Steffen Mau, 53, is professor of sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin. Winner in 2021 of the prestigious Leibniz Prize, awarded each year in Germany to ten researchers from all disciplines. In an essay, published in August and titled Sortiermaschinen. Die Neuerfindung der Grenze im 21. Jahrhundert (“Sorting machines. The reinvention of the frontier in the XXIe century ”, ed. Mercator / CH Beck, untranslated), he studies the metamorphoses of borders in the age of globalization. He is also the author of a sociohistoric monograph devoted to a district of Rostock, in the former GDR, Lütten Klein. Living in East Germany. A company in transformation, published in November by Editions from the House of Human Sciences (270 p., € 23).
How did you react when you heard that Poland was going to build an anti-migrant wall along its border with Belarus?
I was not surprised, because this decision is part of a global trend: the proliferation of border walls across the world. In 1990, there were a dozen. Today, there are more than 70. Thirty years ago, less than 5% of borders were materialized by walls. Now it’s over 20%.
Is this phenomenon continuous? And does it concern all continents?
There has been a marked acceleration since the beginning of the 2000s. Over the past two decades, more walls have been built than during the previous half-century. Geographically, there are great disparities between the continents: in Asia, nearly 40% of the borders are fortified; in Europe, 16%; in Africa and America (North and South), less than 10%. It is important to note that their location often contradicts the thesis of the “clash of civilizations” [du politologue américain Samuel Huntington]. Indeed, the majority of these walls are not at the junction of different cultural areas, but within the same geopolitical space, as between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, between Botswana and Zimbabwe, between Georgia and Russia, between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Sometimes the reason is purely political: for a state it is a question of asserting its sovereignty in the face of a more or less threatening neighbor. But, more and more often, the objective is to fight against the arrival of migrants.
Does the wall between Poland and Belarus mark a turning point on the scale of Europe?
No, it is only an additional stone in the constitution of a fortress Europe. Several member states of the European Union (EU) have already strengthened their external borders: Bulgaria and Greece with Turkey, Hungary with Serbia, Spain with Morocco at the level of the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla; Lithuania along its southern border with the Russian territory of Kaliningrad…
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