Donald trump wants to surround US with a wall. The border will come back on this point. Trump is not the only one who wants to regain control over its borders, and Yle decided to find out why now so fashionable to build walls.
The President of the United States Donald trump ordered to build a wall between USA and Mexico. If trump decides that the wall should stretch along the entire border, then its length will be three thousand kilometers. That’s about as distance from Helsinki to the capital of Syria of Damascus. Very long wall.
But why bother to build a wall? According to the religious scholar Tuomas Martikainen (Tuomas Martikainen), Director of the Institute of migration in Turku, from a purely historical point of view the wall was built to protect the population from wild animals and people.
“A purely historical walls gave people the opportunity to better defend themselves. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. People are in fact very creative in terms of overcoming all kinds of walls,” he says.
According to Tuomas, the walls can have the opposite effect.
“Walls prevent people to move freely, which causes dissatisfaction of those who remained outside if they want to get inside,” he says.
Tuomas believes that the Barrier Israel is a good example of how the walls only provoke people to move through them.
“Initially, it provided some peace of mind, as walls usually work during the conflict. But in the long term it did not solve any problems,” he says.
So the walls belong to a bygone era?
Even the commandment to build a wall sounds seem a bit old-fashioned. Come to mind, for example, the Great wall of China, Hadrian’s wall, the Berlin wall and so on. But the fact is that Europe now is just doing it plans and builds walls.
“It is important to remember that the wall art does not necessarily look as before,” says Tuomas.
According to the Swedish TV channel SVT, since the beginning of 2015 in the country started the construction of at least seven new fences. Our neighbour Norway just installed a two-hundred-meter fence of barbed wire along the border with Russia. Hungary also built the famous wall. Britain thought it wise to build a wall in Calais.
Obviously, this migration crisis led to the creation of all these walls around Europe.
“We live in insecure and unsafe time and the world is changing very quickly. Walls and the like is a way to create a sense of confidence. But now this feeling is created at the expense of others,” says Tuomas.
