If
borders are nothing but abstract lines denoting the edges of jurisdictions,
barriers make them concrete. With the complete mechanization of
warfare in the twentieth century, and the relatively symmetrical
power maintained across borders between similarly armed national
and allied armies, defense was conceptualized no longer as a local
practice, such as city walls and country forts, but as immense
linear constructions amassed along the edges of the national space.
Borders were initially fortified to control the movement of armies,
but later used to regulate the movement of goods, labor, information,
wealth, and diseases into the body of the state.
The
trenches of the First World War were barriers on a continental
scale, stretched along hundreds of kilometers. They proved that
shovels and barbed wires could become strategic weapons capable
of indefinitely paralyzing the movement of two opposing coalition
armies. The post-WWI strategic doctrine that relied heavily on
the principles of linear defense solidified into three major fortification
systems – two were built along the volatile German-French border.
The German West Wall was designed to hold off the French
Army while the Wehrmacht was to occupy territories on the east.
Parallel to it from the west was laid the French Maginot Line,
designed to delay the Wehrmacht’s westward Blitzkrieg while
French reserves are drafted, and lastly the German Atlantic
Wall, designed to defeat an Allied invasion of the continent
along the Atlantic coast. With the increase in the ability of
armies for rapid maneuver, concentration of forces, and air-ground
integration, these lines were easily by-passed or pierced through.
Their surprise collapse turned them into giant archaeological
monuments to the absurdity of standing still in battle, and to
the belief in eternal territorial control. The last of the fortified
lines to have gone the path of a fantasy of eternal defense, and
then to collapse, was the Israeli Bar-Lev Line, built on
the eastern bank of the Suez Canal. The 1973 Arab Israeli War
– the last symmetrical battle to be fought between state armies
of relatively equal force – saw the collapse of this last fortified
line of defense. With the later “peaceful” collapse of the Iron
Curtain, and the end of the symmetrical military balance, another
political space – the frontier – and another type of military
engagement – the low intensity non-symmetrical conflict between
regular armies and quasi-military guerrilla organizations in dense
civilian environments has gradually staged its return.
The frontier is the antithetical
political space to that defined by the fortified lines of borders.
Against the geographical symmetry of static places, and the balance
across sovereign lines, the frontier is a space of flow – it is
a military and political pattern of elastic and shifting geography,
a boundless border zone that could never be represented by drawing
static lines.
In the following pages some
geographical principles – parallels between varieties of historical
frontiers – will be briefly outlined. Historical frontiers are
different in many respects but the similar patterns they exhibit
may help explain the consequences and dangers of the open frontiers
of contemporary geopolitics.
Despite the common perception,
the frontier did not originate with the expansion of the neo-Europes
of America, Australia, or Africa.
The margins of the ancient Roman and Chinese Empires, as
well as those of the Aztecs and the Inca, were deep, shifting,
and little-defined domains of cross-culture interaction and brutal
battles with people defined since Roman times as “barbarians.”
Barbarians were not an amalgamation of primitive warriors, as
common language wants us to believe, but often highly organized
and cultured, settler, or semi-nomadic nations. Zones of imperial
control expanded not only through the conquest, occupation, and
annihilation of the “barbarians,” but as well through their “acculturation”
under a single language, culture, and religion, that is, through
the flattening of differences and the melting of their “foreign”
cultures into the social and economic pots of empires. [i]
But the frontier is never only a single-track
process of expansion. It retreats when the strength of the empire
declines. In Rome of the
fourth and fifth centuries, the by-then “barbarized” imperial
army, almost completely manned by mercenaries, started to lose
battles to more highly motivated, better organized, largely “Romanized”
barbarians. [ii]
On both sides of the battle lines were people
not very different. In various periods throughout history and
indeed still at present some of the (domesticated) colonized collaborate
with the forces suppressing their own people.
In both its advance or retreat,
frontier zones are at the edges of waves pushing towards (each
period’s) fantasies of richness and opportunities, or, in modern
terms, being pulled by utopian visions of ideological fulfillment
whose eccentricity often found no place at the center (think of
the occult traditions of Templar knights developed during the
Crusades, the Amish in America, and the contemporary mystical
rituals, often involving the use of drugs, of some of the “youth
of the hills” in today’s West Bank outposts [iii]
) .
The pattern of the frontier’s
geographical expansion is highly irregular. It shifts with changing
climate, geology, and technological possibilities: pouring wide
across pastoral steppe grasslands in an attempt to grab and fence
out large fields; following the narrow and splintering arteries
of geological strata; tracing ridges of metal and mineral concentrations
above ground in workers camps, towns, and cities; or occupying
geographical “islands” above isolated fields of energy resources.
Often the pattern of inhabitation across the frontier draws a
direct diagram not only of the balance of power between “empire”
and “barbarians,” but the economical and technological capacity
and the social organization of the “empire” itself.
Territorial pockets of control
are thus in constant expansion or contraction, temporary lines
of engagements and confrontations, marked by local makeshift boundaries
and field defenses, are not limited to the edges of the imperial
space but exist throughout its territorial body, describing the
momentary balance of economical efficiency and military might.
If sovereign borders are linear and fixed – the frontier is a
deep, fragmented and elastic space in which clear distinctions
between an “inside” and “outside” of a political system cannot
be easily marked. The splintered geography folds inwards from
the edge of the territory to empire’s very interior. Like in a
fractal arrangement, frontier conditions can be found to various
degrees, wherever one looks at an empire. The “barbarians” are
never organized behind fixed lines, but are already deeply inside.
The border is everywhere, around every public and private property
and infrastructure, splintered into a variety of local or regional
fortification and security apparatuses, that are exemplified in
today’s road-blocks, check-points, fences, walls, CCTV systems,
safety zones, mine fields, and killing zones.
The military geometry of
the frontier relies, in all cases, on an elaborate interaction
between points and lines. A series of relatively autonomous forts,
scattered across the periphery, provides an intricate matrix of
control over the whole terrain. Strongholds are often military
colonies inhabited by civilianized veteran/soldiers (like Roman
legionaries, or medieval knights) who are given land rights in
return for fulfilling the task of frontier management and defense.
These isolated settler/forts are equipped to suppress small disturbances,
and located so as to be able to act as bridgeheads from which
larger concentrated action into “barbarian” territory could be
assembled. An interwoven and expanding network of communication
and transportation lines is laid out to connect between the fortified
points themselves and the empire’s centers. The lines of communication
and transportation are the wedges that open an alien terrain for
further colonization, enabling larger populations to migrate and
populate the settlement-points. The paths of the communication
lines often double up as effective barriers that honeycomb local
populations into isolated enclaves of limited habitat.
The use of rivers is indicative
of the difference between frontier and border geographies. For
states, rivers (the Oder/Neisse between Germany and Poland, the
Amur/Heilong Jiang between Russia and China, the Jordan between
Israel, the occupied West Bank and the Kingdom of Jordan [iv]
) are perfect borders marking the edge of territories,
while in frontier conditions, rivers such as the Rhine and Danube
for the Roman empire, the Chang Jiang for the Chinese empire,
or the Mississippi river for the American frontier are but dynamic
transportation, communication, and patrol networks running through
the body of the terrain, lined from the banks by commercial/military
strongholds.
The points and the lines
are interdependent. The distribution of settlement-points across
the frontier calls for a complex set of lines to connect them,
while the safety of movement along the lines depends on the strong-points
placed to protect them. As such the frontier resembles a dynamic
battlefield played out in slow motion. It regularly shifts from
offensive expansion – seeking the temporary occupation of new
strategic points and securing the lines of supply to them – to
defensive organization designed to protect the territorial gains
from counter-offensives.
The forward frontier post
(the legionary Roman fortresses, the Chinese steppe-forts, the
crusaders’ castles, the fortified peripheral settlements of the
Conquistadors, or the suburban settlers’ outposts on the West
Bank) and the communication lines (the paved roads of the Roman
empire, the mountain passes of the crusaders, the railway and
the telegraph of the American West, and the bypass highways of
the West Bank) serving for occupation defense and economic production,
are instruments merging military and civilian architecture.
In his 1893 lecture, “The
Significance of the Frontier in American History,” [v]
the historian Frederick J. Turner announced
the closing of the American frontier – complete interior colonization
and domestication of North America coast to coast – and claimed
that American democracy would not develop the way it had so far
without incorporating into the national character some of the
rough and ragged characteristics of frontier individuality and
the values of “personal freedom.” The frontier was seen as a liberating
experience from the stifling European culture and the urbanized
east cost. "What the Mediterranean Sea was to the
Greeks, breaking the bonds of custom, offering new experiences,
calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the
ever retreating frontier has been to the United States,” he claimed. [vi]
The qualities of liberty and autonomy, as well
as those of intolerance to law, order, and all things urbane,
were typical of attitudes that developed in isolated frontier
forts and settlements. On these characteristics, in a later echo
Negri and Hardt claimed that “the open space of the frontier became
the conceptual terrain of republican democracy.” [vii]
There were other frontier
myths and characteristics. From the refugees of the seventeenth
century religious wars who left Europe to build their utopias
in the new world, through to nineteenth-century survivors of plagues,
pogroms, and famines, to the twentieth-century survivors of totalitarianism
(to the twenty-first-century victims of terror?) – the people
of the modern frontiers nourish myths of regeneration and triumph
to contrast with histories and narratives of victimization and
persecution. [viii]
Recurring frontier myths tell of the fragile
“immigrant” hardened into a “native,” transgressing the limit
between civilization and the wilderness, combating barbaric forces,
gaining his right to settlement in the destruction of local “evil”
forces, and finally becoming something of the “natives” just destroyed.
Examples for this phenomenon are common and varied: the American
pioneer admiration of the very nobility and unspoiled “savageness”
of the native American nations he had helped destroy, his wearing
of furs and pretences for scouting and camouflage; the common
images of the Englishman wearing local costumes turning into a
“native” hero; the Israeli outpost settler discontent with and
rejection of the suburban culture of his parents and retreating
into pastoral cana’aisation that is simultaneously both Arab-inspired
and fiercely anti-Arab in sentiment… etc.
The brutality necessary for
the pacification and domestication of the frontier cannot be accommodated
within the legal frame of the modern state. Frontier wars are
not won before the enemy is either annihilated or domesticated
to become an imperfect mimicked clone of his colonizer. [ix]
No truces are permanent and no stable lines
can ever be agreed upon across the fragmented geographies, until
unconditional victory has been reached.
When criticized for its brutality,
an expansionist power may claim it lacked effective mechanisms
to enforce its own laws on the periphery of its territory, or
claim that brutal and illegal actions carried out by its agents
are grave exceptions that do not reflect on the rule; but often
enough, it profits, in psychological effect, territorial control
and otherwise, from the brutal and illegal actions carried out
through “local initiatives” of armed settlers or rough soldiers,
without having to own responsibility for their actions. It excuses
what effectively is the rule as an exception, and the exception
as the rule. It is common enough for governments to create the
atmosphere that allows certain crimes to take place. It was therefore
sufficient, according to the Israeli Historian Benny Morris, [x]
that David Ben Gurion makes his wish for expulsion
of the Palestinians felt by IDF officers in 1947-1948, for actions
to be carried out full swing. The frontier thus only seems to
degenerate into complete lawlessness, but this form of chaos is
often promoted and protected from the center. The surrender of
authority has its price, however: the political initiative in
states that have open frontiers shifts from the center to the
periphery. The inhabitants of the frontier can thus exercise strong
political leverage over mainland politics.
The perpetuation of violence
is a necessary condition for pacifying the frontier. Provocation
produces counter-violence and the very justification for the further
suspension of law. The imposed martial law largely neglects individual
rights and reflects nothing much beyond the present strategic
need of an occupier. A legal paradox is thus created: in reaction
to “disturbances,” states may suspend both international and national
laws, act in breach of international convention, without international
mandate (holding their “enemies” in artificially created enclaves
that enable the military to act outside of the state’s own legal
framework) – in general, operating in a complete lawless domain,
while flagrantly criminalizing all acts of resistance to its own
actions. [xi]
This paradox may paraphrase some of the ideas
of Giorgio Agamben. [xii]
In his European imagination, and following
Hanna Arendt, Agamben saw the spaces of legal exception exemplified
in the concentration camps of totalitarianism. But frontiers offer
a variety of zones of legal exceptions where crime and murder
may be possible. The Native American reservations were sites
of genocidal wars in the late nineteenth century; the South African
Bantustans were to exclude a whole race from citizenship; the
Gaza Strip is a walled-off space where selective death can be
administered without legal jurisprudence by military units that
compress the legal system (incrimination, arrest, trial, appeal,
execution) into split seconds. [xiii]
Excessive violence is the
rule, brutality exceeds the limits acceptable at the center, crimes
are often unrecorded, soldiers and settlers kill without legal
jurisprudence. As the civilian and military domains get blurred,
frontier violence is never confined to organized armies or to
guerrilla fighters. The
struggle redefines every act of living, settling, extracting,
harvesting, or trading as violence itself. The settler of a frontier
zone is a militarized and often armed civilian; military action
is often carried out in the midst of and against civilian population,
resistance to it is carried out or assisted by entire populations.
The fragmented legal geography
of the frontier is positioned outside the very condition of modernity
and progress that brought it about. The frontier creates thus
a shifting legal geography of exception, or using Agamben’s words, “zones
of indistinction”
[xiv]
whose edges are elastic, shifting, and incoherent.
According to Agamben the definition of the temporary is integral
to the concept of the “state of emergency,”
[xv]
as this state is defined and justified as an
exception limited by time. The temporary state of emergency and/or
the temporary application of martial law, thus allow the frontier
to maintain a level of lawless brutality that would, and could
not be tolerated were the situation considered permanent.
[xvi]
The situation will remain temporary as long
as it is essential for victory to be achieved, and the frontier
to be completely domesticated – thus and only then the “closed”
frontier could be imbued with the normal laws of the state. Frontier
violence is thus termed as “pacification” (nineteenth and twentieth
century) or “peace keeping” (twentieth and twentieth-first century)
– a temporary instability in preparation for the “eternal stability”
to come. In fact the geography of the frontier is often so fragmented
that legal distinctions can no longer effectively be territorially
based, law can not be contained by territorial envelopes, because
these envelopes undergo constant transformation. Legal distinction
is therefore effectively made between persons on the basis of
race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality, using categories of
citizens, part-citizens, subjects, enemies, or aliens.
Not only does the legal exception
of the frontier refer to violence, but often it refers to ownership
of resources. These resources are often land, but may include
minerals, metals, or energy resources. Land-registry projects,
such as the ones enacted by virtually all colonial empires that
operated in Africa, America, or Australia in the nineteenth century,
do not recognize the full right of “natives” over lands in their
possession in the same way as they recognize the ownership of
the colonizers. The native and nomadic tribes are seen as parts
of the natural landscape of trees and rocks, and their habitat,
defined as terra nullius, could be handed to the imperial
state or the crown. If rights are granted, such as in reservations,
they are often do not extend vertically to include the natural
resources below the surface. This principle allows Israel not
only to seize almost half of all land reserves in the West Bank,
but to control the water of the mountain aquifer under it, and
the air over it.
Negri and Hardt implied that
the current aggressive quest for Western expansion is but a further
extension of the historical principle of the frontier.
[xvii]
As if the Pacific coasts were no effective
limit, the centrifugal forces of capitalism are yet to unleash
another open-ended process of dynamic expansion into frontiers
rich with natural resources and anger. The territorial architecture
of the ”war on terror” with its militarized flows has placed the
imaginary space of the frontier in the forefront of global consciousness,
and gradually extended its legal, social, and military geography
across a new geopolitical construction site. Indeed the militarization
of the global economical and legal infrastructure laid out during
the 1990s turned economic enclaves into outposts and trade channels
into temporary alliances and militarized trajectories. The world
has become a deep zone across whose depth the Western Empire seeks
its “barbarians” in an ongoing and brutal frontier war. The frontier
ceased to be limited to a particular domain of the globe but gradually
crawled to encapsulate its whole. The principle being that as
long as there is an open frontier, the whole of the networked
space would display frontier-like characteristics. Thus the new
global geography of fragments, micro-conflicts, newly erected
barriers and fortifications, exists everywhere in a constant state
of territorial ambivalence, prone to the inconsistent behavior
and self-destructive impulses that define a new global “borderline
disorder.”
[xviii]
Christian Salmon recently described
the geography of borders and barriers in the Israeli occupied
territories in this way:
The border shifts like a swarm of locusts in the wake of another
suicide attack, like the onset of a sudden storm. It might arrive
at your doorstep like a delivery in the night, as quickly as the
tanks can roll in; or it may slip in slowly, like a shadow. The
border keeps creeping along, surrounding villages and watering
places. It is a mobile phenomenon… easily transportable to keep
pace with the ever-expanding settlements.
The border is furtive as well: like the rocket launchers, it
crushes and disintegrates space, transforming it into a frontier,
into bits of territory. This frontier paralyses the ebb and flow
of transit instead of regulating it. It no longer serves to protect,
instead transforming all points into danger zones, all persons
into living targets or suicide bombers. It has ceased to be a
peaceful boundary designed to separate two autonomous lands, to
assign a rightful place to each, to endow a given space with its
distinctive shape, form and color. The border here is meant to
repress, displace and disorganize.
[xix]