Last week, two men were photographed in deep contemplation of their mobile phones. The matter would have stopped there, had they not been policemen on fully-armed and black-clad security duty at the airport. But they were, and they’re in deep trouble.

Now I don’t think it’s a terribly good idea for any police officer on duty anywhere to renounce the outside world for the spiritual dividends of Facebook. My point in what follows is that, unfortunately for those two, the matter goes well beyond a simple lapse in duty.

It’s quite astonishing to think of the extent to which airports require us to surrender our freedom. We’re herded into line and made to take half our clothes off. We watch helplessly as complete strangers rummage through our personal belongings, even as we hope they will limit their groping to our hand luggage. We are expected to appear meek and obeisant throughout. To ask ‘Why?’ or ‘Why me?’ would be an act of high treason.

The paradox is that the point of all this is to keep us safe from people who, if they had their way, would rob us of our freedom. Except airport security is a kind of Sharia law unto itself. The only reason we tolerate it is that we have learnt to do so.

The circumstances of that education concerns our two hapless police officers directly. Airports are not normal places. Rather, they are among the prime sites where the contemporary world order is produced and displayed, and re-enacted on continuous loop. That also means they are of high symbolic value.

By ‘world order’ I mean various things. Take nationality and citizenship. Airports require us to have our passports ready at all times. We expect these passports to be checked and re-checked as we proceed through the various ‘desks’ and ‘gates’.

People without a passport have no business to be anywhere near an airport. That aspect of the world order known as citizenship (of a nation State) is a necessary condition of being there, and it is so in a spectacular manner.

The second facet of the world order that airports enact is that of the global economy and its mantra of total mobility. It is not surprising that Malta got its glittering new terminal in 1992, a few years into the transition from a barnacled protectionist economy to a promiscuous market one.

Airports have, or should have, a cosmopolitan aura about them. Until recently, Maltese people who didn’t get to travel much sometimes spent their Sunday afternoons at the airport, armed with thermos flasks and sandwiches. I don’t blame them, because that was as close as they got to the world out there, so to say.

It’s quite astonishing to think of the extent to which airports require us to surrender our freedom

There are some historical comparisons to be drawn. A hundred years ago, a buzzing railway station was the surest sign that a city belonged to the modern world. The point was brought home to travellers in no uncertain terms – Victoria (now Chhatrapati Shivaji) station in Mumbai was built in the year of the Golden Jubilee and is as understated as a bundle of six cathedrals.

The focal point of the symbolism is the arrival and departures board. The number of platforms, the frequency of trains, and the range of origins and destinations double as a display of the city’s worth. Likewise, to say that the Malta airport has experienced an increase in aircraft movements is to make a point about the country’s place in the world economy.

Which brings me to terrorism. It was said of the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ that it was a war obsessed with aeroplanes and airports. In part this was a result of Al Qaeda’s choice of weapon on the day. More broadly, it tapped into the value of airports as the symbolic hubs of a US-led political and economic hegemony.

The war on terror was not a clash between civilisation and barbarity, but rather one between two forms of power, both of which could be and often were lethal. Certainly the US-led one produced its fair share of war and casualties and viciousness.

My point, however, is not to rant against the US. (I still believe, probably rather obstinately, that it is the land of the freest.) Rather, it is that airport security functioned as a spectacle of its power.

Cut to the present, and to the fact that Islamic State’s penchant for filmed beheadings, heritage devastation and shooting sprees in random public places somewhat eclipsed airports. Until last week, that is, when 17 people were killed and 81 injured at Zaventem.

As I write, the airport is still closed. The airport police are on strike over what they deem to be insufficient security measures. They are insisting that metal detectors, body scanners and X-ray machines should be set up to screen people before they are even allowed into terminals. The counter-argument, and the reason for the strike, is that such measures would simply displace the security risk by a few metres, as people queued up outside the buildings.

The roots of the dispute draw on the symbolism of airport security. The police are right in implying that it is that very symbolism that makes airports so especially attractive as targets. Their argument is that air travel, and the world order it enables and displays, needs X-ray machines as much as it does passports and aircraft.

That is why the image of two police officers at the airport, fully armed and in black uniforms (the war on terror flies a black flag), their heads buried in their mobile phones, is such a disturbing one. It flies in the face of the education that teaches us that airports are unfree and vicious theatres where power clashes are ritually and routinely acted out.

(Note: This piece borrows on some of the ideas discussed in Mika Aaltola’s article ‘The international airport: The hub-and-spoke of the American empire’, which was published in the journal Global Networks in 2005.)

mafalzon@hotmail.com

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