Volume 13, Issue 3 - Editors’ Forum: Borders Thirty Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Guest-edited by Pier Paolo Frassinelli and Melissa Tandiwe Myambo

November 9, 2019 marked the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the physical and geopolitical barrier that divided Berlin and the East from the West. This event symbolically inaugurated the period of post-Cold War globalization. The birth of the World Wide Web that same year spurred on globalization and led many observers to believe that (national) borders had become passé. The zeitgeist seemed to promise a borderless world in which capitalism and democracy would flourish. However, instead, the last three decades have paradoxically borne witness to the proliferation, rescaling, and reinforcement of territorial and other types of borders – linguistic, religious, ethnic, class, racial, urban, cultural, digital, temporal etc. The contemporary preoccupation with borders and walls is the result of the “deglobalization” that is also, ironically, a global phenomenon – Brexit, Trump’s border wall, Israel’s concrete wall in the West Bank, xenophobia from South Africa to India to “Fortress Europe,” and the growing power of right wing authoritarian leaders in several nations. The resurgence of (ethno)nationalism, racism, white supremacy, isolationism, populism, protectionism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and religious fundamentalism are all dialectical consequences of this global backlash. This is the subject of this special issue.

Thirty years after the fall the Berlin wall, political walls in Europe, Israel and the United States safeguard divisions that are based on the defensive projection and protection of besieged “whiteness.” These new barriers take the shape of impassable fences, brick walls, barbed wire barricades, and precarious crossings, negotiating physical and imaginary boundaries. Reworking colonial power structures, contemporary walls are tethered to imperial fantasies that produce whiteness as the insidious marker of religious, economic and racial hierarchies. Notably, these walls sustain an intricate dynamic between visibility and invisibility, ensuring the proliferation of the borderless civilized West (so long as the other remains excluded and hidden from view). At the same time, political walls circumscribe the affective and expansive force-field of whiteness, revealing its enduring efficacy. In this article I look at the recent fortification of fortress Europe, Israel’s escalating security fence and Donald Trump’s promised wall in the US in order to discuss the ways in which the material and ideological walls reappearing around the world are animated by myriad defenses of toxic vulnerability and white affect.

2016 is likely to be recalled – in Europe, at least – as a temporal bordering, after a majority in the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. The “Brexit” referendum result has been pinned on the rise of populist politics and the revenge of so-called “left behind” places. Regardless of reasons, the referendum left the UK with fraught politics and protracted negotiations, especially over how to re-border with a Europe that has held the dismantling of borders at the heart of its philosophical project. While Brexit has already become a byword, an earlier referendum on British borders has long slipped from international note. In 1997, a majority in Wales (one of the four constituent countries of the UK), voted for devolution from central government in Westminster. Like the Brexit referendum twenty years later, the majority in favor of devolution was slight, exposing uneasy fractures and internal cleavages as it opened fresh questions of governance and geography. By attending to a small country at the periphery of Europe, we seek to destabilize the assumption of shared markers of global bordering (1989, 2001), revealing instead the palimpsests of identity and territoriality across which re-made borders run “all over.”

The African borders established in Berlin in 1884–85, at the peak of Cecil John Rhodes’ South African ambitions, were functional to the main five colonial-imperial powers, but certainly not to African societies then, nor to future generations. The residues of Rhodes’ settler-colonial racism and extractive-oriented looting include major cities such as Johannesburg, which are witnessing worse inequality and desperation, even a quarter of a century after apartheid fell in 1994. In South Africa’s financial capital, Johannesburg, a combination of post-apartheid neoliberalism and regional subimperial hegemony amplified xenophobic tendencies to the boiling point in 2019. Not only could University of Cape Town students tear down the hated campus statue of Rhodes, but the vestiges of his ethnic divide-and-conquer power could be swept aside. Rhodes did “fall,” in March 2015, but the South African working class and opportunistic politicians took no notice of the symbolic act, and instead began to raise Rhodes’ border walls ever higher, through ever more violent xenophobic outbreaks. Ending the populist predilection towards xenophobia will require more fundamental changes to the inherited political economy, so that the deep structural reasons for xenophobia are ripped out as convincingly as were the studs holding down Rhodes’ Cape Town statue.

The Berlin Wall was breached as Namibia’s first democratic election was being conducted. It is therefore wrong to say that the fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in Namibia’s independence. That independence was on track when the Wall fell. But the fall of the Wall, and the associated collapse of the state socialist regimes of Eastern Europe, had significant consequences for the form of independence that emerged in Namibia in 1990.

Claims have been made that the advent of social media and its assumed ability to fuel social strife and organize anti-government protests has empowered people around the world to successfully challenge repressive authorities. However, in an era in which several issues ranging from digital colonialism to digital exclusion among other challenges, have become so dominant, it is our role as researchers to question some of these claims especially when they seem unsubstantiated. Sharing or finding solidarity is something that can be done on social media platforms but nothing is as critical as being part of the digital community. In that regard, questions surrounding digital exclusion are critical especially when discussing the extent to which social media influences democracy, questions that several scholars from every corner of the world are currently seized with. In this article, we not only identify social media’s potential but we also probe problems associated with beliefs that digital networks have the capacity to support democratization. Contemporary societies should be asking what the real gains of the fall of the Berlin Wall are in the work of these fundamental digital shifts, which have left both negative and positive outcomes on all countries including established Western democracies.

Although the Person of Indian Origin (PIO) and Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) schemes have existed for some time, they began to serve a political and economic purpose for the Republic of India with the arrival of the twenty-first century. The OCI status asserts “Indianness” as a legible quality in diasporic memory. It does the work of cementing political Indo-Pakistani and Indo-Bangladeshi borders, while coopting the language of transnationalism to bolster the fundamentally nationalist regime of capitalism at work in the Republic of India. The goal of this regime is to promote a functionally nationalist, and thus, anti-transnational reality. As more generations of South Asians live and grow up abroad, creating a legible “Indianness” functions as a service to the capitalist Indian economy. These individuals abroad are encouraged to identify as diasporic “Indians” who must engage with their “motherland.” Thus, the transnationalist discourse of decreasing territoriality is exploited by the Indian state to serve goals that function in ideological opposition to transnationalism. As this discourse of legible “Indianness” becomes more successful, there will be increasing incentives for the ruling party in India to further privilege OCIs. In the end, the language and capital of the OCIs affirms the powers of capitalism contemporary Indian nation-state.

Zoning codes dramatically impact every community they touch. Ostensibly, these ordinances are meant to impose some collectively determined order on our built environments. In practice, they often draw lines in the sand that distribute power unevenly between residents. As home to the U.S.’ second largest homeless population, Los Angeles is but a stark example of the widespread housing crisis hitting many cities around the globe. In the 1970s, this is where the city drew borders around its Skid Row and consolidated social services in a bid to contain homelessness within the region’s urban core. As part of a an ambitious initiative launched in 2013, the city is now updating the zoning codes across its downtown area, a move that is prompting a vigorous debate over the role of municipal ordinances in codifying market-driven approaches to neighborhood revitalization. This interview engages with the Janus face of borders as inclusionary and exclusionary, asking: through what mechanisms – subtle and overt – do zoning codes dictate the shape of our private and communal spaces? And how can communities stake out their turf among competing value systems?

In 2018, amid US president Donald Trump’s ongoing calls to “build the wall” along the US-Mexico border, protestors in the Mexican border city of Tijuana took up his incendiary rhetoric and turned it against the caravans of Central Americans on their way to seek asylum in the United States. This essay explores the deeper logics of recent anti-migrant sentiment in Mexico by unpacking a promotional video that was popular there during Trump’s campaign. Though the video ostensibly controverts Trump’s call to “build the wall,” I argue, it ultimately reinforces an underlying distinction between the “we” it convokes and the undocumented labor migrant to the United States. The essay thus seeks the roots of contemporary Mexican xenophobia in older dynamics of class distinction within Mexico. Tijuana, finally, helps grasp how the border exacerbates these dynamics, and why US racism can make distinctions among Mexicans and among Latin Americans fiercer and more pernicious.