nigeria in which most of them live. There’s even a ‘president’ in exile, a flag and a national anthem ready in the unlikely event that the two provinces unite as ‘Southern Cameroon’.

There are many other examples. Casamance province in the southern part of Senegal has been fighting for autonomy. Kenya has the ‘Mombasa Republican Council’, which wants independence for the country’s coastal region, arguing that it has its own distinct culture and should not have been included as part of Kenya when it won independence from the UK. Its slogan, in Kiswahili, is ‘Pwani si Kenya’ – ‘the coast is not Kenya’.

Few of the numerous secessionist movements are likely to be successful in the near to medium future, but breakaways cannot be ruled out – some have managed it in recent years. Ethiopia lost Eritrea to an independence movement and still faces separatist factions in its Ogaden and Oromia regions, while Sudan is split into two countries, South Sudan having become the world’s newest state in 2011. Sadly, the situation has degenerated into civil war: the dominant Dinka tribe was quickly accused of discriminating against the Nuer, Acholi and others, which led to fighting between them. The war has cost several hundreds of thousands of lives, and caused more than a million people to flee their homes.

It’s a familiar story in the recent history of Africa. Perhaps one of the worst examples was in Nigeria, where a massacre of the Igbos preceded the civil war of 1967–70 and the short-lived ‘Republic of Biafra’; in total over 3 million were killed and Nigeria has a continuing problem with Biafran ideas of nationhood. But this is far from the only case. Burundi is another one. Ethnically it is about 85 per cent Hutu, but the 14 per cent Tutsi minority are politically and economically powerful and the country has long been ravaged by the tensions between them. In 1965 a coup attempt against the king, who was a Tutsi, sparked ethnic fighting which killed at least 5,000 people. In 1972 mass killings sparked an invasion by Hutu rebels who had based themselves in Zaire. It is thought that over the following four years almost 200,000 people died. Smaller outbreaks of violence plagued the 1980s before a full-scale civil war broke out in 1993 and continued until 2005. This time Hutu President Melchior Ndadaye was killed by Tutsi assassins, setting off a chain of events that pitted the two sides against each other. The last few years have witnessed low-level violence, with about 400,000 Burundians fleeing the country, most heading for Tanzania.

In Rwanda around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in the 1994 genocide. The DRC contains over 200 ethnic groups and has been suffering terrible violence since 1996 – estimates vary, but some put the death toll as high as 6 million, and the agony of the conflict is continuing today; a whole host of other countries, including Liberia and Angola, have also endured widespread and sustained conflict. The factors behind the violence are complex and include the imposition of borders, a lack of development and poverty; but without doubt the ethnic divides are significant. And, since the nations still frequently cross nation state borders, conflict in one can quickly spread to another.

All nation states have differences with their neighbours, but in most other parts of the world territorial disputes based on geography and ethnicity arose organically over long periods of time. In many cases they have been settled. However, the African experience is of relatively recent geographical and ethnic contradictions being built into the whole region by outsiders. Yes, we’re back to colonialism – because there will be no getting away from it until the Africans can distance themselves from its effects. Given the scale of the social engineering, sixty to seventy years of independence is no distance at all.

It does not help, of course, that the European borders are still the basis of any diplomatic resolution of territorial disputes – as we saw in Morocco and Western Sahara, which are still having to abide by the lines drawn by Spain. Unsure of how to respond or with whom to side, the international community has recognized neither Morocco nor the Polisario Front’s claim to Western Sahara; the region is on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, meaning that the area hasn’t officially been decolonized. So technically Spain is still the administering power in Western Sahara, even though in practice most of it is under Moroccan control.

Another example is the dispute between Cameroon and Nigeria, which was eventually taken to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and settled in 2002. Interestingly, both countries went to court citing not ancient tribal claims, nor the wishes of the present-day inhabitants, but colonial-era documents drawn up and signed by Europeans, when the British ruled Nigeria and Cameroon was part of the German Empire. These documents were the basis of the ICJ judgement, which came down in favour of Cameroon, stating ‘sovereignty over the Bakassi Peninsula lies with Cameroon and that the boundary is delimited by the Anglo-German agreement of 11 March 1913’. The court noted that the land boundary dispute ‘falls within an historical framework including partition by European powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, League of Nations mandates, UN Trusteeships and the independence of the two states’.

Not all Nigerians are happy with the ICJ ruling, nor with their then government’s decision to abide by it. Some want the issue reopened. The Vanguard newspaper of the Niger Delta region has been campaigning for years to have the ruling reversed, and to revisit the case on the basis of ancestral land claims. One recent opinion piece ended with the declaration: ‘To reclaim Bakassi Peninsula is a task that must be done!’

There are arguments within academia about the extent to which the various disputes and conflicts are actually underpinned by ethnicity. Some academics suggest that politicians are just using the different factions to further their own aims. This may well sometimes be the case, but it does not mean that the differences are not there to be exploited, or that they do not run deep.

In some cases strong tribal affiliations can distract policymakers from focusing on what is in the national interest and can split politics along tribal lines. The relatively stable South African democracy, for example, is supposed to be ethnically blind, but the political system is splintered along ethnic and tribal lines: the Zulu are linked with the Inkatha Freedom Party, for instance, while the Xhosa dominate the African National Congress. The constitution of the country recognized these divides and set up Provincial Houses of Traditional Leaders in Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape, Free State, Mpumalanga and North West. They are in essence reflective of different South African ‘nations’ or tribes.

Another political issue is that tribalism also encourages favouritism – or, to put it another way, corruption. This is a huge problem across the whole continent, described by Kenya’s former president Daniel arap Moi as a ‘cancer’, which impacts in all sorts of ways. Political appointments, business deals and legal judgements can all be affected by it, which means the best person for the job is often not the person who gets it. It discourages marriage from outside a defined group, and it militates against national unity. It’s also hugely damaging for a country’s economic wellbeing. Funds that were intended for economic development, infrastructure or any manner of public spending are diverted into the pockets of increasingly wealthy and powerful individuals. The UN estimates that corruption cheats the continent out of about $50 billion every year. Corruption occurs in every country in the world, of course, but in Africa it is known to be particularly widespread. That’s why the African Union named 2018 as the year for ‘Winning the Fight Against Corruption’.

On the other hand, some people have suggested that a number of checks and balances have been incorporated into the tribal system, and that these can ensure a fairer distribution of wealth and power across a country. Nigeria, for example, as we’ve seen, has sharply delineated ethnic and religious divides. Many regions are overwhelmingly dominated by one group or another, and while the south of the country is predominantly Christian, the north is mostly Muslim. The south enjoys higher literacy rates, better health and more money. The country’s political map runs along similar lines. As a result there is an unwritten rule to even out any discrimination or imbalance of power across the country as a whole: namely that the presidency (which controls most of the budget) will alternate between a Christian and a Muslim. This is an example at the highest level, but within many parliaments and governments decisions are made taking into account the effect they will have on the country’s various tribes, with the aim of avoiding unrest and dissatisfaction. If the political parties representing tribes A, B and C do not bear in mind the views of tribe D they can expect trouble from that part of the country. At one level this is no different from the workings of any other political system, but in Africa it is more tribally/ ethnically based than in most.

Some countries have had more success than others in limiting the political effects of these divisions. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, for example, outlawed parties based on tribal affinity, and in the Ivory Coast Félix Houphouët-Boigny, president from 1960 to 1993, shared out power to a degree that kept a lid on regional tensions. Botswana has been relatively stable, partially because it is one of the few African states with a high degree of homogeneity, plus a democratic system and a functioning economy. Tanzania is another exception, despite having more than a hundred tribes. Its first president, Julius Nyerere, insisted that in order to forge a national identity the sole national language would be Swahili. Already widely used in the country, it became the glue that held together a nation. But even Tanzania is showing slight fractures: Islamists in Zanzibar are now calling for a referendum to end the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar that created Tanzania in 1964.

How much might tribalism affect the development of any country in which it has a strong hold? It is probably impossible to gauge accurately because we don’t have an example of a tribe-free country to use in comparison. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that the need to constantly balance the competing claims of overlapping groups is a distraction from the development of the state as a single entity. And certainly, when conflicts descend into violence they can destabilize an entire country, disrupt its economy, force millions from their homes and cause millions of casualties. They can be incredibly costly, both to the country as a whole and to individual citizens, and they play a part in the terrible cycles of poverty and inequality that occur across the continent.

Africa is the poorest continent in the world. Globalization has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, but at the same time the gap between the rich and the not rich has widened. The division is particularly stark in Africa, where seven of the ten most unequal countries are to be found. Across the continent are modern cities, rapidly filling with skyscrapers, multinational companies and a growing middle class. But in all these burgeoning urban centres, alongside the wealthy live the incredibly poor, who might be scraping by on less than $2 a day. A World Bank study in 2016 found that the percentage of Africans living in poverty had declined from 56 per cent in 1990 to 43 per cent in 2012, but the number of people living in those conditions had actually increased from 280 million to 330 million due to the growth in population.

Zimbabwe is among the poorer countries in Africa, and large numbers of the population are intent on finding a better life elsewhere, especially in its two much wealthier neighbours – Botswana and South Africa – to the south. However, richer countries don’t necessarily want a huge influx of poor migrants, many of whom struggle to cross the borders. Botswana has a 300-mile-long electric fence along its border with Zimbabwe. It says this is to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle, but unless Zimbabwean cows can do the high jump it’s difficult to see why it needs to be so high. Zimbabwe, and its impoverished population, is also fenced off from South Africa. As one of the richest countries in southern Africa, South Africa is a magnet for migrants – which is partly why it also has a fence along its border with Mozambique.

Despite these barriers, many people do cross over into South Africa, and high levels of immigration have caused tensions just as they have elsewhere in the world. In 2017 Nigeria’s leadership appealed to the South African government to intervene to stop what it called ‘xenophobic attacks’ during a spate of anti-immigrant violence, following comments reportedly made by the Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu that foreigners should ‘pack their bags’ and go. He said he was misquoted, but the damage was done and many of those rioting were heard chanting, ‘The king has spoken’. People from the 3-millionstrong community of Zimbabweans were among the main targets, but there are also around 800,000 Nigerians in South Africa and during the trouble no foreigner was safe if found by the mob. Nigerian homes and individuals were attacked, some Nigerian-owned small business were looted and burnt, there were several fatalities, and hundreds of people were forced from their homes and fled to camps set up by the government. The trouble also led to anti-South African demonstrations in Nigeria in which South African businesses were attacked amid calls for South Africans to ‘go home’.

Here we see a scenario familiar in countries across the world: fear and anger directed at immigrants, who are not only accused of taking local jobs but also of creating higher levels of crime by selling drugs, forming gangs and so on. Crime isn’t necessarily linked to immigration, but it is linked to poverty, and both are widespread across Africa. Statistics show that Africa is second only to the Americas when it comes to crime rates, especially that of murder. A UN report on global crime rates for 2012 showed that of 437,000 murders in that year, 36 per cent were in the Americas and 31 per cent in Africa. By comparison, just 5 per cent of murders were committed in Europe. The same report suggested that in some parts of Africa the murder rate was increasing.

Poverty appears to be both a cause of crime and a consequence of it, and poor people are caught in this cycle. Most of those living desperate lives in shanty towns do not turn to crime despite lacking access to what better-off people would regard as the basics of a comfortable life. Nevertheless, they suffer the consequences of crime – theft, violence, weapons, gangs, drug-selling, overstretched law enforcement, exploitation – all of which loop back into insecurity and underdevelopment and thus help sustain the poverty into which they were born.

But while the poor are trapped in this cycle, the rich are getting richer and using their wealth to save themselves from encountering the hardships of day-to-day poverty by retreating behind walls of their own: the gated community, a clear sign of the economic divisions and the vast inequality that can be found across the continent. There are many attractions to this way of life, as one advertisement makes clear: ‘Uncomplicate your life! Escape to Lusaka’s newest suburb. An exclusive and secure residential estate . . . MukaMunya is protected by an alarmed electric fence, a gated entrance and a 24-hour security system allowing entry by invitation only . . . the main road is tarred too, making that dream of driving a low-slung executive car an option. Enjoy a host of facilities . . . The park club house offers two tennis courts, a squash court, a 25-metre swimming pool and a fully stocked bar. In close proximity to one of Lusaka’s finest schools, the “equestrian belt” and an easy drive into town.’ The walls of a gated community promise luxury, safety and exclusivity. If your name’s not on the list, you can’t come in, and to get on the list you have to pay. A lot. MukaMunya means ‘My Place’ in Soli, one of the Bantu languages of Zambia, but most of the local population can but dream of having a home there.

Fortified communities are not exactly new. From early agricultural times, on through the Roman period and the Middle Ages, walls around collections of dwellings became a normal way of living. It was only in relatively recent times – with the rise of the nation state and internal security, including police forces – that cities allowed walls to be taken down, or began to expand outside them. Now the walls have started to go back up again. But whereas in the past the whole community would be able to retreat behind its walls for protection when threatened, now only a minority live there permanently.

The trend for living in gated communities started to re-emerge during the twentieth century and has been gathering pace ever since. Now such communities are being built the length and breadth of Africa, with Zambia, South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria leading the way. South Africa pioneered the African gated trend. According to The Economist, as early as 2004 Johannesburg alone had 300 enclosed neighbourhoods and 20 security estates, while in 2015 Graça Machel, widow of Nelson Mandela, inaugurated the ‘parkland residence’ Steyn City in South Africa – a development four times the size of Monaco – which includes South Africa’s most expensive house.

This is not limited to Africa, of course. In the USA, for example, the use of ‘fortified towns’ seems to have begun in California in the 1930s with gated enclaves such as the Rolling Hills Estate. Some scholars identify an acceleration in the building of gated communities in the 1980s and suggest that as governments cut back on welfare and spent less on communal areas, the people who could afford to do so withdrew from the public space. One study in 1997 estimated that by then the USA had 20,000 gated communities housing 3 million residents.

Similar patterns are clear in Latin America, for example, which has also seen a dramatic rise in ‘fortress communities’ this century. In Lima, Peru, what has become known as the Wall of Shame separates Las Casuarinas, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods of the city, from Pamplona Alta, one of the poorest. Some have grown to be almost cities within cities: Alphaville in São Paolo, Brazil, for instance, houses more than 30,000 residents, completely changing the way the urban centres operate and are organized, while the Chinese are building developments far exceeding that.

This modern way of living is not only for the very rich, either. The rapid growth of the middle class in many African countries has led to the development of gated developments marketed at those who cannot afford the luxury of a top-end detached house, but who are able to pay for a flat in a large compound of modern high-rise blocks. Take Nigeria, for example: in its capital, Lagos, which has a population of 21 million, you can find some of the world’s poorest people, living in the slums in floating shanty towns on the city’s lagoons, or crammed onto the islands around the mainland, close to some of the most expensive houses in the world. In the new upmarket developments it is not unusual to see a two-bedroom flat on the market for more than $1 million. You certainly wouldn’t get any change from a million if you bought in one of the developing new ‘cities’ such as Eko Atlantic, which is built on just under 4 miles of land reclaimed from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean adjacent to Lagos. The city is ringed with such developments. They are testament to the fact that this oil-rich country of 186 million people has a burgeoning middle and upper-middle class, and how wealth distribution is changing in its urban areas.

The boom in such properties is partly a response to high crime rates, as we’ve seen. However, ironically, a 2014 study published in the Journal of Housing and the Built Environment suggested that moving to a house inside the fortress might actually increase the chances of someone trying to break into your property. Anyone well off enough to be able to live in a gated community is assumed by burglars to have something worth stealing.

The report did acknowledge that the compounds offer levels of protection higher in general than those outside them, but said that they leave public spaces deserted and at higher risk of crime. Gated communities threaten to weaken social cohesion wherever they are built. Of course there have always been parts of cities where the wealthy live, but there have also been shared social spaces, be they town squares, markets, parks or entertainment areas that are open to everyone. The new model of urban and suburban living is designed to be exclusionary: you can only get to the town square if you can get through the security surrounding the town. This lack of interaction may shrink the sense of civic engagement, encourage group-think among those on the inside and lead to a psychological division, with poorer people left feeling like ‘outsiders’, as though they’ve been walled off. Increased wealth without bringing a relative degree of prosperity to all reinforces division.

There are consequences for the entire community, and a knock-on effect on attitudes to both local and national governments. If significant numbers of people live in communities in which they pay private companies to provide the infrastructure, such as water pipes and roads, and then to protect them with private police and fire agencies, while dealing only with private healthcare, then the role of local and national government diminishes. And if a government’s remit is to administer only smaller sectors of society, then the cohesion of the nation state is also weakened. It would be hard in this scenario for a politician to come up with the slogan Britain’s David Cameron used in 2016 in relation to financial hardships – ‘We’re all in it together.’

Or, to put it in the language of the United Nations in its UN-Habitat report: ‘impacts of gating are seen in the real and potential spatial and social fragmentation of cities, leading to the diminished use and availability of public space and increased socioeconomic polarization. In this context, gating has been characterized as having counterintuitive impacts, even increasing crime and the fear of crime as the middle classes abandon public streets to the vulnerable poor, to street children and families, and to the offenders who prey on them.’ However, some studies suggest that within the compounds gating has helped encourage a sense of social cohesion and community neighbourhood that transcends tribe and ethnicity. This is where the tribal concept based on ethnicity breaks down.

In a 2015 study on gated communities in Ghana, when residents were asked why they had chosen to live in the developments the top response was ‘quality homes’, with ‘safety and security’ second and ‘class of residents’ third. A ‘sense of community’ was sixth, and a hint of the impact of gated communities on culture came in eighth: ‘a buffer from extended family system’. Although this reason came eighth, it was a fascinating insight into how this modern reinterpretation of a walled city will slowly contribute to the weakening of the close extended family ties found throughout the continent.

In places where welfare provided by the state is weak, and where employment is often temporary and informal, it is normal that one or two relatively high-earning family members will use their income to supplement dozens of extended family members. Giving a family member a job is not considered nepotism but a family responsibility. This has long been the case in Africa, so putting a physical barrier between members of the extended family will have a negative effect as most of the properties built are for the nuclear, not the larger, family. The developments are a different world, and not just in the physical sense. For those on the inside the new, much looser ‘tribe’ is the social class of your immediate neighbours.

The new tribes living behind the walls identify with each other because they have things worth stealing, not because their mothers and fathers originally came from a certain region or spoke a particular language. They have similar lifestyles, often similar interests, which are similarly protected. When you have enough money you can pay others to protect you; when you don’t you band together, and so behind the walls the sense of ‘we’ or ‘us’ is diluted, sometimes to as little as ‘I’.

Ethnic identity still predominates in most African countries. While the nation state borders are real, insofar as they exist within a legal framework and are sometimes marked by some sort of physical barrier, they do not always exist in the minds of people living within and around them. Like the Sahrawi, whose traditional territory has been split by the Moroccan Wall, many still feel the pull of their ancestral lands.

The post-colonial consensus by African leaders not to change the borders was based on a fear that to do so would invite never-ending conflict, and in the hope that they could build genuine nation states and thus reduce ethnic divisions. It has been incredibly difficult, not least because in Africa the nations still frequently cross nation state borders, whereas in, for example, Western Europe, there are more often clear geographical or linguistic lines where one nation ends and another begins.

We are now well into the twenty-first century and Africa stands at a point which, with hindsight, was always coming: it needs to balance the rediscovery of its pre-colonial senses of nationhood with the realities of the current functioning nation states. That’s a fine line, fraught with danger, but to ignore or deny the divisions that occur the length and breadth of this vast space will not make them go away.

Once there was the ‘scramble for Africa’; now there is a race to bring about a degree of prosperity so that people may be persuaded to live peacefully together, while working on solutions where they wish to live apart.

CHAPTER 7

EUROPE

‘Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or

human rights crises in one part of the world from

national security crises in another. What begins with

the failure to uphold the dignity of one life all too

often ends with a calamity for entire nations.’

– Kofi Annan

People gather at the Berlin Wall as it starts to come down, November 1989.

EARLY ONE GREY MORNING IN 1979 I BOARDED A MILITARY train in West Germany heading through East Germany to Charlottenburg station in the West German sector of Berlin, formerly the capital of a united Germany. By that time the Berlin Wall had been up for eighteen years and it appeared to be a permanent fixture in our lives, one that would keep us apart for ever. There didn’t seem to be any prospect of living another way – the present was fixed in concrete, barbed wire, part of a conflict that threatened to split enough atoms to kill us all.

As a serving member of the RAF I was armed with a military ID card and thus had no need of a passport for this particular journey. At the border we stopped at a station complete with barbed-wire fences and a watchtower. Terse, unsmiling Soviet border guards entered the train and checked our documents while the East German Transport Police, known as ‘TraPos’, used sniffer dogs to inspect the underside of the carriages. The capitalist locomotive and crew were replaced by good communist versions, and after about two hours we chugged our way into the military corridor linking West Germany to West Berlin.

The carriage doors had been locked with chains from the outside and the windows were sealed as we entered a shabby, drab, half-lit world in which reality seemed to be a permanent grey. We were forbidden to stand up when the train stopped at stations or speak to any East German or Soviet officials or civilians. The length of the 145-mile corridor was enclosed by high wire fences interspersed with watchtowers complete with floodlights and guards with sub-machine guns. Behind the fences were cleared ‘killing zones’, allowing a clear line of fire in case anyone was brave – or foolish – enough to try to cross the border. After a clanking, stop-start, four-hour journey, we rolled into Berlin and towards the symbol of the greatest ideological divide of the twentieth century. This was a city wall like no other – built not to repel invaders, but to keep people in.

These days most Europeans take the idea of freedom of movement for granted. But it was not so long ago that travel across the continent was severely restricted. During the Cold War, to cross borders in Western Europe you had to have a passport, but it was a routine act. Crossing the Iron Curtain into Eastern Europe, on the other hand, required a passport, paperwork and security checks, and was done in the knowledge that your every movement would be monitored. The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall were the stark physical reminders that a continent with a shared history, interlinked cultures and ancient trading routes had been completely riven by ideology and Great Power politics.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, as the communist and capitalist victors sized each other up across this new divide, the Soviet economic system quickly started to fail its citizens. Just by looking out of a window or crossing a street, ordinary people in the East could see the spectacularly successful rebuilding of West Germany. West German TV reached most of East Germany, beaming images of a burgeoning consumer society into ordinary people’s homes. The East Germans even used to joke that the most easterly regions, out of range of the West German transmitters, were the ‘Valleys of the Clueless’. Every day that people were able to witness the progress was a blow to the idea that the Soviet system was superior. The ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany had boasted in 1958 that its principal task was to overtake West Germany in the consumption of consumer goods within two years. This didn’t happen, but the Soviet Union did take the lead in the space race; a popular East German parody of a communist slogan of the time went, ‘Ohne Butter, ohne Sahne, auf dem Mond die rote Fahne’ (‘There’s no cream, there’s no butter, but on the moon the red flag flutters’).

Before the wall went up, so many East Berliners had opted to migrate to the Western sectors, either to work or live permanently, that the East German economy was in dire straits. About 2 million had voted with their feet in the previous decade, and the flow was increasing. Between January 1960 and the end of July 1961 another 330,000 people moved west. East Germany was losing its workforce and its credibility.

In the middle of the night of 13 August, with Moscow’s approval, the East German army began to wall off half of one of the world’s great capital cities. The authorities on one side called it the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall (anti-fascist protection bulwark), those on the other called it ‘the wall of shame’. For the first few years it consisted of occasional stretches of wall, but mostly of blocked-off streets, walled-up windows and stretches of barbed wire. But within a decade there was a concrete wall reinforced by watchtowers, bunkers, electric fences, dogs, automatic shooting ranges and hundreds of armed guards.

On the Eastern side people were forbidden to approach it, but in the West you could walk up streets that ended where the wall was built and touch the logical madness of the division of the German and European peoples. On this side, the black humour of the Cold War years could be spray-painted on the wall. I remember two examples of the graffiti, both in English: ‘Jump over the wall and join the Party’, and ‘Warning! East German high jump training area’. In reality no one could jump the wall, but tens of thousands tried other ways of crossing from east to west, and at least 140 people were killed in the attempt, although some researchers put the total much higher. Tunnels seemed the most obvious escape route, but there were other memorable and successful efforts.

Just four months after the wall went up, twenty-eight-year-old train driver Harry Deterling pointed the passenger train he was driving at the wall, opened the throttle and smashed through the fortifications. By no coincidence six members of his family were among the passengers. Two years later Horst Klein, an acrobat, noticed there was a disused steel cable stretching over the border. At a height of 60 feet above the guards patrolling below, he inched, hand over hand, to West Berlin. Perhaps the most audacious and brilliant escape came in 1979. Hans Strelczyk and Gunter Wetzel used their mechanical knowledge to build a rudimentary hot-air balloon system using propane cylinders. Their wives fashioned the balloon from canvas and bed sheets. Gathering their four children (and having tested the wind direction), they floated up to 8,000 feet and several miles westwards to freedom.

Nevertheless, the wall, judged by its raison d’être, can be called a success. It is not known how many successfully crossed, but it is estimated that the figure is only around 5,000; the mass exodus had been halted. The East German economy began to stabilize after its workforce was imprisoned, and by the mid 1960s the state had control over its trade and currency and was capable of functioning, along with the rest of the Russian empire’s vassal states.

However, the East Germans had not been given a choice, and most of them knew it. They were trapped behind a wall that both physically and mentally imprisoned several generations. Shortly after it went up psychologists and psychiatrists began to use the term ‘Wall Disease’ (Mauerkrankheit). The barrier, it was theorized, created a syndrome in which some people considered themselves locked up, which in turn led to psychological and behavioural disorders such as schizophrenia, alcoholism, depression and even suicide. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung took a wider view, arguing that the Iron Curtain meant Europe in general was ‘dissociated like a neurotic’. Of course, some degree of mental illness would have been present in the population anyway, but it’s also difficult to believe that the wall had no hand in this.

Europe during the Cold War (1947–89), divided by the Iron Curtain.

For those of us in the West, the East was ‘over there’– behind the Iron Curtain. Several generations of thinkers and intellectuals were convinced that the East German system was superior to that of the West in both economic and moral terms. When the blindingly obvious became apparent to them in 1989 it was, and remains, difficult for some to admit that a lifetime of belief was based on the rubble of a giant prison system. As for the rest of us, we didn’t go ‘interrailing’ in the summer holidays to visit Budapest, Dresden and Warsaw, nor were there weekend visits to Prague or Tallinn. Most of us were in our thirties before we ever met anyone from ‘over there’ because it was difficult to get there – and nigh on impossible for them to get ‘here’. Many people behind the Iron Curtain lived in a system where they needed a permit to travel from one city to another within their own country, never mind cross an international border to the West. For twenty-eight years it was just the way it was. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev had become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Slowly he began loosening the chains around people’s lives. The word ‘perestroika’ began to be used, meaning ‘restructuring’, but also signifying ‘listening’. Within this came the idea of ‘glasnost’, or openness. In a thousand small ways society and politics opened up and people listened to each other. By late spring in 1989 the idea had spread so far that Hungary, behind the Iron Curtain, had begun to dismantle part of its border fence with Austria. That summer thousands of East Germans decided to take their summer holidays in Hungary.

By August hundreds of East German families were camped outside the West German consulate in Budapest, and hundreds more had taken refuge in the grounds of the Holy Family Church, all under the watchful eye of officers from the East German Secret Service – the Stasi. A rumour went around about a ‘Pan-European Picnic’ to be held at the Austrian border, and people were suddenly on the move. By late afternoon on 19 August several hundred had gathered by a wooden gate, dozens moved towards it, and then hundreds literally ran through the gap, some crying with joy, some laughing, and some simply continuing to run, unable to believe they were really across the border. Three weeks later Hungary fully opened the border crossings and 60,000 people flooded out. The German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, said later, ‘It was in Hungary that the first stone was removed from the Berlin Wall.’

In the autumn there were mass anti-government demonstrations in East Germany. In October the much-loathed leader, Erich Honecker, resigned and was replaced by the marginally less loathed Egon Krenz. Without guidance from its Russian masters, the politburo was making policy on the hoof. It decided to allow East Berliners to apply for travel visas to visit West Germany. This was a process that could have been managed, and the Communist authorities might have been able to buy time and engineer ways of staying in control, but one of those small details that can change history got in the way. The man tasked with announcing the visa decision on 9 November was the Minister of Propaganda, Günter Schabowski. He had just returned from holiday, had not attended the meeting at which the policy was decided, and had no idea of any of the details of the process, which included briefings for border guard commanders the following day so they could follow orders. When he was asked ‘When do the new regulations begin?’ he hesitated, and then replied, ‘As far as I know immediately, right now.’ There were already thousands of East Berliners at the wall; within hours there were tens of thousands on both sides.

At first the East German border guards refused to allow anyone out, but then, amid the confusion, they stamped a few passports and then stood back to allow the crowds to surge through. The scenes, which a year before no one had predicted, were amazing. West and East Germans embraced each other, champagne corks popped, and the ‘wall peckers’, ordinary East and West Berliners, climbed to the top of the wall with chisels, hammers and axes, and set to work levelling the great barrier. The word of the night was wahnsinnig – mind-blowing.

It was a heady, emotional day for all Europeans. I was living in Paris at the time and about thirty-six hours later saw a battered old East Berlin Trabant car, with four young East Berliners inside, sputtering up the Champs-Élysées. With the border open, they had decided the first thing they wanted to do was see the City of Light, and had driven almost non-stop to get there. All along the great avenue Parisians stopped to applaud their German neighbours and the new era.

The two Germanys united politically in 1990, after forty-five years apart. In 1989 Willy Brandt, the former Chancellor of West Germany, was reported as saying: ‘Now what belongs together will grow together.’ It was assumed that he was referring to Germany, though in fact he was talking about Europe in general.

So, a united Germany? A united Europe? Up to a point. There was still the divide that chisels and hammers could not destroy – ‘the wall in the heads’. The wall hadn’t just prevented people from travelling, it had created deep gulfs – economic, political and social – that would prove harder to overcome than the physical barrier. So, after the tears of joy and declarations of brotherhood, the hard yards of reunification began. This was not a merger of equals. In 1990 the East had a population of 16.1 million, the West 63.7 million, and the West’s economy dwarfed that of the East. The capitalist democratic Western system set about destroying the communist machine armed with the mandate of unified elections, which had seen the former Communist Party in the East crushed.

All large countries have regional cultural differences, but this was a large country in which the people had had no contact with each other and lived under different systems. For example, in the West belief in God and church attendance was declining slowly, whereas in the East it had become a relic of the past. The East Germans may have rejected communism, but that didn’t mean they were prepared for the harsher, more selfish aspects of capitalism. On the other side many West Germans may have welcomed unification, but quickly began to grumble at the financial cost of absorbing a failed economy and a population that needed to be ‘re-educated’ in the ways of the modern world.

It all boiled down to a German version of ‘us and them’ – Ossis (Easties) and Wessis (Westies). Opinion polls in 2004 found that one in eight East Germans hankered after the old days before the wall came down, and in 1999 many East Germans still spoke about feeling humiliated by the job losses, compulsory retraining programmes and their difficulties in coming to terms with the new system and consumer culture. Even in 2015 a study by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development concluded that at least half of all Germans still felt the difference in both economic and cultural terms. The eastern areas are often still referred to as ‘the new Federal States’, which is a reminder that, to some people, the East was joining the West, as opposed to the two entities mutually joining each other.

Despite investment of more than $2 trillion, the eastern regions remain poorer than the West, and in late 2017 unemployment there was 12 per cent, double that of the West. This is not a story of failure: the region has become considerably richer and more efficient than it was – Dresden, Leipzig and other cities are thriving, living standards have risen – but more than a quarter of a century after unification, the divisions remain. Out of Germany’s twenty most prosperous cities, Jena is the only one in the East that makes the list. This is not only because wages are lower there; it is also because, due to the communist system, property ownership was very low. At unification any savings people had were converted at the rate of two East Marks to one West Mark.

In 2010, sociologists at Bielefeld University found that, despite comprising about 20 per cent of the population, less than 5 per cent of people they defined as the ‘elite’ in politics, business and the media were from the East, even though education levels are higher there, especially in maths and science – thanks in part to the high level of investment in schools since reunification. That education gap has itself meant that the brightest from the eastern regions head west to take up the best-paying jobs. With females achieving higher educational standards than males, the ratio of young women to men has fallen in the East, with a concurrent drop in the birth rate there. Long-term relationships and marriage between people from the East and West were once unusual, but have now begun to appear. Nevertheless, the majority of these comprise men from the West and women from the East; that they are still far from the norm is shown by the nickname for an Ossi/Wessi couple – ‘Wossis’. All this has contributed to a shrinking population in eastern Germany, although the rate has slowed. Some reports suggest the decline may even have stopped, partly thanks to the success of cities such as Dresden and Leipzig (‘Germany’s coolest city’), although this has come at the expense of an exodus of young people from rural areas.

There are also regional differences in culture: both food and consumer goods have played a role in the German post-unification identity. Twenty-five years ago the East Germans flooded into shops that sold Levi’s jeans, video recorders and quality chocolate. But the consumption of the ‘new’ products again underlined the dominance of the western side of the new joint relationship. Very few East German products made it into the supermarkets in the West, and the puttering, spluttering ‘Trabbie’ car became the subject of pan-European humour. The Trabant jokes have gone (as have many of the factories producing the old eastern goods), and the cultural and regional differences become less political as the years pass, but even in 2010 national headlines were made when Chancellor Merkel, an Ossi, was asked about her favourite food and chose an East German meat-andpickle soup of Russian origin known as solyanka. Over time local foods such as solyanka and the Spreewald cucumber will simply be an element of regional culinary identity, and there will be no political tang to it. There is no going back as Ostalgie (a mix of nostalgia and the East) fades.

The divides in modern Germany are nowhere near as stark as they were during the Cold War, and some are due to factors that predate the communist/capitalist split. However, the outlines of the wall and the Iron Curtain can still be seen – and can still be felt. You can see physical remnants along Bernauer Strasse, at the Niederkirchnerstrasse, by the Bundestag, the Berlin parliament, and at the Wall Museum situated at what was Checkpoint Charlie. At the flea markets you can even buy a bit of concrete ‘chiselled out of the wall on that famous night in 1989’, although the chances of it being genuine are slim given that the volume sold would have made the wall one of the biggest structures ever erected. Either way, you can take home a little grey symbol of history, of human suffering, of the ultimate political division of the twentieth century that split Europe in a way that seems unimaginable to many people nowadays.

After the wall came down, things moved fast in Europe. When the Eastern Europeans came in from the cold and the Germans reunited, the political consensus was that the future belonged to a unified, borderless Europe with a single currency, in which the nation state would fade away. This EU federation would interact with other major blocs in a globalized world dominated by huge trading pacts. People, goods, services and money would all be able to move freely between the member states.

The EU’s founding fathers helped rebuild a shattered and divided Europe after the Second World War, based on restoring the nation states to prosperity within a shared trading area; hence it was originally called the European Economic Community. Their descendants took the view that a European nation could be built on ideology. It is a noble aspiration rooted in the desire to end 2,000 years of European tribes warring against each other. In the 1990s Yugoslavia discovered too late that it had failed to extinguish the flames of Balkan nationalism under the blanket of Slavic socialism and watched as the entire house burned down; those seeking a European superstate saw Yugoslavia as evidence of precisely why the EU project had to succeed. However, a variety of small details and a few large-scale, high-impact factors have exposed problems in the system.

When the community of nation states began to morph into a union of member states in the 1980s, more and more powers were transferred to Brussels in a dilution of sovereignty that not everyone supported. Over the years countries have called for more independence and the ability to make decisions in the best interests of their own populations in terms of budgets, laws, trading regulations and so on. They don’t want to be dictated to by a centralized power in Brussels. And following EU directives has led to serious economic issues in some countries. The Single European Act of 1986 established the single market, and a single currency, the Euro, was created in 1999. However, there wasn’t a concurrent single fiscal or financial policy, nor was there the flexibility in the Euro system to absorb regional financial shocks. When times were good, people were less inclined to question the wisdom of creating this interdependent system. Now, however, the Euro is struggling and is hardly an enticement for EU applicants; and there have been financial winners and losers. Greece, for example, suffers horrendous levels of youth unemployment, due partially to economic policies forced upon it by Berlin and Brussels.

The EU has also faced the challenge of uniting East and West Europe, after expanding in 2004 to allow in several of the eastern states. Freedom of movement is one of the ideals of the EU, giving Europeans the right to live, work and travel throughout the member countries. It was intended both to enable growth across Europe and to encourage integration among the European populations. It is an ideal many have embraced, travelling around the continent in a way that wouldn’t have been possible just a few decades ago, especially to places previously hidden behind the Iron Curtain. In some ways it has reduced that sense of the ‘other’ that was pervasive during the Cold War. But, just as Germany has experienced a lasting impact from the Berlin Wall, there are still many differences between the West and East. States such as Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria had been subjected to the same travel restrictions and economic lapses as East Germany, and their economies were then severely disrupted by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Progress has been made, but many of the EU’s poorest countries are ones that used to be in the Eastern bloc.

The expansion of the European Union since it was originally formed.

When the eastern states were incorporated in the EU, GDP per capita in countries such as the UK and France was almost six times higher than in Poland. Despite this, many in the political class in West European countries severely underestimated how many people would move westwards to find work and were unprepared when several million did just that. It is an economic fact that migrant workers are needed, and often do jobs some of the indigenous populations reject. However, the hard logic of economics does not always work in persuading a French, Dutch or British plumber, builder or taxi driver of the benefits to the country of migrant labour when they find themselves in competition with new arrivals for jobs, housing and healthcare. When so many economic migrants began to travel from poor European countries to rich ones, people started to grumble at the influx of Eastern European migrant workers and question the benefits of free movement. This was felt most strongly in Britain with the rise of UKIP, and ultimately contributed to the Brexit vote.

Adding to this growing discontent was the financial crash of 2008 and subsequent government cuts in social spending and investment across the Union. While the banks were crumbling, the taxpayers in each nation state were left to clear up the mess. With unemployment rising and migration increasing across a border-free region, the weaknesses of the system started to show. True believers will endorse the European project come what may, ardent nationalists will always fight against it, but agnostics will support it only if it works for them – and large parts of the European electorate started to feel that it was no longer delivering. Without economic prosperity to bind them together, and with waning support for a failing system, rising levels of nationalism could no longer be suppressed or ignored.

The EU has never really succeeded in replacing the nation state in the hearts of most Europeans. It could be argued that its founders moved too fast, and too arrogantly, in believing that the creation of Europe would result in a population whose identification was European first, nation state second. In 1861, one of the pioneers of Italian unification, Massimo d’Azeglio, said, ‘We have made Italy; now we must make Italians.’ Even that has proved a challenge, and in some ways is still ongoing; this was the case even where the regions had a shared religion, history and, to an extent, geography. To create the EU and the Eurozone and then set about making Europeans is an infinitely more difficult project in which the very different interests, needs and priorities of Finland and Hungary have to mesh with those of Greece and Portugal. The limited success in doing so is visible in the growing instability in the union. The Scandinavians have met to discuss the possibility of a Nordic Union in the event of the EU collapsing. The Visegrad Group (Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary) increasingly presents a united front to Brussels. The ‘push’ of ‘One Europe’ is challenged by Brexit, by separatist movements in Scotland, Belgium, Italy and Spain, and by the growth of Eurosceptic parties in almost every country. Late 2017 brought this into sharp focus with the crisis in Catalonia, underlining the tensions that exist when there are several nations within a state.

Many academics like to argue that nationalism is a ‘false construct’ because it is based on ‘imagined communities’, but there is nothing false about people’s feelings concerning their national identity, and ‘imagined’ does not mean non-existent. The Palestinians, for example, through language, religion and culture, have developed a strong sense of identity and thus believe that they are a nation, and as such a nation deserving of a state. Few academics challenge this narrative, and yet intellectually they continue to argue that nationalism is outdated, even primitive. On the latter claim they may have a point, but to ignore the reality of nationalism, which is found the world over, is folly. Some academics, intellectuals and sections of the media, business and political class see themselves as liberated from nationalism. In 2016 the European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, described national borders as ‘the worst invention ever’. He may have a point, but stating it so baldly is hardly likely to win over nationalists to his idea of a European superstate.

The new elite, of which Mr Juncker is a prime example, don’t seem to really understand nationalism and are too quick to dismiss it. As the late historian Tony Judt wrote in 1996, while reluctantly arguing that an ever-closer bonding of the Europeans was impossible, ‘We should recognize the reality of nations and states, and note the risk that, when neglected, they become an electoral resource of virulent nationalists.’

That is what has happened. As nations have experienced rapid change due to migration, attitudes towards immigrants have hardened, and support for virulent nationalist parties has grown. A majority of people in most West European countries still have a favourable view of newcomers, but most opinion polls taken since 2004 track declining support. That trend has only intensified with the sudden influx of non-European refugees and migrants across both East and West Europe, fuelled by the turmoil in the Middle East and beyond. The pressure of this latest challenge, together with the fact that the EU was already struggling to unify its members, who were still reeling from the effects of the financial crisis, has exacerbated cracks that have started to appear in the EU edifice from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and is threatening the system.

The migrant crisis built up steadily from 2011, hitting a peak in 2015. With serious conflicts and civil wars across the Middle East and Africa, millions have been killed and displaced, and millions more have fled the violence, looking for a new life in the West. At first most European leaders were welcoming, but as more and more refugees kept coming, it became clear that the EU was unprepared to handle such numbers – over a million in 2015 alone – and that a growing number of people were becoming increasingly unwilling to do so. As attitudes began to change, certain borders within the EU started to tighten again as many countries sought to regain control over the number of immigrants crossing their boundaries.

Unconnected to the migrant crisis, a resurgent Russia has also played its part in the rise of the Barrier Continent. Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Ukraine began building defensive fortifications along its eastern border. In 2015 Estonia and Latvia started building fences on their frontiers with Russia and in 2017 Lithuania, which had already reintroduced conscription in alarm at Russian actions, followed the example. However, the migration crisis is a major reason why Europe now has about the same length of physical barriers along national borders as it had during the Cold War. The situation began along the borders of the EU itself. There were already fences and walls in a few places, for example enclosing Spain’s Moroccan enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta. In the former, as with many barriers, the 20-foothigh double fence has proved porous. In early 2018 at least 200 African migrants stormed over the fence, some so desperate that they attacked police officers trying to stop them. Most were caught later and taken to a migrant detention centre, but thousands have made it to Spain via this route in the past few years.

One of the first new barriers to go up in 2011 was a razor-wire fence along the Greek border with Turkey to prevent migrants and refugees from the wider Middle East and Africa getting in. In 2015 Bulgaria followed suit.

However, the border barriers at these entry points haven’t stopped new waves of migrants from arriving and finding a way in. Migration paths tend to change – many people choose to make the dangerous sea crossing from Turkey to Greece, for example – and although a 2016 deal between the EU and Turkey saw the latter agree to take back large numbers of these migrants, many still find their way into the EU. In response, a number of border controls and barriers have started appearing along borders between EU countries as well.

Hungary was one of the first; twenty-six years after the Cold War barriers came down, new ones started to go up. It began to build a fence, first along its border with Serbia, then the one with Croatia, ending up with over 300 miles of razor-wire fencing to keep people out. During the summer of 2015, many thousands of immigrants were crossing into Hungary every day; by 2017 that number had been reduced to virtually none. The Hungarian government has been one of the most outspoken against immigration and EU plans for resettling people. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced a referendum in 2016 on whether Hungarians wanted the EU to be able to dictate immigrant quotas. A vast majority voted in line with the government, although voter turnout was low. Nevertheless, a majority of the population do seem to sympathize with this viewpoint: according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 76 per cent of Hungarians think that refugees will increase terrorist incidents and 82 per cent see them as a burden on the country, taking jobs and social benefits. The Hungarian government continues to push its agenda, playing on people’s fear of foreign threats and focusing on the dangers of immigration in relation to terrorism and the spread of Islam, and tightening its immigration policies even further. Although Hungary has been widely criticized for its attitudes and policies towards migrants, it has not had sanctions imposed by the EU and the prime minister’s popularity in Hungary has not been dented.

Several other nations have followed Hungary’s example and taken similar measures, and a number of ‘temporary’ border controls have risen up, including within the ‘border-free’ Schengen area. Slovenia erected a fence along its border with Croatia; Macedonia along its Greek border; Austria along its busiest border crossings with Slovenia and Italy; and there are plans in place to construct a wall in Calais to prevent migrants from crossing the English Channel. To the north, Norway has built a fence along its border with Russia, and Sweden began to restrict the flow of migrants entering the city of Malmö across the Øresund bridge linking it with Denmark. Alongside the walls and fences, other countries started to tighten their borders with further measures. These are mostly designed to restrict the movement of non-European migrants and refugees who have managed to enter the EU through less secure borders – and the wave of terror attacks in recent years has helped make the idea of checks more acceptable to many people. However, the very existence of these barriers still has an impact and threatens one of the basic ideals behind the EU.

The barriers also have a serious effect on countries where immigrants are now stuck – especially in places where they continue to arrive. Greece, for example, has tens of thousands now stranded on its island centres with nowhere to go, straining its resources. With the migrant crisis affecting some countries more than others, and with some refusing to share the burden, relations between the member states are further tested.

Nevertheless, huge numbers of Europeans do have a positive view of immigration and are happy to welcome newcomers to their countries. Many feel the West has a moral obligation to help those fleeing violence and persecution, while others support the argument, put forward by many politicians, economists and business leaders, that European countries actually need immigrants: due to ageing populations and low birth rates, some countries – Germany, for example, where the median age is 46.8 – face a population decline and so need immigrants to ensure a healthy economy in the future. But although governments repeatedly try to explain this, people tend to base their feelings on the current situation, not on some vague problem in the future, and the number of those who support immigration is shrinking. Hence opinion polls such as that of the 2014 Pew Research Center found that 86 per cent of Greeks and 80 per cent of Italians wanted fewer immigrants allowed into their countries. The poll was taken as the migrant crisis was growing, but more than a year before it reached the peaks of 2015. As for wanting more migrants? Only 1 per cent of Greeks and 14 per cent of Germans surveyed felt that way.

Many EU leaders seem to have been unprepared for the backlash against immigration. It stems from a number of reasons, as people started to see and feel the impact on their lives of so many newcomers. Across the continent there was, and is, a clear divergence in this respect based on education. Far more people without a college education want reduced immigration, and this is likely to be connected to the fact that they are often competing with immigrants from within and without the EU for low-paid jobs. Many people in this category particularly dislike being told that they are bigots for feeling unsettled at the scale and pace of the change they see around them; the equation between lack of education and bigotry is seen as doubly insulting.

An increase in the number of terrorist incidents across Europe has led people to link terrorism with high levels of immigration. People fear that terrorists are coming into the EU posing as refugees and asylum seekers, and are then able to travel freely between European nations. Some of the assailants in the November 2015 attacks on Paris had entered through migrant channels, but in fact most attacks have been carried out by EU citizens.

Some people also feel a threat to their public services, concerned that they can’t cope with the additional burden, and this also ties in with a sense of fairness. Imagine being in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery in, say, Hungary or France in which a significant number of the people around you were not born in that country. You may well want everyone to be treated, but you may also think that you have been paying for the health system for decades whereas the person next to you hasn’t. The longer you wait for your own treatment, the more likely it is that you might think it isn’t fair. These may be base instincts, but they are predictable. Of course, the EU system is set up to make it fair in so far as many member states pay in, and the citizens of all member states can benefit no matter which state they are in. But if the person in the waiting room isn’t even from a fellow EU state, the sense of injustice is, for some, intensified.

Across the EU, leaders have been looking for ways to manage the levels of immigration and discontent within the population. In 2016, Denmark introduced a bill under which asylum seekers arriving in the country with cash and jewellery could keep only 10,000 kroner’s (about £1,000) worth; anything above this had to be used to contribute towards the cost of ‘basic maintenance, healthcare and accommodation’. Sentimental items such as wedding rings were exempt after comparisons were made to the treatment of Jews by Nazi Germany. Some German states and the Swiss had already, quietly, introduced similar measures, although the practice is less widespread: the Swiss, for example, recorded only 112 cases where assets were taken, out of 45,000 refugees who arrived in 2015.

There’s little doubt that in Denmark this measure, and others in the same bill, were brought in to assuage rising anxiety about the increasing number of refugees, the cost of taking care of them, and quite possibly to dissuade refugees from heading that way. The government had one eye on the rise in support for extreme right-wing groups. However, what was overlooked was the fact that Danish law already required Danes who became unemployed and had no insurance to sell valuables up to a certain level before they could receive state support. Having welcomed 21,000 asylum seekers in 2015, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the politicians to sell the idea of charity to a culture steeped in the Scandinavian principle of social egalitarianism. The Danes were taking in more asylum seekers than France, despite having a population one-twelfth the size – and although there were critics of the new regulations within Denmark itself, what annoyed many people was the criticism that the measures were racist, and comparisons were being made to the Nazis.

There are also some people who are concerned that the newcomers do not share ‘European values’. These are difficult to define, but most people would agree that the EU countries have similar ideas about individual freedoms: gender equality, sexual equality, freedom of religion and freedom of speech. The influx of people from cultures where these are not norms can make people feel their own values are under threat. Across the EU nations, culture wars have broken out over the idea of multiculturalism and values. For example, should gender segregation be allowed in places of higher education? Is the full burka compatible with the French concept of laïcité – keeping religion out of public life? What sentences should there be for committing female genital mutilation if some citizens regard it as a cultural norm? Should free speech include allowing the propagation of beliefs such as the condemnation of certain groups of people as ‘the worst of creatures’ as, for example, Jews and Christians are described in the Koran? Or that in religious matters a woman cannot ‘have authority over a man; she must be silent’, as taught in the New Testament?

Europe is now home to people from all over the world. It took in hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese in the late 1970s and 1980s, large numbers of Chinese and Indians have come, and there are Latin American communities in most capital cities. They are all part of the mix of the new Europe to which everyone is adapting, but the most difficult adjustment appears to be that between non-Muslims and Muslims. There are many reasons why this might be, but one thing that seems to crop up frequently is the perception that Muslims have come in vast numbers, outnumbering local populations.

European Muslims actually make up a fairly small proportion of populations across the EU. The most exhaustive study prior to the latest migrant/refugee crisis was by the Pew Research Center in 2010. It found that in the EU the largest Muslim populations are in Germany

(4.8 million) and France (4.7 million). This constitutes 5.8 per cent and 7.5 per cent of their respective populations. The UK share was 2.9 million (4.8 per cent), Sweden 430,000 (4.6 per cent) and Greece 610,000 (5.3 per cent). The numbers are rising – there has been a steady 1 per cent increase per decade over the last thirty years, so while 6 per cent of the EU population (13 million people) were Muslim in 2010, the figure was projected to rise (prior to the mass influx of 2015) to 8 per cent by 2030. But the numbers are still much lower than many people believe to be the case.

The misperception may be due to a number of reasons: for example, some representatives of Muslim communities (often self-styled) are far more vocal about religious issues than any other community, and therefore more noticeable through media coverage. However, a bigger factor is probably that there are highly visible concentrations of ethnicities in urban centres. Approximately 20 per cent of Stockholm is Muslim, 13 per cent of Amsterdam, 15 per cent of Brussels, and 12 per cent of Cologne. It would be easy for many people to assume from what they see around them in their daily lives that the rest of their country was similar. For example, a UK government report in late 2016 found that in overwhelmingly Muslim parts of northern cities such as Bradford, Muslims themselves thought the UK was well over 50 per cent Muslim.

The polling taken in 2010 also suggests there is a clear divide between most of Western Europe and Southern and Eastern Europe in attitudes towards Muslims. In the south and east negative attitudes prevailed, for example 72 per cent of Hungarians had an adverse view of Muslims, as did 69 per cent of Italians, 66 per cent of Poles and 65 per cent of Greeks. When we move north and west, clear majorities give Muslims a favourable rating. In the UK ‘only’ 28 per cent of respondents had a negative attitude; in Germany this was 29 per cent.

However, in some parts of Western Europe, anti-Muslim sentiments seem to be on the rise. Public anxiety about Islam is probably highest in France. In the 2010 poll, for example, only 29 per cent of people had a negative attitude towards Muslims, but since then there has been a steady increase in hostility towards the religion, which may be linked both to the wave of terror attacks France has suffered and to increased migration. An Ipsos survey in Le Monde titled ‘French Fractures 2017’ found that 60 per cent of respondents ‘believe the religion of Islam is incompatible with the values of the French Republic’. On the issue of immigration, 65 per cent said there were too many foreigners in France. On this point there was a clear political split in attitudes – 95 per cent of National Front voters agreed as opposed to 46 per cent of socialists. A few months earlier the then president, François Hollande, was one of that 46 per cent. In a book titled A President Shouldn’t Say That he is quoted as having remarked, ‘I think there are too many arrivals, immigrants who shouldn’t be there.’ He also acknowledged that France has a ‘problem with Islam . . . Nobody doubts that.’

France certainly has a problem with integration. There are now whole swathes of French towns and cities that are overwhelmingly Muslim. The neighbourhoods tend to be on the periphery of the urban areas and are almost always among the poorest parts of town. We have been here before. Substitute some of the words in this fascinating 1928 essay in Foreign Affairs magazine by Charles Lambert, and it could have been written in 2018:

The foreigners who migrate to France tend also to congregate together, and certain of our departments have become veritable centers of irredentism. Several villages in the Départment du Nord are peopled entirely by Poles who have brought their wives, their children, their priests and their schoolmasters along with them. Immigrants from Poland make up 20 per cent of the population of Lens, 40 per cent of the population of Courrières, 68 per cent of the population of Ostricourt. Thirty thousand Italians have settled in the south-west. The conquest of our frontier provinces by a process of infiltration is proceeding systematically. In the Riviera district nearly a third of the whole population is foreign, while the proportion reaches almost a half in Nice.

These communities ended up being assimilated, and this may happen again with the growing Muslim populations. However, there are differences – ones that apply to the European experience of the latest waves of immigration as a whole. Firstly, if we accept that racism still exists across the continent, then the skin colour of most European Muslims may hold them back, both socially and economically. Secondly, unlike the Polish and Italian communities of the 1920s, there are voices within the Muslim communities telling them that the place they have come to is abominable and must be resisted. These preachers of hate, often expounding an extreme religious world view, may not represent the majority, but in communities in which faith plays a central role they have a platform and influence greater than their white extreme right-wing counterparts. Immigrant communities often have difficulty settling in unfamiliar surroundings and gaining the acceptance of the native population, and this struggle is compounded if some of the communities’ ‘leaders’ are telling them to embrace separation.

Negative perceptions of ‘outsiders’ have caused divisions not just between countries, but also within communities, political parties, the media, at street level and in the courts in every EU country. The idea of free movement was already a challenge when it merely concerned Europeans, but real discontent was limited, to an extent, to the fringes of society. The arrival of so many non-Europeans has helped ignite the simmering nationalism across the EU countries, and is a major factor in the dramatic rise of the far right in the last few years. A decade ago the only European extreme right-wing party (other than those of their own country) that most people could name was probably the French National Front. Now there are several that are familiar throughout Europe, among them Golden Dawn (Greece), Sweden Democrats, Party for Freedom (Netherlands), Freedom Party (Austria) and Jobbik (Hungary). Most of the ultra-nationalist parties are against further EU integration, but a central tenet for all of them is a fear of Islam, and this is clearly a driving force for many of their supporters. The nationalists argue that they are simply against Islamism in the form of radical political Islam, but the ultra-nationalists frequently cross this line to outright Islamophobia and a dislike of Muslims as people.

The rise of nationalist and far-right parties is anathema to the ideology of the EU, which sees itself as a union of liberal democracies. Now the nature of those democracies is under threat across the EU, not just in the eastern countries like Hungary and Slovakia. In essence the divide is between those who are tolerant of intolerance and those who are not. Germany has played a central role in both the EU and the migrant crisis, so it is worth exploring the way in which events have unfolded there. It will be some time before the issues are resolved.

Angela Merkel opened Germany’s doors to migrants and refugees in 2015. She was criticized by other EU leaders, certainly, but also started to face increasing opposition within Germany itself. This is not to say that Germany has been unwelcoming. The state has been working flat out to accommodate the newcomers, and thousands of ordinary people have volunteered to help in the refugee centres, as well as offering a wide range of services including language teaching and employment mentoring. Nevertheless, as more and more migrants have arrived, problems have emerged as people have started to grasp the scale of the task ahead in creating an integrated society. In 2015 alone, almost a million non-EU citizens arrived in Germany; most were Syrian, followed by Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians and Eritreans. The Germans had not experienced the movement of peoples on such a scale since the end of the Second World War.

One of the initial problems is that as people arrive they tend to gravitate to areas where ethnically similar communities have already been established, which can lead to problems with integration and can rapidly change the demographic and cultural character of certain districts. As the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees observed, ‘Refugees want to go to places where they are among themselves: Pakistanis want to go to the Rhine-Main area, Afghans move to Hamburg, Syrians to Berlin. But in dense areas, housing space is scarce and rents are high. Ghettos evolve quickly.’

As the initial wave of public goodwill has subsided, fuelled also by incidents such as the numerous sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015, which were largely attributed to the immigrant population (although no convictions have been made), there has been a steady rise in violence across Germany. In 2015 there were more than 1,000 attacks on refugee shelters. That was at the height of the migrant crisis, but in 2016, when the number of people arriving had dropped significantly to under 300,000 as a result of the deal with Turkey to reduce the flow across the Aegean, there were still a similar number of incidents.

In Germany the outlines of the wall and the Iron Curtain can still be traced in matters more serious than food and accents, and this is especially true when it comes to immigration. Attitudes towards immigrants are much more negative once you cross the River Elbe. Put simply, there are more immigrants in western Germany than in the east (other than Berlin), due to a quota system used to distribute refugees and asylum seekers across the country; as the eastern states are poorer and less populated, they have received fewer of the new arrivals. In both 2015 and 2016 three of the western states, Bavaria, North Rhine Westphalia and Baden Württemberg, took almost 50 per cent of the migrants/refugees. By contrast, in 2015 Saxony-Anhalt received 2.8 per cent, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern 2 per cent and Brandenburg 3.1 per cent. But, despite this, there tend to be many more physical attacks on migrants in the east. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV) produced a 2016 report stating that in the western states there was an average of 10.5 extremist attacks per million people. In the eastern state of Saxony this rose to 49.6 attacks, in Brandenburg to 51.9, and in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to 58.7. The three regions are also home to the largest groups of organized neo-Nazis.

In 2016 the German government’s annual report on the ‘Status of German Unity’ noted not only the effects on those suffering discrimination, but, according to Iris Gleicke from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, the difficulties of securing ‘social peace in eastern Germany’ were causing a ‘very serious threat to the economic development’ of the eastern states. She also noted: ‘the large majority of eastern Germans are not xenophobic or right-wing extremists’. Germans are careful with historical references, but the scale of the attacks led Gleicke to invoke the memory of the 1930s and Hitler’s Brownshirts: ‘We East Germans have to take the matter into our own hands and decide whether we want to protect our cities and villages or leave them to the brown nightmare. Society should not look away when people are attacked or refugee shelters are set on fire.’ Such comments resonate deeply in the German psyche, but there is a growing contingent of people who do not want the country’s past mistakes to dictate how they must feel, or what they can and can’t say. Which brings us to the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) and the Alternative for Germany Party (AfD).

As early as 2014, members of PEGIDA were marching in Dresden and other eastern cities. This overt hostility put it beyond mainstream politics, but by early 2015 it was attracting huge crowds and had spread across the country. One demonstration in Leipzig drew 30,000 people, 20,000 turned out in Munich, 19,000 in Hanover and 10,000 in Dresden. As so often happens when politics moves from the fringe into wider society, many of the rallying cries heard at the demonstrations had first been voiced on the terraces of football stadiums. A notable example was the Dynamo Dresden ‘Ultras’, who beat President Trump to the term Lügenpresse (‘lying press’) by at least a year. From the Dresden terraces the chant spread to the streets. The crowds felt that the authorities, in league with the media, were not telling them the truth about immigration.

By the early summer support for the party had dropped, due to a combination of ‘demonstration fatigue’ and a series of scandals involving PEGIDA leaders, including one in which the founder of the movement, Lutz Bachmann, was pictured posing as Hitler. But the underlying sentiments had not gone away, and as the migration crisis peaked that summer of 2015 they came back to the surface, creating the political space for a more ‘palatable’ version of PEGIDA – and that was the AfD.

The AfD Party had actually formed back in 2013, but its focus then was campaigning against the Euro currency. As the migrant crisis began to grow it turned its attention towards immigration and forged contacts with PEGIDA. By summer 2016, with PEGIDA floundering, it was well positioned to take over as the biggest radical right-wing movement. It quickly grew in both membership and representation in the state parliaments. The alarm bells really began sounding when it finished second in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern election, taking 21 per cent of the vote and leaving Chancellor Merkel’s CDU Party trailing in third place. By the time of the general election in late 2017 it was well organized and popular enough to enter the Bundestag in large numbers. This was the first time the extreme right had been represented there since the early 1960s. Although Angela Merkel’s party gained the biggest share of the vote, the AfD made significant gains, particularly in the east of the country, coming third overall in the election. The political centre of gravity in Europe was not holding.

AfD policies include the rejection of the Schengen zone and the creation of permanent border controls at both national and EU level. It supports enhanced vetting of asylum seekers and says there is no place in Germany for Muslim practices and beliefs if these run counter to ‘the free democratic social foundation, our laws and the Judaeo-Christian and humanistic bases of our culture’, according to party paraphernalia. Softening its stance, it does accept that Muslims can be ‘valued members of society’, but argues that multiculturalism does not work. It is also against the Euro, campaigns for the Deutschmark to be reinstated, and wants powers returned to the nation state.

All of these ideas are echoed right across the continent. The regional and political rifts we see in Germany are opening up everywhere. In the Dutch general election of March 2017 the far-right Party for Freedom became the second-largest party. In May the National Front’s Marine Le Pen went through to the second round of the French presidential election and won 33.9 per cent of the vote, almost doubling that of her father Jean-Marie in 2002. Austria’s Freedom Party has also enjoyed increased support, coming third in the election in October 2017. Even Chancellor Merkel tacked sharply to the right in the 2017 election campaign as she sought to see off the growth of the extreme right. There is a truth about liberal democracies: those which cannot crush domestic anti-democratic movements need to find ways to manage them.

As early as 2014 the stresses of migration prompted the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to say he wanted to create an ‘illiberal democracy’. Behind his phrase is the idea that liberal policies and values can be rejected by an electorate that votes in a nationalist party hostile to these things, but the country remains a democracy. The Polish government elected in 2015 held similar views. This ideology runs counter to the ideals of the EU, and is one of the growing divisions threatening to splinter the union. As the Brookings Institute states in a report on migration: ‘The crisis has destabilized the politics of the entire European continent, roiling the political systems of individual countries and threatening the solidarity of the EU as a whole.’

This is a fundamental challenge to a divided Europe. It is not just about immigration; it is also about economies, trade, sovereignty and liberalism in general. But, as we cope with the new realities of mass immigration and the moral necessity to take in refugees, we must not lose sight of core values. If we do, we may condemn all future Europeans, from whatever background, to live in a more repressive society than at present. It’s worth remembering that most of those coming to Europe are trying to get away from despotic regimes that have failed them. We need to deal with radical Islamism, manage mass migration and care for refugees, but in a manner that does not undermine our liberal values and rule-of-law-based systems.

Those laws, values and that system are what eventually healed the most recent great schism in Europe, the one that developed after 1945. Now divisions, new and old, are again appearing. The next few years will show us if we can make a safe European home or go backwards into a divided future.

CHAPTER 8

UK

‘Each man is an island unto himself. But though

a sea of difference may divide us, an entire

world of commonality lies beneath.’

– James Rozoff

Hadrian’s Wall, Northumbria, a stone wall that was built to defend Roman-conquered Britain from the northern tribes.

IMAGINE YOU’RE A ROMAN SOLDIER POSTED TO HADRIAN’S Wall c. 380 CE. You’re from the Etruria/Tuscany region, one of the relatively few soldiers serving in your legion who is actually from the Italian peninsula. It’s February, freezing cold, and you’re on the night shift looking out from the ramparts. You can’t even see the stars as it’s cloudy, there’s a drizzle and dawn is approaching. A brisk wind is blowing up your tunic, and you’re thanking Jupiter for the delivery of braccae (woollen trousers), which arrived last week and were only three months too late. It’s difficult to know which is worse, the weather or the sporadic attacks from the barbarians north of the wall. Your colleague on the night watch on your stretch of the wall isn’t of much comfort seeing as he’s from northern Gaul, doesn’t speak much Latin, and he only joined up so that after twenty-five years’ service he might get Roman citizenship.

You look out at the vague outlines of this barren land, its sparse grasses and rushes bent in the wind, you think of home, the towns of Lucca and Siena, the countryside, the coastline. At this point you sigh heavily and say to yourself, ‘Pro di immortales, quid hic facio?’ (‘What the hell am I doing here?’) Or words to that effect.

Hadrian’s Wall must have been quite a sight for the ‘primitive’ island tribes. Built in 122 CE, it was 73 miles long and parts of it were 15 feet high and 10 feet deep. A 13-foot-deep, 30-foot-wide ‘fighting ditch’ was dug in front of it. Between the two were thickets of spikes.

There were numerous fortified gates and at every Roman mile along the wall there was a small fort, and between each of these two turrets. On one side of this wall was ‘civilization’, on the other ‘barbarians’. To this day some English and Scots joke that this is still the case, though the wall is no longer there to separate them.

Over the course of 1,500 years, Hadrian’s Wall, symbol of the great reach of the Roman Empire – as well as its limitations – almost disappeared. After the Romans left, it fell into disrepair. Farmers took bits of it to build houses and sheep pens, the burgeoning Christian communities took more for churches, and little by little, as the memory of the Romans in Britain faded, so did their wall crumble into the landscape they had sought to conquer.

The Romans never succeeded in uniting the lands. Hadrian’s Wall was built to defend the conquered territory against the parts they couldn’t rule. When they’d first arrived in south-east England in 43 CE they found an array of Iron Age tribes. These tribes knew of the Romans; they would already have had some cultural and economic interactions with the empire, and would also have heard stories of Rome’s military capabilities from Julius Caesar’s incursions almost a century earlier. Back then the tribes had put up fierce resistance, but when the legions fell upon them this time they were unprepared and, crucially, they were not united. They were overrun by the Romans, who then set themselves up in Colchester as they prepared to occupy the whole island.

Historians believe that by 47 CE eleven tribes in the south-east had surrendered and the Romans controlled the area from south of the Humber across to the River Severn Estuary near the Welsh border. From there, the arduous push into Wales and the north began. By 84 CE they were as far up as the Moray Firth, about 150 miles inside what is now Scotland. There is evidence that the Romans sailed up as far as the peninsula of Kintyre and legionaries probed into the Highlands, but the Moray Firth was the limit of their settled power in Britain. Had they been able to continue, put the whole island under single rule and remain, the history of the United Kingdom could have been very different.

But the Roman Empire’s borders were being threatened elsewhere, and troops were needed to defend the heartland, not push forward on the fringes. Back the Romans came, stopping more or less where the modern England–Scotland border is. And after they stopped, they built their wall: the most important surviving testament to the strength and reach of Rome’s military prowess. Geographically the region does not have the rivers, say, or mountains that so often form natural boundaries. But it was where the Romans drew the line militarily.

The wall helped shape the place that would eventually be known as the United Kingdom. For two and a half centuries the line held. Below it life grew increasingly Romanized; above it, a different Celtic culture continued. The future Wales and Scotland were never fully defeated and would always retain a sense of difference from the region that became known as England – the part of Britannia where Pax Romana held sway and where most of the Roman roads and towns were built.

By 211 CE southern England was called ‘Britannia Superior’ on the grounds that it was closer to Rome. The capital was moved to London. Northern England was ‘Britannia Inferior’ (another distinction still relevant today), and York was declared its capital. By the year 296 the land had been divided further. Now the south was called ‘Britannia Prima’, the north up to Hadrian’s Wall was ‘Maxima Caesariensis’, the Midlands were governed as ‘Flavia Caesariensis’, and Wales was known as ‘Britannia Secunda’. None of it would last in name, but the outlines of those demarcations are still seen today.

Eventually, however, events on the Continent conspired against the Romans. A few years after our Roman soldier asked himself his rhetorical question, General Magnus Maximus asked himself the same thing, and in 383 CE his answer was to take his legions home to challenge the Emperor of Rome. A few years later, the entire apparatus of the empire’s northernmost outpost packed up and headed for Rome.

After Maximus left, the ‘barbarians’ (Picts and Scots) broke through to the south, prompting the Britons to petition Rome to send a legion to expel them, which it did. Hadrian’s Wall had fallen into disrepair by this point, so the Romans advised the British to build a frontier barrier to keep the northern invaders out. However, they failed to provide the know-how to use stone and the British put up a wall made of turf. The ‘barbarians’ cut straight through, resulting in a second plea to Rome – it was the same as the first: ‘Save us!’ Again the legion returned, beat back the invaders, and this time showed the locals how to construct a stone wall.

It was no good. Without the Romans even stone could not hold back the hordes from the north. A third appeal was made – this one was known as the ‘Groans of the Britons’. This time the response was not the one they wanted, but it has gone down in the annals of British history and to this day is used in political discourse. Rome wrote back: ‘Look to your own defences.’ The unifying power in Europe had rejected the British, the British had rejected the unifying power, and they were indeed on their own, looking to their ‘own defences’. Comparisons to Brexit are fun, but not necessarily germane. The problem then was that there weren’t any defences. The shadows were lengthening; the twilight of Roman Britain was giving way to the Dark Ages.

In the late 600s there was still enough of the wall standing for the great Anglo-Saxon scholar, the Venerable Bede, to describe a section of the wall near the River Tyne as ‘eight feet wide and twelve high, in a straight line from east to west as is clear to beholders to this day’. But it was already becoming a diminished structure. By the 1700s it meant so little to people that what appears to be one of the greatest acts of cultural vandalism in British history occurred.

In 1745 Field Marshal George Wade was tasked with intercepting the Jacobite army of Bonnie Prince Charlie as it headed south. His troops and artillery, marching west from Newcastle, failed due to the lack of solid road. This prompted Wade to build a new, cross-country road to Carlisle, along the ancient route of Hadrian’s Wall. He had a long history of road-building in Scotland, and a reputation as a nononsense military man. The nearest building materials to hand were within his field of vision – it must have seemed obvious that the thing to do was to pull down large sections of the wall and use them as the bedrock of about 30 miles of his road.

The destruction of the wall continued until the 1800s, when its value as a great historic monument began to be more widely recognized. Conservationists took up the cause and stretches of the wall were cleared of debris and foliage and maintained. The best-preserved sections are in a 20-mile stretch in Northumberland between Hexham and Haltwhistle and are now one of the great tourist attractions of the UK. In the summer months thousands of keen walkers follow the trail across the same gloriously bleak countryside the Romans encountered all those centuries ago. In winter, though, you get a better feel of what was for them the outer edges of civilization. Most of the towers, crenellations and gates may have gone, but the wall still stands, both physically and in the collective imagination of the British. It reminds them of the time when they were first politically connected to the mainland of the European continent, when the dividing line was drawn between the two largest constituencies of the island – England and Scotland.

And even now, in the twenty-first century, with much of the wall long gone, even though most of it actually lies south of the Scottish border, the Roman fortification still symbolizes one of the main divisions in what, paradoxically, remains a United Kingdom.

Whereas in Europe we see the difficulty of getting nation states, and the nations they represent, to unify under one banner, the United Kingdom has been uniting different peoples and identities for hundreds of years.

Right now, the UK is going through a real moment of ‘us and them’, between the nations it comprises and within its populations, and many people feel more divided than ever. This has been exacerbated in recent years, with the 2016 vote to leave the European Union and its aftermath. Cultures and identities are diverging, interacting in new ways with bigger issues of globalization, nationalism and the EU.

The majority of Brits are bound together legally, linguistically and to a great extent culturally. Scotland and England were distinct nations for much of their history, with an often fractious relationship. Much of the trouble started in the thirteenth century, when Edward I of England tried to claim Scotland. After many years of fighting against the English invaders, Scotland’s independence was regained by Robert the Bruce in 1314. Over the subsequent centuries the border was often a hotspot for trouble, with raids and incursions from both sides, but the two countries were brought closer together in 1603 when James VI of Scotland also became James I of England, and finally they were officially joined together in the Acts of Union 1707.

Scotland may not be a separate nation state, but the Scots are a nation quite distinct from the English – and, perhaps most importantly, they certainly feel that way. The differences between them can be exaggerated, but they do exist, and not just because a greater proportion of men wear skirts north of the border.

Until a few centuries ago there was a mild ethnic difference. The Scots were descended from Celtic peoples, as were the Welsh and Cornish. They came to the islands about 4,000 years ago and even inhabited what is now England, although there they were gradually replaced by Frisians, Angles, Jutes and Saxons. Although the genetic differences between English and Scots are now barely noticeable, to this day the English are sometimes called ‘Sassenachs’ by the Scots – which is Gaelic for ‘Saxons’.

Gaelic, or ‘Gàidhlig’, was the first language for most people in the north-west of Scotland during the seventeenth century. But within fifty years of the Acts of Union, only about 23 per cent of people spoke the language; this number had shrunk to 4.5 per cent in 1901, and 1.2 per cent at the turn of this century. About 60,000 people now speak Gaelic, mostly in the Western Isles, and they are bilingual. The Scots are very aware that their current native tongue is not derived from their original language. What they are left with is historical memory – the knowledge that once they were very different. The English have a vague recollection of being the far larger and sometimes dominant force in the relationship; the Scottish have a much keener sense of oppression.

The question of self-determination has not gone away, however, despite increased independence for Scotland within the Union. When England and Scotland were first joined together, Scotland retained control over its education and legal systems – for example, English law allows for ‘Guilty’ or ‘Not Guilty’, but Scottish law has a third category of ‘Not Proven’. Leave to one side the joke that this sometimes translates as ‘Not Guilty – and don’t do it again’, it satisfies one of the fundamental tenets of self-rule: overseeing your own judicial system. But Scotland and England were largely ruled as one. It wasn’t until 1885 that the post of Secretary for Scotland was created, and even then it was a junior position. It finally became a senior cabinet post, with the title Secretary of State for Scotland, in 1926.

In 1997 a referendum was held on proposals for devolution, in which a firm majority voted in favour. In 1998 the Scotland Act was introduced, creating a Scottish Executive and Scottish parliament based in Edinburgh which had significant powers, devolved from London, in what were judged to be specifically Scottish affairs. In 2007 the Executive rebranded itself the Scottish government, a term that gained legal recognition in 2012. The following year it called for an independence referendum in 2014. The break-up of the UK now looked a distinct possibility. With just two days to go before voting, the three main British political parties, by now thoroughly rattled and hoping for a ‘No’ vote, said that if independence was rejected ‘extensive new powers’ would be given to the Scottish parliament. This was probably one of the reasons for the final result: 55 per cent voted against independence.

Following the referendum, Westminster went ahead with the 2016 Scotland Act, which gave Scotland’s parliament control over a wider range of matters including the ability to amend the Scotland Act of 1998, management of the British Transport Police in Scotland, the right to keep half of the VAT raised in Scotland, and decision-making over speed limits and road signs. The latter two may seem relatively trivial compared to powers over education and law, but control of minor issues, as well as great affairs of state, satisfies the need for control of what are perceived as one’s own affairs.

Perhaps this is the reason for the apparent decline in support for independence. Following the result, it was not long before people were talking of a second referendum, and in the 2015 general election there was a massive surge of support for the Scottish National Party, which increased its number of seats in the House of Commons from six to fifty-six. However, since then, with the new powers coming through, people have seemed less interested, and the Scottish National Party’s focus on a second referendum is perhaps the reason why they haemorrhaged support in the 2017 general election, losing twenty-one seats. It now seems that for the foreseeable future the kingdom will remain united. Scottish identity is strong, but not strong enough for the majority of the population to want it reflected in an independent state. The United Kingdom as a concept still supersedes the differences in identity that exist between the various nations it comprises.

Much of what has been said here about the Scottish–English relationship could be said about that between the Welsh and the English. Again, the English are less aware of the oppression for which they are responsible than are the Welsh, which in turn gives an occasional sharp edge to the relationship. But powers have now been devolved to a Welsh national parliament, which has gone a long way in answering questions about self-rule. The suppression of the Welsh language ended long ago: several Acts of Parliament have guaranteed its equality in law with English, and Welsh-language TV and radio stations have been set up; this has encouraged a resurgence in its use. Roughly 20 per cent of Welsh people speak ‘Cymraeg’ – that’s around half a million. It’s one of the Celtic languages, closely related to Cornish, and both can be traced back to the language spoken in those regions in the sixth century.

The Cornish also see themselves as a separate region to the rest of the country – Cornish nationalists say that England begins ‘east of the River Tamar’, which divides Cornwall from Devon. The Cornish were officially recognized as a national minority group in 2014; nevertheless, support for Cornish independence has not yet spread beyond the fringes of politics.

While having a very strong sense of their own identity, most people in the British Isles get along fine, subscribing to the same values and to the overarching idea of the Union. There are of course stories of anti-English sentiment being expressed in both Wales and Scotland, and it does happen – I was once effectively refused service in a working men’s club in Perthshire. However, such incidents are rare, and for every bigot there are thousands of other people who rarely give the differences a second thought except when engaged in what is usually well-intentioned ‘banter’ or teasing.

As a young Englishman I had the privilege of being on a train along with several hundred Scotsmen going to Wrexham to see Scotland play Wales. The journey was one long drinking session punctuated with songs including ‘If you hate the fucking English clap your hands’. My hands may have hurt from enthusiastic clapping, but I did not mistake the sentiments of some football fans for those of the entire Scottish nation. ‘Hate’ is a word bandied about on the terraces; away from the stadium, most people behave in a more grown-up manner. Just as many Brits who voted to leave the EU did not do so from a chauvinistic, extreme nationalist way of thinking, so many Scots who voted to leave the UK were not anti-English.

Most of the ancient British ‘tribes’ are intermingled, working, living and playing together. As the population of this relatively crowded island approaches 70 million, it is crucial that the cohesion remains – or, if one of the peoples does decide to break the legal ties, that it is done peacefully. In the past century there’s only been one corner of the kingdom where this has not always been the case – Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland is the smallest of the four main UK regions, representing just 5.7 per cent of the land area and, with 1.8 million people, 2.9 per cent of its population. It was created in 1921 after the British government divided Ireland into two separate jurisdictions. ‘Southern Ireland’ became independent in 1922, while Northern Ireland remained part of the UK. Some people think that the terms ‘United Kingdom’ and ‘Great Britain’ are interchangeable, but the latter refers only to England, Scotland and Wales (and a few small adjacent islands), whereas the UK also comprises Northern Ireland. The full title is ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’.

From the beginning, Northern Ireland’s population was split between Protestants (the majority) and Catholics. The Protestants tended to be descendants of settlers from Scotland, and to a lesser extent England. Most were and are ‘Unionists’, and want to stay in the UK; most Catholics were and are ‘Nationalists’, who want a united Ireland, although they disagree about how to achieve this. There has always been a degree of animosity between the two communities, which has frequently erupted in violence, the worst of which came during the three decades of the ‘Troubles’, which began in the late 1960s and cost more than 3,500 people their lives, with another 50,000 injured.

The 1998 power-sharing Good Friday Agreement ended most of the violence and the resulting ‘peace dividend’ has helped drive economic growth and a reduction in unemployment. Nevertheless, Northern Ireland remains a place deeply divided – with an entrenched culture of ‘us and them’. Few elements of life are as bisected as education and housing, something that is made very obvious in the capital, Belfast, by the physical walls built between the two sides. They are known, collectively, as the ‘Peace Walls’, but the sad irony is that they symbolize conflict. This is no continuous, imposing barrier such as that along the West Bank or the Saudi–Iraq border, but rather a series of somewhat ramshackle concrete and metal structures which zigzag through several of the poorer districts of Belfast, mostly in the north of the city. They started to appear at the beginning of the Troubles. Many begin and end seemingly without reason, but the locals know why: they mark the division of Protestant and Catholic territories across which, without the walls, violence might be more frequent.

Henry Robinson is someone who understands the width and depth of these divides better than most. A former member of the Official IRA, he was jailed in his youth for knee-capping a man from the rival Provisional IRA. However, having served a sentence in Crumlin Road Prison, he has devoted his life to conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, as well as around the world in places such as Colombia. He believes the walls are standing in the way of reconciliation: ‘I call them “Conflict Walls” or “Hate Walls”. The conflict is over but sectarianism has been allowed to continue to be embedded in society, and the evidence for that is the increase in the number of walls since the conflict ended.’

In all there are about a hundred of these walls in Belfast. They have even become something of a visitor attraction, and in the summer months you can see tourists arriving on buses from the cruise ships to gaze at them. They are a strange juxtaposition of the economic benefits that the ‘peace dividend’ has brought alongside a reminder that the peace is fragile. On each side of the walls the neighbourhoods are festooned with the symbols and messages of the antagonists. Look up from the pavement kerbs, painted in the colours of the Irish or UK flags, and you will see walls sporting slogans such as ‘The Brits Haven’t Gone – Nor Have We’ in support of the ‘Real IRA’ or ‘Ulster Will Always Remain British – No Surrender’. The whole sides of some buildings are given over to murals honouring paramilitary groups such as the IRA and the Ulster Freedom Fighters. Henry is unimpressed with this tribal loyalty: ‘I think both communities have become comfortable with the terror touts and almost take a perverse, ghoulish pride in the continuation of these monuments of hate. That’s a barometer that maybe things could go wrong in the future unless it’s dealt with.’

The division exists across the country, and there are walls in other urban areas such as Londonderry/Derry, albeit to a lesser extent. In the smaller towns it’s harder to spot the fault lines – but they are there. One housing estate will be predominantly Protestant, another Catholic. A town’s river might be the boundary. It is easy to find districts where 90 per cent of residents are either Unionists or Nationalists. In everyday life many people do interact, and in the more middle-class areas there is greater diversity in housing; many people don’t make a conscious choice not to integrate with their neighbours. But the political and religious structures built into society shape the way they function and ensure that communities lead parallel but separate lives.

It is hard to find ways of breaking down these self-perpetuating divisions. Just as neighbourhoods are split, especially in social housing estates, so are schools. A scheme to integrate the system has faltered, and recent research found that in almost half of Northern Ireland’s schools 95 per cent of pupils were of the same religion. Another generation of children is set to grow up belonging to one or other of two main factions in an education system described in 2010 by Peter Robinson, then First Minister in Northern Ireland, as a ‘benign form of apartheid which is fundamentally damaging to our society’. Henry Robinson agrees: ‘The walls are symbolic of the non-physical walls and the division where the majority of people educate their kids in separate religious schools. There is a culture of separation in Northern Ireland and a policy of integration, which doesn’t marry up . . . There’s not enough community support or focus on bridge-building on both sides.’

While efforts to end the rift seem to have hit an impasse, there is something that could soon have an impact: changing demographics. After the partition of Ireland in 1921 Protestants outnumbered Catholics in Northern Ireland by two to one, a ratio that lasted until the early 1970s. Now, however, Protestants are no longer even a majority of the total population: according to the 2011 census they accounted for 41.6 per cent (across various denominations), with Catholics at 40.8 per cent. The religious aspect of the conflict has faded in recent decades with the decline in religious practice, but it has been replaced by one of cultural identity: whether a person is a Catholic or Protestant indicates whether they are a Unionist or Nationalist. With birth rates and religious identification declining more quickly in the Protestant areas, it’s likely that the Catholics will become a majority, a situation that will bring with it political implications and questions about Northern Ireland’s position in the UK.

That position is already problematic following the Brexit vote. The Northern Ireland–Ireland frontier is the only land border in the UK; how should it now be handled? The people and businesses in the region are used to being able to move and trade freely across the border. How this might change could have far-reaching consequences, and risks upsetting the fragile peace as well as boosting support for the union of Northern Ireland and Ireland. The British government has said it has no plans to install border controls, but that in itself raises a number of problems – potentially allowing an open route for both people and goods between the UK and EU, one of the very things people who voted to leave wanted to control.

How the different regions of the UK voted in the 2016 EU referendum.

Brexit has exposed deep divisions throughout the UK. It has exacerbated the old ones – the majority in both Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain – but also exposed a variety of differences within the population.

One of the clearest demarcations in British society has always been that of class, and this remains the case today. It might be less clearcut than in the past – a middle-class teacher may well earn less than a working-class plumber, a train driver may earn more than someone in middle management – and there is greater social mobility and diversity. However, most social mobility studies find that men and women who attended private schools and then one of the Russell Group universities (the UK’s twenty-four leading universities) still dominate the highest positions in the land in numbers way above their proportion of the population as a whole. The case can be made that these people are in fact the most highly educated, and in many instances the best people for their jobs; but it can also be argued that this system prevents each country from finding and utilizing the best of its talents.

Only 7 per cent of the UK population attended independent schools, but they dominate the highest levels in the judiciary, the armed services, the BBC, the major corporations, the civil service and both major political parties. For example, 55 per cent of the civil service’s permanent secretaries are privately educated, as are 71 per cent of the top judges. About half of the UK’s newspaper columnists are privately educated. A 2014 Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission report found that on the BBC’s influential Question Time programme, 43 per cent of guests had attended Oxford or Cambridge University. And there are other factors at play that help perpetuate the imbalance across society. Many major companies offer only unpaid internships, effectively barring a young person from applying unless their parents can subsidize their living costs. Consequently the better off, many of them privately educated, gain the experience and contacts that help them succeed in the world of work.

With both politics and the media disproportionately packed with the privately educated, the latter tend to dominate public discourse, which can have a huge impact on influencing public opinion. But it can also mean that they represent a minority viewpoint, which runs the risk of obscuring how popular the opposing view really is, resulting in a situation where a large number of people become increasingly frustrated that their voices aren’t being heard. That is partly what happened with Brexit, which is why in June 2016 the political, business and media classes got the shock of their lives when the UK narrowly voted in favour of leaving the European Union. The less arrogant woke up and realized how out of touch they were with huge swathes of the electorate.

Since Brexit there has been much talk of the ‘left-behinds’, which usually refers to those for whom EU membership and globalization led not to a better life, but to competition for lower-skilled jobs and sometimes unemployment. Those who voted to leave the EU did so for many reasons and came from all walks of life, but certainly many were from the poorer regions of England and Wales, former workingclass areas, reflecting the traditional class divide between rich and poor.

The old divisions are hard to overcome, and at the same time some commentators have started to identify new rifts in society.

The writer David Goodhart characterized a major new difference in his 2017 book The Road to Somewhere ‘between the people who see the world from Anywhere and the people who see it from Somewhere’. In it he argues: ‘Anywheres dominate our culture and society. They tend to do well at school and then usually move from home to a residential university in their late teens and on to a career in the professions that might take them to London or even abroad for a year or two.’ The Anywheres can feel at home wherever they go, whether that’s Berlin, New York, Shanghai or Mumbai. On the other hand the Somewheres tend to have a much more clearly defined sense of identity. Like the majority of people in Britain, they live within 20 miles of where they grew up and identify with locality, region and country – they are more ‘rooted’.

Among the Somewheres are many whose jobs have slowly disappeared as a result of the economic changes linked to globalization and whose working-class culture has recently been marginalized, especially in national discourse. The word ‘cosmopolitan’ comes from Greek roots meaning ‘citizen of the world’. We are indeed all one people, but it is a challenge indeed to persuade someone who lives near where they grew up, has a strong local identity and does not possess work skills that are transferable across continents that they are ‘cosmopolitan’.

Goodhart suggests that up to 25 per cent of the UK population are Anywheres, about 50 per cent Somewheres and the rest Inbetweeners. These are approximations and rough definitions, but they are useful in understanding modern Britain through the prism not just of class but of world view. Many ‘progressive’ Anywheres might be embarrassed about expressing love of country, Somewheres less so – their world view was an accepted ‘fact’ in British society until at least the late 1970s, but the rise of the multicultural society, parallel cultures and the spread of higher education has challenged it.

Britain’s Labour Party, the traditional party of the working class, is increasingly that of middle-class ‘progressives’, many of whom will lean towards the Anywheres’ world view. In the 1966 general election Harold Wilson’s Labour Party won power with approximately 11 million working-class votes and 2 million from the middle classes; in 2015 the figures stood at about 4.2 million working-class votes and

4.4 million middle-class ones. This changing pattern is down to a range of factors, not least the decline in traditional working-class jobs, but it is also because the party that traditionally concentrated on matters of vital importance to the working class – jobs, housing and crime – has appeared to focus more on other issues, including identity politics.

These different identities – whether global or more rooted – have been brought into conflict with one another in debates about identity, nationalism and, yes, immigration before and after the Brexit vote. For decades this was in many ways a hidden discourse, as political and media circles seemed to refuse to engage with it. But nevertheless, huge numbers of the population were discussing it the length and breadth of the land.

Successive governments backed the idea that for the current and future health of the economy the UK needed mass immigration. There is indeed a strong case to be made for this. A glance at any of the big UK cities is enough to show that transport, health and many other industries would grind to a halt if all immigrants in the country simultaneously took the day off work. However, what was lacking was the concomitant funding of social housing and healthcare, and those in power tended to dismiss people’s concerns without stopping to listen to them properly.

An example occurred in the UK general election campaign of 2010. The then prime minister, Gordon Brown, engaged in a televised street conversation with a lifelong working-class Labour voter, sixty-five-year-old Gillian Duffy, in the northern town of Rochdale. Mrs Duffy ventured a range of views on the national debt, education and the health service, and then said, ‘You can’t say anything about the immigrants because you’re saying that you’re . . . but all these Eastern Europeans what are coming in, where are they flocking from?’ Her comments seemed to suggest that she felt that if she was to express the view that she was unsure of the pace of change in her home town, she would be considered a racist. Unwittingly, the prime minister went on to confirm her view. After joking with her, smiling, patting her on the back and wishing her all the best, he got into his car. Then, forgetting that his microphone was still on, he said to an aide, ‘That was a disaster. Well I just . . . should never have put me in with that woman. Whose idea was that?’ And then, in response to an aide asking what she’d said, ‘Oh everything, she was just a sort of bigoted woman.’ At this point millions of people in the UK who were also anxious about how their home towns were changing realized that their prime minister thought they were bigots.

Many economists argue that the UK does indeed need immigration; the problem is that it has happened very quickly, and the government didn’t take into account the consequences when assessing projections for immigration after ten Eastern European countries joined the EU in 2004. The projections turned out to be far from realistic. A 2003 report for the Home Office claimed that as few as 13,000 people a year would come from countries such as Poland and Hungary, if Germany and other major EU countries kept their labour markets open as well. That turned out to be an important ‘if’. ‘Come on in,’ said the UK government; ‘Don’t come on in,’ said most of the other EU countries – in fact only three countries (the UK, Ireland and Sweden) allowed Eastern Europeans immediate access to their labour markets in 2004. The rest of the member states introduced a variety of restrictions, with a view to a more gradual process over a number of years. By mid 2015 about 900,000 people had arrived in the UK from Poland alone. According to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, between 2004 and 2016 net migration into the UK averaged 250,000 people a year. Combined, that is roughly equivalent to the population of six cities each the size of Liverpool.

Given these statistics it is unsurprising that in a 2011 YouGov poll 62 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement ‘Britain has changed in recent times beyond recognition; it sometimes feels like a foreign country and this makes me feel uncomfortable.’ Some people jump on such sentiments as proof of xenophobia and an irrational response to the benefits both of membership of the EU and of globalization. This is somewhat unfair on ordinary people who have seen their neighbourhoods or the urban areas they visit undergo rapid change. That some areas have been transformed is a fact; that this can make some British people feel uncomfortable is as obvious a statement as saying that if large numbers of foreigners suddenly moved into a few districts of Ho Chi Minh City, the local people would likewise feel uncomfortable.

It’s ironic that often the same type of person who decries middleclass ‘gentrification’ of a working-class area, and who understands how the working class might not exactly embrace such change, is often quick to criticize people who are uneasy about the ways in which immigration can alter a neighbourhood. ‘Gentrification’ is sometimes even called ‘social cleansing’, while immigration is termed ‘diversification’. What is almost always true is that many of those using these terms are less affected by them than those living on the spot. To dismiss people who enjoyed their relatively homogeneous cultures and who are now unsure of their place in the world merely drives them into the arms of those who would exploit their anxieties – the real bigots.

Most British people now accept the ideas of ethnic equality, gender equality and gay marriage. Being anti-immigration does not necessarily accord with being anti-immigrant. Just as there is a difference between being uncomfortable about change and being racist, the same is true of patriotism and nationalism. I define the former partially as ‘love of one’s own country and respect for those of others’ and the latter as ‘love of one’s own country and contempt for those of others’. History has shown that it takes time for us to feel comfortable with the ‘other’, but also that, properly managed, both We and They can learn to embrace each other.

This is just as true when it comes to the thorny issue of religion. The 2011 census counted dozens of religions in England and Wales in a list that included ‘Jedi Knights’, ‘Heavy Metal’ and ‘Satanism’. However, these faiths, along with Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, are practised by a minority of the 65-million-strong population.

About two-thirds of people have no participatory connection with a religion or place of worship, which shows what an anomaly Northern Ireland is – the strong religious identities there don’t reflect the reality in the rest of the UK. Church attendance overall continues to decline year on year, a trajectory that began in the 1950s and has accelerated. Despite Christianity’s precipitous decline, 59.3 per cent of respondents in the 2011 census – 33 million – claimed to be ‘Christians’. This is clearly a cultural relic from times when almost the entire country professed to believe in Christianity and shows that even if many people don’t accept the tenets of the faith, they identify culturally with its history and traditions. But this too is fading: in the 2001 census 72 per cent had identified as Christian.

In addition to the 59.3 per cent figure for Christians, the 2011 census found that 4.8 per cent identified as Muslim, 1.5 per cent as Hindu, 0.8 per cent as Sikhs and 0.5 per cent as Jews. That correlates roughly as 2.7 million Muslims, 800,000 Hindus, 423,00 Sikhs and 263,000 Jews. Along with ‘No religion’, these are the top six categories in terms of numbers. For the record, the Jedi Knights were seventh with 176,000 adherents – or possibly people with a particular sense of humour. There were only 1,800 self-declared Satanists.

The future increase in Jedi Knights, and indeed believers in Beelzebub, may be difficult to forecast, but this is less true of the main religions. The fastest-growing faith in the UK is Islam, partially because of birth rates, immigration and devotion. Whereas most Britons who identify as being of Christian heritage are not religious – in reality less than 7 per cent of the population class themselves as practising Christians – a 2014 poll found that 93 per cent of Muslims said they practised their religion. How much of this is devoutness and how much cultural pressure is difficult to judge, as in most Muslim cultures it is not acceptable to declare a ‘belief’ in atheism. Given the strength of its following, and the fact that one in three UK Muslims is under the age of fifteen, the rise of Islam as Britain’s second-biggest declared religion seems likely to continue. And with ongoing immigration and the decline in church attendance in the Christian community, it follows that Islam will probably become the most-practised religion in the country.

That is a different thing, though, from the actual size of the Muslim population. In 2011 about one in twenty people in the UK was Muslim, but the public perception of the ratio is very different, as it is throughout Europe: an Ipsos Mori poll suggested that most Britons overestimate the number of Muslims by a factor of three. This is true of both the non-Muslim and the Muslim population and may in part be due to the concentration of Muslims in urban areas – 80 per cent of Muslims live in just four regions: Yorkshire, the north-west, the West Midlands and Greater London.

This concentration has given rise to a situation whereby parallel societies have emerged, which can lead to division and challenge social cohesion. There are parts of some urban areas (Luton, Burnley, Manchester and Oldham, for example) that are overwhelmingly Muslim and have little contact with nearby, predominantly non-Muslim neighbourhoods. Multiculturalism has not helped in this respect – it prevents assimilation and undermines social cohesion: we risk becoming many societies with different cultures, with reinforced ‘us and them’ mentalities and lifestyles.

In the post-war years the UK struggled to become accustomed to being, in some regions, a multicultural society. The British are now engaged in a similar adjustment in an age of accelerated mass migration, but one that includes a significant additional factor – religion, which, as we’ve seen in Northern Ireland, can be one of the most difficult rifts to heal. As most faiths argue, at their core, that theirs is the true way, and that others are at best misguided, they tend to separate people – an unwelcome development that some religious leaders actively encourage. This is particularly the case with Islam because, compared to other religions, there is a greater degree of political involvement by Muslim groups, and a concomitant degree of media attention. Certainly there are numerous examples of inter-faith religious women and men endeavouring to bridge the gaps, but too many mosques retain preachers with a culture of promoting an ‘us and them’ mentality – and many on the right wing of British politics are guilty of the same thing.

There has long been an Islamic presence in the UK – a 1641 document refers to a ‘sect of Mahomatens’, and the first translation of the Koran appeared in England in 1649. However, fifty years ago the estimated Muslim population was 50,000; now it is approaching 3 million. This is a rapid increase, almost all of which has come about in the last fifty years, together with rapid changes in social attitudes in the UK. As we have seen, church attendance declined, belief was eroded, and yet religious freedoms were increasingly accepted. Abortion became legal, as did homosexuality. Gay marriage and the adoption of children by gay people is now routine, and the majority of the population, regardless of what some Christians say, accept most of the changes.

The tension here comes with the growth of a religion many of whose adherents and leaders do not accept the above examples of modern liberal life because they go against the basic tenets of their faith. A poll conducted by ICM Research in 2016 found that 52 per cent of British Muslim respondents believed that English law should be changed to make homosexuality illegal again. This attitude is not a problem when its adherents are so few in number that they have no power to change the status quo. For example, Britain’s tiny ‘ultra-Orthodox’ Hasidic Jewish population tends not to engage in the culture wars of the majority population and is content to pursue its own agenda within its own community. However, Islam is now, and will increasingly be, in a position to make its views known and heeded, which could have a major impact on society depending on what type of Islam it is – one that is pluralistic and in tune with the majority culture, or one that seeks to reverse the liberal changes for everyone, or one that insists on different laws for different people.

In the UK and elsewhere, will there be a Europeanization of Islam, or an Islamification of swathes of European urban areas? At the moment there are examples of both. There are millions of modern Europeans who happen to be Muslim and who fully participate in and are part of the fabric of whichever European country they are citizens of. But there are also examples of overwhelmingly Muslim urban areas where (often violent) Islamist ideology is propagated by people seeking to control them. The more the latter is allowed to spread, the more difficult it will be for the former to resist it.

The answer to the question ‘What has my religion got to do with you?’ is that we are all British, and as such enjoy the right to hold and expound views as to what sort of society we want. The moment religion bumps up against the political arena of man-made laws we all get a say: any Christian owner of a bed-and-breakfast business who tries to ban homosexuals will soon find this out. Those who claim to support the relatively progressive society that has been created must express confidence in the legitimacy of that progress in order to continue to enjoy the fruits of previous generations’ political labours. This confidence appears to have been waning for many years now with the rise of ‘cultural relevancy’, and a paralysing fear that any criticism of aspects of a different culture will be branded racist. Naturally there are people clever enough to have spotted this anxiety and used it to close down debate. Racism is an increasingly easy, shallow term to throw around, and in many cases deflects from our understanding of what is actually going on in our society.

At its root this fear appears to derive from an overwhelming embarrassment, perhaps guilt, about the myriad evils of colonialism. Hence it might be troubling to fly the British flag, but to hoist that of a former British colony at a cultural event in the UK would be a legitimate expression of pride in culture. One type of patriotism, bad – another, good. This attitude is an interesting mix of guilt, paternalism and authoritarianism. Many ordinary people in the UK are baffled by these cultural cringes because they do not inhabit the intellectual hinterland of those who propagate the dominant narrative. George Orwell was aware of all this. As early as the 1930s he wrote in his essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’:

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.

Orwell was referring specifically to England, and perhaps his observations provide a clue to the rationale of some English pro-Brexit voters – those who do have a strong sense of national identity and pride, and are bewildered by a political and media class seemingly detached from ordinary people’s lives. Orwell was part of the commentariat before the expression was invented. He was an unusual example then for the same reasons as he would be now – he bothered to experience English culture as it is lived by large numbers of people. It taught him to try to understand better.

The UK has held together in the face of nationalist sentiments and class and religious splits in the past. It is again being tested – whether it is able once more to overcome those divides and recreate the relatively cohesive societies of the twentieth century is yet to be seen. Hadrian’s Wall shows us how far back our divisions go, the Belfast walls how far we still have to go and how badly things can go wrong.

It is possible to look at the rifts in modern British society, and the competing narratives, and realize how important it is to balance the reasonable concerns of the different factions. Whether in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales, communities need to be bound together in shared experience, cumulatively comprising the nation state – bound together, up to a point, with shared values, hard as they are to define. Our worst nightmare is a future in which we retreat into our various enclaves – the sum of the parts not equalling, but weakening the whole.

CONCLUSION

‘The thing that hath been, it is that which shall

be; and that which is done is that which shall be

done; and there is no new thing under the sun.’

– Ecclesiastes 1:9–10

WHEN WORKING AS A REPORTER I ONCE WALKED OUT OF the Green Zone in Baghdad with two colleagues at the height of the bombing and kidnapping campaign in the early 2000s. At the time the modus operandi outside the Green Zone was to travel lying down on the back seat of a beat-up car with tinted windows, accompanied by two men with assault rifles up front. As I passed the last checkpoint guarded by American soldiers, every footstep began to take on significance. With each one I was one step further away from safety – and assistance, should anything go wrong.

It is a strange space, one in which there are few people and no one is really in charge. There is no structure, no law, and the people who do venture into this ‘no man’s land’ fall very emphatically into ‘us’ or ‘them’ categories. Journalists used to be recognized as neutral, but those days are mostly gone and in many conflicts we are seen as targets for retribution, or as cash cows to be sold or ransomed. On this occasion we went a few hundred yards, spoke to a group of civilians, grew increasingly nervous and hurried back to the relative safety of the Zone. At the time it was regularly mortared, but we all agreed it was better to lose your head quickly to shrapnel than to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s knife-wielding gang – the embryonic ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’.

These strange places – the spaces in between – are often created by our conflicts and divisions. Sometimes they’re still contested territory, sometimes they’re mutually agreed buffer zones. Whichever they are, stepping into them can be an unnerving experience. You do so at your own peril, often very aware that each side is training weapons on you as you proceed.

There are, alas, many modern examples. Cyprus is divided in half, between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, by a 111-mile-long buffer zone. The starkest part is the Varosha area of the city of Famagusta. In 1974 the inhabitants fled, fearing a massacre by Turkish troops, and never returned. Varosha is now sealed off by barbed wire, guard towers and the Turkish military. Inside this ghost town it is mostly quiet, apart from birdsong. The streets are empty, the pavements overgrown with weeds, and many of the abandoned buildings are still in ruins from the war. At night the city disappears into the darkness; there are no lights because there are no people. You cannot cross the divide in Varosha, although there are now seven points on the island where an official from one side will check your passport before you go a few hundred yards to reach the other side, whereupon you must present it again. Both sides watch the space in between; a shadowy place, outside the confines of safety and comfort, where you are watched, and beyond which lies the ‘other’.

Enforced separation and violent confrontations are the extreme effects of what happens when we build walls – and when the divisions they represent are apparently insurmountable. No one wants this: such spaces and such situations are frightening and dehumanizing. Going from one side to the other under scrutiny and threat can be unsettling.

Moving between Israel and Gaza is a cold, isolating experience: you feel as if you’re caught somewhere between a sci-fi nightmare and some sort of lab experiment. To cross from Israel, you must pass through two Israeli checkpoints. Armed guards watch from behind bulletproof glass. Your belongings are thoroughly inspected. At the end of a long corridor you press a buzzer; the camera above takes a long look at you before the door clicks open. Now outside, you are in Gaza. But there are no people here; you are in a fenced-off corridor, in a stretch of no man’s land over 1,000 yards wide (in some places it is wider). At last you emerge fully into the harsh sunlight and scrubland. Several hundred yards further on a Palestinian checkpoint awaits, though there the inspections are less thorough. The return journey has much more stringent checks on the Israeli side: border guards monitor the banks of cameras from behind tinted windows; sound and touch sensors are fitted all along and near the wall; full-body scanners, the sort you find at airports now, are in use; luggage is swabbed for traces of explosives.

This may seem an unfriendly or overly rigorous routine, but arguably it works. The wall reduces the chances of suicide bombers from Gaza entering Israel, and the section of no man’s land pushes the target range of rockets fired into Israel back by at least 1,000 yards. This is an uncomfortable truth. Yes, the very sight of the Gaza Wall, the barriers around Bangladesh, the barbed wire between Hungary and Serbia offends our sensibilities and is testament to our failure to resolve our differences. It is easy to decry the trend of wall-building; and walls can indeed imbue tough issues with a false sense of resolution. However, they can also provide temporary and partial alleviation of problems, even as countries work towards more lasting solutions, especially in areas of conflict. The Gaza Wall, along with many other measures, for example the Iron Dome anti-missile system, has dramatically reduced the number of fatalities on the Israeli side of that conflict. The Saudi wall with Iraq has helped prevent infiltration by IS.

But what of those walls in non-conflict areas? The barbed-wire policy of Hungary, in both the physical and the political sense, has reduced the inward flow of people, but is unlikely to stop it altogether. And mass migration isn’t going to end in the foreseeable future. People on the move are fleeing from poverty and/or violence, heading towards wealthier, more stable countries. While such levels of poverty and conflict prevail – and across the Middle East and Africa, that is likely to continue – the waves of migrants will keep coming, perhaps even increase. The world’s population is still growing: in Africa, already home to widespread poverty, the population is expected to double, from 1.2 billion now to 2.4 billion within about thirty years. So although the poverty rate is decreasing, as the population increases there are likely to be more people trapped in poverty overall, with little hope of or opportunity to change their circumstances.

A number of richer countries will continue to erect walls to help stem the flow of migrants. Some people argue, however, that we should simply dispense not just with walls, but with borders themselves – and allow completely free movement, so that any person can go anywhere on the planet they wish.

In a 2017 Foreign Affairs essay, Nathan Smith, Assistant Professor of Economics at Fresno Pacific University’s School of Business, described this ‘open borders’ idea as:

a regime of nearly complete freedom of migration worldwide, with rare exceptions for preventing terrorism or the spread of contagious disease . . . Ending migration controls in this way would increase liberty, reduce global poverty, and accelerate economic growth. But more fundamentally, it would challenge the right of governments to regulate migration on the arbitrary grounds of sovereignty . . . The more efficient allocation of labor would result in global increases in productivity, leading the world economy to nearly double in size. This increased economic activity would, moreover, disproportionately benefit the world’s poorest people.

Smith argues that by opening borders we could end world poverty, and therefore that it is, in a way, a moral duty for those of us in the West to do so, especially in terms of righting historical wrongs. There is even a view that the practice of citizenship within a state is as violent and discriminatory as the slave trade, because it places citizens’ rights over human ones and thus legitimizes the idea that some people are more human than others. If this were to happen, the strain on resources in the West would be immense: welfare state systems, for example, would effectively have to be dismantled. Smith recognizes that ‘open borders would probably lead to a large increase in visible extreme poverty in the West’, but counters that ‘impoverishment by Western standards looks like affluence to much of the world’, and that the benefits to millions outweigh the inconveniences and downsides for Westerners.

At first glance there is a logic to the argument. You can make the humanitarian case that, overall, things would ‘level out’. However, it doesn’t appear to factor in two crucial elements. The first is what effect such mass movement would have on the countries being abandoned. The initial emigrants would be those who could afford it, no longer having to make perilous journeys at the mercy of people traffickers and across deserts and seas. With fewer doctors, teachers and other educated people, those countries would go into decline – perhaps even collapse and become utterly impoverished – with no prospect whatsoever of advancement.

The second problem is human nature – or, more specifically, group identity. An optimistic view maintains that the nation states on the receiving end will struggle but cope, that they will absorb the newcomers. But a glance at history, and at the present, suggests a more cautious view of humanity may be required. In reality, mass movements of people have already triggered unease: local populations do not seem to be happy when large numbers of outsiders descend upon them. The impact on politics in Europe is clear: there has been a sharp move to the right and extreme right. It is a similar story across the globe. It’s commonplace to read articles denouncing the Western countries for having some of the most restrictive immigration laws and highest levels of racism in the world. Elsewhere, they know better; other regions are just as capable of being anti-immigrant, violent, religiously intolerant and racist. The pressures of globalization and rising population numbers are being felt the world over, and we’re seeing a rise in nationalisms – both secular and religious – as a result. In India, for example, given the prevalent attitude to the current levels of immigration into the north-eastern states, it seems unlikely that a massive increase in migration from Bangladesh would reduce friction.

Elsewhere, since 2014 the residents of the Paraguayan town of Encarnación have been divided from their Argentine neighbours in Posadas by a 15-foot-high, mile-long concrete wall along the river on the Argentine side. Official reasons for the construction were vague, but the context was clear: it was part of increasing anxiety, in one of South America’s most liberal countries, over migration. Next to Paraguay is Bolivia, from where migration into Argentina also comes. This prompted the congressman from the northern Argentine province of Salta, Alfredo Olmedo, to say ‘We have to build a wall . . . I agree 100 per cent with Trump.’

Open borders are not going to work in the current climate – or even for the foreseeable future. The idea of the ‘nation state’ has caused its share of problems, of course. We seem to have recognized this when drawing up the Outer Space Treaty – the United Nations’ laws on the ownership of space – which states that:

Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.

The Treaty establishes the exploration and use of outer space as the ‘province of all mankind’. The Moon Agreement expands on these provisions by stating that:

Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the Moon [or other celestial bodies in the solar system], nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or non-governmental organization, national organization or non-governmental entity or of any natural person.

For the earth, however, it is too late to start again. The planet and its human inhabitants are too complex for there to be a sudden shift to a global government in which nation states are dissolved and the world is the ‘province of all mankind’. The demise of the nation state is frequently forecast for a variety of reasons: globalization, federal superstructures such as the EU, the rise of city states and, most recently, by the rise of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. And yet the nations and the states keep surviving. What’s more, the world of nation states that we live in has, for all its flaws, brought with it relative stability. We have come a long way, even if there is further to go. Measure the post-Second-World-War era against the seventy-five years prior to it and you can see how much progress we’ve made. Globally, literacy rates are up, and poverty rates down. Diseases have been cured, infant mortality has been reduced, as has maternal death in childbirth. By means of science, democratic principles and good leadership, this progress can continue.

However, what is clear is that if we do not move more money to where most people are, many of them will try to move to where the money is. In the immediate future foreign-aid budgets should be increased. In the near future, we need a twenty-first-century Marshall Plan for the developing world to harness the riches of the G20 group of nations in a global redistribution of wealth. After the destruction of the Second World War, the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe. It was a massive effort, driven by the Americans and carried out in the knowledge that it would benefit both sides. We now need a plan of even greater scope and ambition, executed in the knowledge that it will benefit everyone. It should encompass development, infrastructure, trade, education, health and climate change.

We have already had a taste of what will happen without such measures. Migration will continue, indeed grow, and in the face of this ‘threat’ to their own prosperity and stability, wealthier nations will only become more protective of what is theirs – territory, services, culture – further fuelling nationalist movements and the mania for wallbuilding. Politics will become nastier, the barriers will be built higher, and increasingly violent attempts will be made physically to beat back those coming over the walls. Many hardliners and xenophobes (often the same people) want zero immigration. This is undesirable from both a humanitarian and an economic standpoint.

The Western countries require immigrants for the mid-term future in order to sustain themselves. I say ‘mid-term’ because I’ve yet to see a prediction of what will happen when the tipping point is reached – when technology, replacing many jobs, meets peak immigration. But for now the world needs migration at sustainable levels, which, for example, does not empty Bangladesh while destabilizing India. But how to control it is not clear: who should be allowed in – economic migrants beneficial to the country’s prosperity, or refugees fleeing war and persecution? Who decides who falls into the latter category? How many should be permitted to come?

And how can these newcomers be integrated in a way that doesn’t cause problems with the locals? Most of the West has accepted, and in some cases embraced, diversity. Any ideas of ‘racial purity’ are long gone, confined to the fringe such as we saw in the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville in the USA in 2017. Any level of violence towards the ‘other’ is unacceptable: the fire-bombing of migrant centres in Germany, for example, is a disgrace.

But while most Westerners don’t engage in this sort of extreme behaviour, they do want to preserve the underlying values of their culture. After centuries of bloodshed, imperialism and many other ills, the Western countries are now underpinned by a shared belief in democracy, gender equality, freedom of religion and freedom of speech. Naturally, sometimes a nation does not conduct itself in accordance with its own civilized values, but this hypocrisy does not mean that the values are not there. What the majority of people want is for those coming to their communities to share their values, or at the very least to tolerate and not militate against them. A large proportion of modern Europeans would not object if a homosexual couple moved in next door, but they would be unhappy with a homophobic neighbour attempting to whip up hatred against homosexuals. So we need to find a way for newcomers to join the host community, not seek to undermine its values. This is not a question of race or religion, or simply good manners: the only place the guest gets to smash the plates is at a Greek restaurant. In this two-way relationship, it is also the host’s responsibility to make the guest welcome. This applies to guests and hosts in countries and cultures the world over. In this way, both sides can build bridges and reach across to each other.

Until there is acceptance of the universal brotherhood of man, and a world in which there is no competition for resources, we will build walls. It was ever thus. We are animals. Wonderful, sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, incredible in our capacity, infinite in our imagination, but still creatures of this world, and like every other creature we need our space.

There is a proverb found in most languages: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’ This is not some trite folksy saying; it states an inevitable truth about boundaries both physical and psychological. We plan for a future in which we hope for the best and fear the worst, and because we fear, we build walls.

However, if that seems a deterministic view of humanity, there is an upside. Our ability to think, and to build, also gives us the capacity to fill the spaces in between the walls with hope – to build bridges. For every wall between countries there is an information superhighway, for every Al Qaeda there is an inter-faith outreach group, and for every missile defence system there is an international space station. Billions of dollars are donated in aid by rich nations. The codification of human rights acknowledges that, in theory at least, humans are all created equal. We have built great halls in which to meet, discuss and try to resolve our differences. The United Nations, the EU, the African Union, ASEAN, MERCOSUR, OPEC, NATO, the World Bank and hundreds of other pan-national and global organizations have all been created to help unite us and mediate our conflicts. They are a formal recognition of the human condition, and through them the megatribes seek to resolve their differences, maintaining their walls while searching for more lasting solutions.

So although at present nationalism and identity politics are once again on the rise, there is the potential for the arc of history to bend back towards unity.

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Chapter 3: Israel and Palestine

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Starr, Kelsey Jo, and Masci, David, ‘In Israel, Jews are united by homeland but divided into very different groups’, Pew Research Centre, 8 March 2016

Vallet, Elisabeth (ed.), Borders, Fences and Walls: State of Insecurity? (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014)

Chapter 4: The Middle East

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Chapter 5: The Indian Subcontinent

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Couderé, Hanne, ‘India: violence against Dalits on the rise’, The Diplomat, 19 May 2016

Hanson, S.; Nicholls, R.; Ranger, N., et al., ‘A global ranking of port cities with high exposure to climate extremes’, Climatic Change, vol. 104, no. 1 (January 2011), pp. 89–111

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Sukumaran Nair, P., Indo-Bangladesh Relations (New Delhi: APH Publishing, 2008)

Tripathi, Sanjeev, ‘Illegal immigration from Bangladesh to India: toward a comprehensive solution’, Carnegie India, 29 June 2016

Chapter 6: Africa

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Aisien, Ebiuwa, and Oriakhi, Felix O. U., ‘Great Benin on the world stage: reassessing Portugal–Benin diplomacy in the 15th and 16th centuries’, IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, vol. 11, no. 1 (May–June 2013), pp. 107–115

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Chapter 7: Europe

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Divine, David, Hadrian’s Wall: North-west Frontier of Rome (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1995)

Nolan, Paul, ‘Two tribes: a divided Northern Ireland’, Irish Times, 1 April 2017

‘Population of the UK by country of birth and nationality: 2015’, Office for National Statistics, 25 August 2016

Torney, Kathryn, ‘How integrated are the schools where you live?’, The Detail, 23 November 2012

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to all at Elliott & Thompson for constant support on a twoyear project and for cutting enough ‘flowery stuff’ to open a floristry. Thanks also to Wen Qi, Sabrina Zeng, Sam Bamba, Sameer Bazbaz, Mina al Orabi, Dr Rogier Creemers, Dr Reece Jones, Fawaz Gerges, David Waywell, Henry Robinson, Professor Stuart Elden and David Kornbluth.

INDEX

A

Abbas, Mahmoud 88

Abdulaziz al Saud, King Salman bin 113–14

Abdullah, King 102

Abu Dhabi 114

Acts of Union (1707) 222

Afghanistan 2, 126, 143

Africa 135

Bakassi peninsula dispute 164–5, 167

Benin City 160–2

civil wars 157, 164, 165–6, 198

colonialists 161–2, 163–4, 167

creation of nation states 157, 159, 161–3, 166–7, 177

crime rates 172

extended families 176–7

financial inequality 170–1, 172–3, 174, 176–7

gated communities 172–3, 174, 176–7

immigration 171–2

independence movements 155–7, 164–5

Moroccan Wall 155–6

political corruption 168–9

population growth and poverty 246

Provincial House of Traditional Leaders 168

refugees 198

religious divisions 169

tribalism 6, 157–8

tribalism and politics 168–70

see also individual countries by name

African National Congress (ANC) 168

African Union 169

ageing populations 27, 200

al-Ali, Naji 72

Al-Aqsa compound 82

Al Qaeda 104, 108, 244

Alawites 102

Ali ibn Abi Talib 102

Alphaville, Sao Paolo, Brazil 174

Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) 209–11

Ambedkar, B. R. 149

Anfal military campaign 111

Anglo-Ottoman Convention (1913) 109

Angola 163–4, 166

Annan, Kofi 179

anti-Semitism 64, 65, 88

see also Israel and Palestine

Antifaschistischer Schutzwall 185

Arab Human Development Report 2002 112

Arab-Israeli War (1948) 74

Arab Revolt (1916) 116

Arab Spring 101

arap Moi, Daniel 168

Argentina 248

arms smuggling 51–2

Arunachal Pradesh 140

Ashkenazi Jews 80, 83

Asian Water Tower 19

Assad, Bashar al- 105, 110

Assad, Hafez al- 105

Assam Accord (1985) 130

Assam, India 129–30, 132

Austria 2, 188, 200, 207, 211

B

Baath Party 111, 116

Bachmann, Lutz 210

Bakassi peninsula 164–5, 167

Bakassi Self-Determination Front (BSDF) 165

Bakongo people, Angola 164

Balfour, Arthur 73

Balfour Declaration (1917) 72–3

Bandurski, David 32

Bangladesh 2, 123–5, 126–33, 144, 145, 248

climate change 133–5

Rohingya people 136–8

War of Independence 127, 128

Bango Bhoomi 132–3

Banksy 72–3

Barak, Ehud 92–3

Battle of Karbala (680) 102

BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 231

Bede, Venerable 220

Bedouins 85–6

Belfast walls, Northern Ireland 227–9

Belgium 196–7

Benin City, West Africa 160–2

Berlin Wall 1, 183–4, 185–6, 188–9, 192

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 131–2

Bhutan 140, 144

black separatists 64–5

Border Patrol Agency, US 46, 47, 48

Border Security Force (BSF), India 124, 130

Botswana 169–70, 171

Brahmins 146, 148

Brandt, Willy 189

Brazil 174

Brexit 6, 196, 222, 226, 229, 231, 232

Brown, Gordon 234

Brussels 193–4

Buddhism 19

Bulgaria 194, 199

Bundu dia Kongo movement 164

Burma see Myanmar Burundi 166

Bush, George W 47–8

C

Cameron, David 175

Cameroon 164–5, 167

Casamance province, Senegal 165

caste system, Indian 145–9

Catalonia 197

Catholics and Protestants, Northern Irish 226–9

Charlie, Bonnie Prince 220–1

Charlottesville protests 64, 251

Chicago Tribune 41

China 2, 6

ageing population 27

Buddhists 19

civil war 20

claims on Arunachal Pradesh 140

Cultural Revolution 15

cyber-security legislation 30–3

Cyberspace Administration 32–3

education 24–5

financial inequality 12, 20, 21–3, 26

government 12, 15, 18–21, 23–33

Great Firewall/Golden Shield 27–33

Great Wall of China 12–16

growing the urban population 23–4

Han people 13–14, 17, 18, 19, 27

hukou system 24–5

Qin dynasty 16

relations with Myanmar 139

social funding 24–6, 27

suppression of information 27–33

Tibet 19, 126

trade and industry 18, 20–1, 30–1, 33

Uighurs and Han division 17–18, 29

urban/rural division 12, 23–5

water supplies 19

China Media Project 32

Christianity 4, 79–80, 85–6, 89, 128, 138, 169

in the UK 226–9, 236–7

in the US 60

Clayton Industries 40

climate change 133–6, 149

climate refugees 135–6

Clinton, Bill 51

Clinton, Hillary 48

Cold War 184, 192, 194, 198

colonialism 6, 111, 125, 240–1

Africa 157, 159, 161–3, 166–7, 177

Comanche nation 44

Coming to Birth (M. O. Macgoye) 159

Communist Party

Chinese government 12, 15, 18–21, 23–33

Soviet Union 188

Congress Party, India 132

Cornish nationalists 225

Coulter, Ann 39

Creemers, Rogier 28–9, 30, 31

crime rates, African 172

Crisis Resolution Security Services 40–1

Croatia 2, 199, 200

Cultural Revolution, Chinese 15

cyber-security legislation, Chinese 30–3

Cyprus 244

D

Dalits/Untouchables 146–9

Darling, Patrick 160

d’Azeglio, Massimo 196

defection from East Germany 185–6, 188–90

Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) 107

Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 164, 166

Deng Xiaoping 15–16, 21, 26

Denmark 2, 200, 202–3

Deterling, Harry 186

Dome of the Rock 82

drug running 46, 51–2

Duffy, Gillian 234

Durand, Henry Mortimer 143

Durand Line 143

Dynamo Dresden ‘Ultras’ 210

E

e-commerce 33

East Germany 183–7, 188–9, 190–1

East Pakistan see Bangladesh

Eastern European migrants 194–6, 234–5

Eastern Turkestan Republic 17

The Economist 173

education

China 24–5

Germany 191

Israel 85

Middle East 115

United Kingdom 231

United States of America 58–9, 63–4

Edward I of England, King 222

Egypt 78, 89–90, 101, 106

Egyptian–Israel border wall 78

English Channel 200

Eritrea 165

Estonia 2, 198

Ethiopia 165

Europe 2, 6, 116, 186–8

European Commission 197

European Economic Community (EEC) 193

European Union 3, 6, 193

border controls 198–200, 210–11

dilution of sovereignty 193–4

Eurozone 194, 196

financial crash (2008) 196

freedom of movement 194–6

immigration 194–6, 197–202, 203–11, 246, 250–1

Muslim population and integration 203–6, 239–40

nationalism 6, 193, 196–8, 206–12

public services 201–2

terrorism 200, 201, 205

uniting East and West Europe 194–6

see also individual countries by name

F

Facebook 4, 29

Farook, Syed Rizwan 51

Farrakhan, Louis 65

Fatah 87, 88–9

Federally Administered Tribal Areas 144

Fergany, Nader 112

financial crash (2008) 196

financial inequality 175

Africa 170–1, 172–3, 174, 176–7

China 12, 20, 21–3, 26

Germany 191

Israel 81–2, 85

United Kingdom 231–3

First Intifada (1987–93) 74, 90

flooding 133–6

Foreign Affairs magazine 205–6, 246–7

foreign aid budgets 250

France 201–2, 203, 204–6, 211

Freedom Party, Austria 211

G

Gandhi, Indira 129

Gandhi, Mahatma 125, 147

Gandhi, Rajiv 129

gated communities 172–6

Gaza 74, 87–90, 245–6

General Law of Population (1974), Mexican 50

Gerges, Fawaz 78, 114

Germany

ageing population 201

Berlin Wall 1, 183–4, 185–6, 188–9, 192

East and West Germany 183–93

immigration 201, 207–11

Muslim population figures 204

right-wing parties 209–11

unification 189–93

Ghana 169, 176

Gleicke, Iris 209

globalization 4, 53, 170, 233, 249

‘Gold Star parents’, US 61

Good Friday Agreement (1998) 226–7

Goodhart, David 232–3

Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu, King 171

Gorbachev, Mikhail 1, 188

Graham, Lindsey 40

Great Depression 46

Great Firewall of China 27–33

Great Wall of China 12–16

Greece 2, 194, 199, 200–1, 205, 207

Green March, Moroccan 156

Green Zone, Baghdad 100–1, 243–4

Guizhou province, China 24

H

Hadith 113

Hadrian, Rod 40

Hadrian’s Wall 217–18, 219, 220–1

Hamas 78, 87–9, 91, 93

Han people 13–14, 17, 18, 19, 27

Handala 72

Haredi Jews 80, 81–4

Hari, Michael 41

Harkat-ul-Jihad al Islami 132

Heyer, Heather 64

Hezbollah 102

Himalayas 19, 134, 140

Hindus 125, 128–9, 131–2, 135, 145–50

Hollande, François 205

Honecker, Erich 188

Houphouët-Boigny, Félix 169

Houthis’ forces, Shia 104, 108

hukou system 24

Human Rights Watch 130

human settlement, early 4

Hungary 2, 188, 194, 199–200, 205, 207, 246

hunter-gatherers 2

Hussein, Saddam 101, 107, 109, 111

Hutus 166

I

ijtihad 113

immigration

within Africa 171–2

Egyptian–Israel border 78

European Union 194–6, 197–202, 205–6, 207–12, 246, 250–1

importance of integration 250–1

India 124–5, 126, 127, 128–32, 135, 248

Kuwait–Iraq border 110

Mexico 44–5, 50

‘open borders’ theory 246–9

United Kingdom 234–5

United States of America 41, 46–51, 56–7

Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) 46–7

independence movements, African 155–7, 164–5

India 19

Bangladesh border fence 2, 123–5, 130, 133

Bango Bhoomi theory 132–3

Bhutan and Nepal borders 140

caste system 145–9

Comprehensive Integrated Border Management System (CIBMS) 141–2

immigration 124–5, 126, 127, 128–32, 135

Kashmir – ‘Line of Control’ 141, 142, 143

Myanmar border and Naga tribes 138–40

Pakistan border 2, 140–3, 145

partition of 125–6, 127, 140, 141

religious divisions 125–6, 129, 131–3, 135, 145–9

unrest in Assam 128–30

India Pakistan Border Ground Rules Agreement (1960–61) 142

Initium Media 29

Inkatha Freedom Party 168

Inner Mongolia 17

International Court of Justice (ICJ) 167–8

International Organization for Migration 134–5

internet 5, 27–33, 112, 113

Iran 2, 6, 102, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 116, 144

Iran–Iraq War 5

Iraq 2, 42, 100–1, 103–4, 107–8, 109–10, 111, 116, 246

Iraq War (2003–11) 100–1, 109, 116

Iraqi Kurdistan 111

Ireland 229, 235

Iron Curtain 184, 186–7

Islam

in Africa 170

Dome of the Rock 82

ijtihad and the ‘closing of the Arab mind’ 113

in India 125–6, 129

integration in the EU 203–6

radical organizations 18, 51, 79, 101, 104, 105, 107, 114, 128, 137, 246

Sunni and Shia division 4, 5, 6, 102–3, 104–6, 107–8, 109, 115, 116, 144

Uighur Muslims 18

in the United Kingdom 204, 237–9

Islamic State (IS) 18, 79, 104, 105, 107, 114, 246

Israel 1, 6

Arab population 84–6

Bedouin community 85–6

Christian population 85

comparative stability 92–3

division amongst Jews 80–4

education 85

ethnic divides 79

financial inequality 81–2, 85

gender divisions 82–3

Israel Defense Force (IDF) 86

political divides 83

religious sites 82–3

Israel and Palestine 1, 6, 71–3

East Jerusalem 74

Gaza border 78, 245

history of borders dispute 73–4

Iron Dome anti-missile system 245–6

Israeli point of view 74, 76–8, 79, 84

Jewish settlements in the West Bank 74, 76

Palestinian point of view 74, 76, 78, 90–1

suicide bombers 76–7, 78, 245

two-state solution 77, 84, 88, 92

‘Walled Off Hotel’ 72–3

West Bank dividing wall 71–3, 74, 76–7

Italy 196, 197, 200, 201, 205

Ivory Coast 169

J

Jabotinsky, Ze’ev (Vladimir) 77–8

Jacobite army 220–1

Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen 132

James VI of Scotland and I of England, King 222

Japan 20

Jerusalem 74, 93

see also Western Wall

jihadist organizations 18, 51, 79, 101, 114, 115

see also Islam; Islamic State (IS); terrorism

Jinnah, Muhammad Ali 125

Jones, Reece 124, 133

Jordan 76, 91–2, 106–7

Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 175

Judt, Tony 197

Juncker, Jean-Claude 197

Jung, Carl 186

K

Karachi Agreement (1949) 142

Kashmir 141, 142, 143

Kassem, Suzy 95

Kenya 159, 165

Khan, Abdur Rahman 143

Khan, Humayun 61

Khan, Khizr and Ghazala 61

Khatun, Felani 124

Klein, Horst 186

Kohl, Helmut 188

Koran 113, 116

Kornbluth, David 77, 79, 84

Krenz, Egon 188

Kshatriyas 146

Kurdistan/Kurds 110–11

Kuwait 2, 106, 109–10

L

Labour Party, UK 233

Lagos, Nigeria 174

Lambert, Charles 205–6

Land and Maritime Boundary dispute 164–5, 167

Latin America 174

see also Mexico

Latvia 2, 198

Le Guin, Ursula K. 119

Le Monde newspaper 205

Le Pen, Marine 211

Lebanon 42, 91

Liberia 166

Libya 101, 106

Lincoln, Abraham 65

Lithuania 2, 198

Louisiana Purchase 43

Lu Wei 32–3

M

Macedonia 2, 200

Machel, Graça 173

Malik, Tashfeen 51

Manchuria 13–14, 17

Manusmriti 145–6

Mao Zedong 15, 18, 20–1

Marshall Plan 250

Mauritania 156

Maximus, General Magnus 219–20

McCain, John 61

Melilla 198–199

Merkel, Angela 192, 207, 210, 211

Mexican–American War 43, 45

Mexican Repatriation 46

Mexico 3, 43–54

Middle East

Arab minority groups 110–11, 116

attitude to Palestine 91–2

barrier building 99–100, 106–10

civil wars 104–5, 106–7, 108, 198

defensive city walls 99–100

development reports 112–13, 114–15

education 115

Green Zone, Baghdad 100–1

ijtihad 113

refugees 198

religious division 102–6, 107–8, 109, 115–16

terrorist threat 99–101, 103–4

‘Three Deficits’ 112–13

uniting Arabia 114–17

see also individual countries by name

migration see immigration Mimroth, P. L. 148–9

Modi, Narendra 132

Mombasa Republican Council 165

Mongolia 13–14

Moon Agreement 249

Moroccan Wall 155–6

Morocco 155–7, 167, 198–9

‘Mount Liupan’ (Mao Zedong) 15

Mozambique 171

Mughal dynasty 125

Muhammad, Prophet 102

MukaMunya gated community 172–3

Muslim Brotherhood (MB) 89

Muslims see Islam Myanmar 136–40, 144

N

Naga people 138–40

Nairobi 159

Narayanan, K. R. 148

Nation of Islam 64–5

nation states in Africa, colonialist creation of 157, 159, 161–3, 166–7, 177

National Front, French 205, 207, 211

National Rifle Association (NRA), US 53

nationalism 6, 193, 196–7, 206–11

Native American tribes 44, 54

Ndadaye, Melchior 166

Nepal 140, 144

Netherlands 207, 211

New Scientist 160

Nigeria 161–2, 164–6, 167–8, 169, 171–2, 174

Nkrumah, Kwame 151, 169

Nordic Union 196

North American Free Trade

Agreement (NAFTA) 50, 53–4

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 53

Northern Border Project, Saudi Arabia 107

Northern Ireland 226–9, 230, 237

Norway 200

Nowrasteh, Alex 51

Nusra Front 79

Nyerere, Julius 170

O

Obama, Barack 48–9, 53, 65–6

Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA) 227

Orbán, Viktor 199, 211

Orwell, George 240–1

Ottoman Empire 106

Outer Space Treaty 248–9

P

Pakistan 125–7, 130, 132

Afghanistan border 143–4

Indian border 2, 140–3, 145

Iran border 144

Palestine

border tunnels 89–90

Christian population 89

disillusionment with leadership 90–1

Egyptian border 89–90

Gaza 74, 87–90, 245–6

Hamas and Fatah 87–9, 91

Middle Eastern discrimination against 91–2

national identity 197

New Charter (2017) 88

West Bank 1, 6, 71–3, 74, 76–7, 90

see also Israel and Palestine

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 72

Palestinian Authority (PA) 87, 91

Paraguay 248

Party for Freedom, Dutch 211

Pashtuns 143–4

Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) 209–10

Pearce, Fred 160

People’s Daily newspaper 23

perestroika 188

Persian Safavid dynasty 106

see also Iran

Peru 174

Picts 220

Pinto, Lourenco 161

Poland 194, 205, 212, 235

Polisario Front (PF) 155, 156, 167

Portuguese explorers 160–1

Prohibition (1920–33) 46

Protestants and Catholics, Northern Irish 226–9

Provincial Houses of Traditional Leaders 168

Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) 227

Q

Qin dynasty 16

Qin Shi Huang 16, 33

Quesada, Vicente Fox 55

Question Time 231

R

Reagan, Ronald 1, 47

refugees 50–1

entering Europe 198–9, 202, 208

Syrian 106, 110

see also immigration

religious persecution 6, 128, 131–2, 135, 136–7

see also Islam; Israel and Palestine

Republic of Biafra 166

right-wing parties, extreme 64, 203, 206–7, 209, 250

Road to Somewhere (D. Goodhart) 232–3

Robert the Bruce 222

Robinson, Henry 227, 228

Robinson, Peter 228

Rohingya people 136–7

Roman Empire 217–20

Rozoff, James 213

Russia 2, 198, 200

Rwanda 166

S

Sadat, Anwar 117

Safavid dynasty 106

Sahrawi Arab Democratic

Republic 155–6, 177

Salman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin 113–14

San Bernardino terrorist attacks 51

Saudi Arabia 6, 42, 104, 105, 115, 116

building barriers 42, 106, 107–8, 246

internal divisions 108–9

reforms initiated by royal family 113–14

Scandinavia 196

Schabowski, Günter 189

Scioli, Mike 48

Scotland 196–7, 219, 220

Gaelic language 223

independence referendum (2014) 223–4

relationship with England 222–4, 225–6, 229–30

Scottish parliament 223–4

Scotland Act (1998) 223

Scotland Act (2016) 224

Scottish National Party (SNP) 224

Second Intifada 74

Second Temple, Israel 82–3

Second World War 46, 250

Senegal 165

Sephardi Jews 80, 83

Serbia 2, 199

Shia Islam 4, 5, 6, 102–3, 104–6, 108, 109, 115, 116, 144

Shudras 146

Siachen Glacier 143

Silk Route 14

Singh, Maharaja Hari 141

Single European Act (1986) 194

Six-Day War 64

slavery 45, 59–60

Slovenia 2, 200

smartphones in China 30

Smith, Nathan 246–7

smuggling across borders 46, 51–2, 89–90

social media 4, 28, 29, 30, 51

Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, UK 231

Socialist Unity Party, East

Germany 184–5

South Africa 168, 171–2, 173

South Sudan 165

Soviet Union 1, 184, 194

space, ownership of outer 248–9

space race 185

Spain 43–4, 156, 167, 197, 198–9

Sri Lanka 126

Stasi 188

Strelczyk, Hans 186

Sungbo’s Eredo 162

Sunni Islam 4, 5, 6, 102, 103, 104–6, 107–8, 109, 113, 115, 116, 144

Sweden 2, 200, 204, 207, 235

Switzerland 202

Syria 42, 79, 92, 101, 105, 106–7, 110, 111, 116

Syrian–Israel border wall 78–9

T

Taliban 143–4

Tanganyika 170

Tanzania 170

terrorism

Bango Bhoomi theory 132–3

in Europe 200, 201, 205

in the Middle East 99–101, 103–4

radical Islam 18, 51, 79, 101, 104, 105, 107, 114, 115, 128, 137

Uighur people of China 18

United States of America 50–1

see also Hamas; Islamic State (IS)

Texas 43–5, 52

Texas–Mexico Automotive SuperCluster Region 52

Tibet 17, 19, 29, 126

Tohono O’odham nation 54

‘Tortilla Curtain’ 47

trade and industry

China 18, 20–1, 30–1, 33

United States of America 52–3

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) 43, 45

tribalism, African 6, 157–8

Tripathi, Sanjeev 131

True Story of Ah Q (Lu Xun) 22

Trump, Donald 3, 6, 39–41, 43, 50, 51, 52–7, 61, 64, 93, 210

see also United States of America

Tunisia 101, 106

Turkey 106, 110, 111, 199, 208, 244

Tutsis 166

2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 3

U

Uighur people 17–18, 29

Ukrainian–Russian conflict 198

UNICEF 104

Unionists and Nationalists see Northern Ireland

United Kingdom

‘Anywheres and Somewheres’ 232–3

Brexit 6, 196, 222, 226, 229, 231, 232

class division 231–3

colonialism and colonial guilt 161–2, 163, 240–1

Cornish nationalists 225

education 231

Hadrian’s Wall 217–18, 219, 220–1

immigration 234–6

multiculturalism and integration 238–40

Muslim population 204, 237–9

Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics 226–8

relations between England and Northern Ireland 226–7, 229, 231

relations between England and Scotland 222–4, 225–6, 229, 231

relations between England and Wales 224–5

religion 226–8, 236–9

Roman invasion 217–20

United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) 196

United Nations (UN) 109–10, 112, 114–15, 130, 136, 137, 167, 169, 172, 175–6, 248–9

United States of America 3, 6

black population 58–60

border protection agencies 40, 46, 47, 48

broadening political divide 62–3, 65

citizens rights and equality 41–2

Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) 107

education 58–9, 63–4

gated communities 173–4

Hispanic population 42–3, 56, 57

immigration 41, 46–51

Iraq War (2003–11) 100–1, 109

Marshall Plan 250

race relations/inequality 6, 56–61, 63–5

religious diversity 60

Republicans 6, 40, 50, 62

smuggling 46, 51–2

student extremism 63–4

terrorism 50–1

trade and industry 52–3

Trump’s border wall plan 39–41, 42, 43, 50, 53

US–Mexico border 43–52, 53–5

white supremacists and black separatists 64–5

Untouchables/Dalits, Indian 146–9

V

Vaishyas 146

Vanguard newspaper 167–8

Varosha, Cyprus 244

virtual private networks (VPN) 28, 29

Visegard Group 196

W

Wade, Field Marshal George 220–1

Wales 219, 224–5

‘Wall Disease’ – Mauerkrankheit 186

‘Wall of Shame’, Moroccan 155–6

‘Walled Off Hotel’, West Bank 72–3

Washington Post 31

Weinstein, Bret 63–4

West Bank 71–3, 74, 76–7, 90, 91

see also Israel and Palestine

West Germany 183, 184–5, 186, 188–9, 190–1

Western Sahara 155–7, 167

Western Wall, Israel 82–3

Wetzel, Gunter 186

Wilson, Harold 233

Women of the Wall (WOW) 82–3

World Bank 170–1

The World is Flat (T. Friedman) 4

X

Xhosa tribe 168

Xi Jinping 7, 11–12, 18, 31–2

Xia dynasty 24

Xinjiang region 13–14, 17–18, 29

Y

Yemen 101, 104, 108

Yugoslavia 193

Z

Zanzibar 170

Zarqawi, Abu Musab al 244

Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince Mohammed bin 114

‘Zhao family’ 22

Zimbabwe 171

Zuckerberg, Mark 4

Zulu tribe 168, 171

First published 2018 by

Elliott and Thompson Limited

27 John Street

London WC1N 2BX

www.eandtbooks.com

eBook ISBN: 978-1-78396-343-0

MOBI: 978-1-78396-344-7

Copyright © Tim Marshall 2018

The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Picture credits:

Pages 8–9: iStock.com/real444; pages 36–7: Herika Martinez/AFP/Getty Images; pages 68–9: iStock.com/Joel Carillet; pages 96–7: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/Stringer/ Getty Images; pages 120–21: STRDEL/AFP/Getty Images; pages 152–3: Stefano Montesi/Corbis News/Getty Images; pages 180–81: The Washington Post/Getty Images; pages 214–15: Epics/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Maps: JP Map Graphics Ltd

Sources for maps: Pages 17 and 22: The Economist/2010 China census; page 44: Openstreetmap.org; page 57: Pew Research Center; pages 104–5: CRS, Pew Research Center, CIA World Factbook; page 134: Diercke International Atlas; page 163: John Bartholomew & Co; page 230: BBC.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typesetting: Marie Doherty

Cover design by davidwardle.co.uk

Table of Contents

Title

Contents

Introduction

1 China

2 USA

3 Israel and Palestine

4 The Middle East

5 The Indian Subcontinent

6 Africa

7 Europe

8 UK

Conclusion

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

Copyright