A couple of weeks ago Donald Trump said in an interview that he thought Nato was ‘obsolete’. It’s early days yet for us to know exactly what he meant. Obsolete or not, it is certainly ironic in at least one way. The people who in 1989 wept as they tore chunks off the Berlin Wall now find themselves in a military alliance with a country that is about to put up its own unspeakable version.
Trump’s case for the wall is that it will put an end to drug trafficking and undocumented migration across the border. As he put it in a typical sleight, “a nation without borders is not a nation”. True, except borders and walls are different species. The main point about national borders is that they establish the limits of sovereignty.
They are also expected to put in place some measure of control. Typically, this happens in fuzzy and uncertain ways. In this case, it is unlikely that the wall will be of tangible consequence. It’s common knowledge that a good chunk of drug trafficking to the US rides in the backs of the millions of trucks that cross the border every year – at regular checkpoints.
The image of columns of parched Mexicans hobbling across the desert to El Dorado is equally flawed. In fact, very many of the Mexicans who live and work irregularly in the US got there through paperwork, in the main part through visa overstaying; nothing that any wall could ever do anything to, in other words.
With respect to basic function, therefore, this wall is flawed. It follows that it is elsewhere we must look if we are to understand its logic. The two cues are history, and Trump’s own biography.
The work of architectural historian Simon Pepper provides a useful point of departure. In Renaissance Europe, walls were strongly associated with sovereignty and the liberties of free cities. They were anything but purely functional. Rather, they served a constitutional purpose as the line that divided the status of the city from that of the faubourg (suburb).
Fortresses were another matter altogether. Beyond their basic defensive storyline, they symbolised the authority of princely or imperial power. Tellingly, princes were in the habit of being portrayed holding plans and sketches for fortifications. Towers, gates and such were standard fare in heraldry and princely pageantry.
There was a twist, however.
While walls meant free cities, fortresses could not entirely escape the shadow of oppression and despotic rule. It was the often-misunderstood Macchiavelli who cautioned against fortresses as both provocative and useless.
Trump’s America-made-great-again is a gated community writ large. It is a fortress, an island of privilege and paranoia afloat on a sea of imagined subordinates and enemies
It is always risky to leapfrog across the centuries. Still, what I see taking shape in Trump’s mind, and soon along the US-Mexico border, is not a wall. It does not follow the logic of civic sovereignty and freedom. Rather, what we have here is a fortress born of the grand gesture. The best evidence is the paranoia that thoroughly underwrites Trump’s rhetoric. Put simply, Trump’s America is a barnacle.
No wonder the Mexican government is so incensed. Mexico’s predicament today is not too different to that of Perugia in the 1540s, when Pope Paul III built the Rocca Paolina as an aggressive act of domination over the city.
The notion of the fortress invites a further spot of leapfrogging. A couple of decades ago someone coined the term ‘fortress America’ to describe the mushrooming of so-called ‘gated communities’ across that country. Physically, gated communities are residential areas (clusters of apartment blocks, in many cases) that are surrounded by walls or fences. The contraptions of fortification also include CCTV, security guards, swipe cards, and so on.
Like Renaissance fortresses, gated communities come with their own inescapable shadow. On the one hand, people will live where and how they choose to – if they see fit to turn their homes into bunkers, so be it.
On the other, gated communities tell a story of urban dysfunctionality. Their spread implies that groups of people have all but given up on the principles of civic coexistence, and have chosen instead to seal themselves off into little enclaves. In the US, as well as in India, South Africa and many Latin American countries, property developers are fond of a neat little ploy: they convince people that life in the rest of the city is nasty, brutish and short.
Enter Trump, who happens to have spent the first 50 years of his working life selling real estate, in a market where the gated community is king. Walls, enclaves, fences and the million other devices of fortification are to Trump what leather, awls and soles are to a cobbler.
Trump’s America-made-great-again is a gated community writ large. It is a fortress, an island of privilege and paranoia afloat on a sea of imagined subordinates and enemies.
The snag is that neither Renaissance nor real-estate fortresses work quite as intended. The former invariably fall or become obsolete, and neither kind can survive without the very thing it tries to keep out. In India, the walls that surround gated communities also serve as the back walls of makeshift huts. The poor, whose cheap labour serves the gated few very well, survive crammed in those huts.
Civic order and the liberties of the free city will always prevail over the Trumps and Paul IIIs. The sad part of the story is that very many people will suffer in the process. There was a time when the people of Berlin wrote letters to the East. One can only hope they will now write the same to the West.
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