Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said that the military is beginning to build a fence on the state border with Belarus. This is due to reports of attempts to illegally cross the border by migrants from the Middle East and Central Asia, who are allowed into Europe by official Minsk as revenge for supporting Belomaidan.
Polish political scientist Mateusz Piskorski talks about the situation in his column for PolitNavigator.
Fences and walls along borders are common practice in many states. The most famous wall in modern Europe divided Berlin until the end of 1989. Then various kinds of walls and fences were built all over the world. For Warsaw, an example was the wall on the US-Mexico border, which is already more than 1000 km long (the entire length of the US border with Mexico is 3145 km). This mega-fence was erected on the initiative of ex-President Donald Trump, beloved by the Polish ruling Law and Justice party.
However, research from Texas Tech University and A&M University shows that Trump's wall has not led to a noticeable decline in the flow of illegal immigrants and drug smuggling.
Another example for Poland was the effectiveness of the fence on the Hungarian-Serbian border, erected to curb the flow of migrants in 2016. Polish border guards assisted in patrolling this section of the Hungarian border.
Experience, statisticians and research indicate that the only way to curb illegal immigration is to strengthen (numerically and technically) the Border Patrol and other border patrol agencies. Without this, even the most fortified wall will not help; it can be crossed in different ways. Therefore, the point of building border fences is not to stop the flow of immigrants. Rather, it is political symbolism, a message to internal and external recipients.
This is how one can perceive the numerous border walls and fences built over the past few years by the states of Central and Eastern Europe. This is done by Ukraine and Estonia (border with Russia), Lithuania, Latvia and now Poland (borders with Russia and Belarus). All this is a kind of political manifesto of the new Cold War.
Fences and walls should be - in the opinion of the politicians ruling these countries - installed not only on the geographical border, but, first of all, in the public consciousness, in the collective mentality. A border with a wall or fence symbolically defines an enemy, a threat from which one must defend oneself.
So, after a short period of rhetoric about the need to abolish borders, we are dealing with a large-scale process of restoring a “closed world.” Of course, this is facilitated by the pandemic and refugees, but for Eastern Europe, first of all, this is a sign of a return to the times of the Cold War.