After 2016, the situation has further deteriorated: new walls are continuously taken into consideration or set up, in the most diverse forms, to separate “us” from “them”. President Trump, in the United States, hopes and strives to complete the construction of the wall along the border (3200 km long) with Mexico. In Asia, a fortified frontier separates India and Bangladesh, and more generally the whole continent excels in the “race for walls” in progress in the world. A European example, somehow original and unprecedented, is the “water wall” represented by the Mediterranean, which separates Africa from Europe. Thousands of people die each year trying to sail across this particular wall, certainly built by nature and not by men, but equally certainly made lethal by their hypocrisies and their omissions.

Walls, in their various and in some cases unforeseeable forms, are the most obvious and recurrent expression of conflict in human history. Like the animals, of which, anyway, men are objectively (not a value judgment, but simply a fact) close relatives, they “mark their territory”, delimit its boundaries, act according to the logic of “us” and “ them”. Already in the seventeenth century the French philosopher Blaise Pascal in one of his most famous “Pensées” recounts, and denounces, this logic, which is, as we shall see later, inevitably murderous and at the same time suicidal, in a brief imaginary conversation between two characters: “Why do you kill me?”. “Well! Don't you live on the other side of the water? If you lived on this side, my friend, I would be an assassin, and it would be unjust to slay you in this manner. But since you live on the other side, I am a hero, and what I do is just.”

More precisely, to make a specific reference to the contemporary era, walls are the most complete expression of identity-related nationalism, which marks the most recent history not only in Europe, and which has become even more lethal and pervasive in the context of the ungoverned globalization in which we are increasingly immersed in the new century and millennium. As the American political scientist Stephen M. Walt wrote, maybe in a “politically incorrect” but certainly very effective way, in Foreign Policy, “the most powerful force in the world is not the nuclear armament, the Internet, God or the bond market. It is nationalism “.

The political leaderships that, throughout the history of the twentieth century, and now also in the new global century, have used and use this “force” to achieve popular consent and take over power and then control it in an autocratic way, are both opportunistic and, more or less consciously, at least potentially criminogenic. Today it is no longer a question of leaderships that are expression of “hypertrophic” forms of the national state arisen in Europe in the twentieth century (Orban in Hungary, to cite one case), but of leaderships expression of various and multiple forms of identity-related tribalism, based essentially on ethnic and / or religious characteristics, present and active on all continents. To give just a few examples: the Hindu and anti-Islamic nationalism of the Indian leader Narendra Modi; the various forms of Islamist tribalism established in the Middle East (al-Qaeda, etc.) and also present in Africa, such as the Boko Haram movement in Nigeria, feeding transnational terrorism in Europe and throughout the world. Xi Jinping's identity-based neo-nationalism in the context of the Chinese authoritarian capitalism, managed by a party that continues to define itself as communist and which has placed itself at the helm of campaigns of patriotic education and of repression of ethnic and religious minorities (the Uighurs, Turkic-speaking and of Islamic religion, for example, that a recent law aims to “Chinesize” within 5 years). Putin's Russia, for whom “liberal ideas are obsolete” and “no one wants migrants”, and by whom support and money to European neo-nationalist and populist movements are given, in a paradoxical but also explicit agreement with Trump, whose goal is America First, hence the European Union is an enemy to destroy, as the Russian leader also thinks. In addition, concluding this quite partial list, the radical and violent Buddhism in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, aimed above all at the repression and elimination of local Muslim communities.

As we can see, nationalisms and identity-based tribalisms of twentieth-century origin did not end with globalization, but rather became somewhat more diversified, extensive and pervasive. There are, in my opinion, at least two reasons that explain this process. The first reason is related to the economic, social, cultural and therefore, in a broad sense, political changes, which the neo-liberist ungoverned globalization has led to. The growth of inequalities, the crisis of the middle classes, the uncertainty in working and living conditions, the crisis of social protection systems determined above all by capital mobility, which makes redistributive fiscal policies difficult, the anthropological and cultural disorientation, the loss of identity in a world increasingly dominated by transnational and global flows (of people, goods, capital, signs, etc.) that cross the territories, all this has given rise to societies in which, as the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev wrote in 2017, “anxious majorities” are increasingly formed, marked by widespread phenomena of existential anxiety. Precisely on this ever-expanding new world of interests and emotions make leverage the opportunistic and nationalistic leaderships on the rise. Trump, leader of the last world super-power, today in decline, is a significant example of that: a billionaire entrepreneur, master in tax avoidance and evasion, who presents himself as representative of the excluded, as the guarantor of popular interests, “we” (the people and its leaders) against “them” (the migrants, the minorities, the global elites of which Trump himself is obviously part). One can easily understand why in this process, in America as in Russia and in Europe, even anti-Semitism is back in fashion, as a historically relevant reference model, the most significant of the twentieth century, for every form of opposition between “us” and “them”.

The second reason for the increasing spread of nationalism and identity-based tribalism in the age of globalization is linked to the great scientific and technological revolution, above all in communications and transport, underway in the last decades. This revolution has above all made the level of interdependence between the various parts of the world grow in an extraordinary way,  while in the past it was strongly limited by the barriers of time and space. As a result, nationalisms and tribalisms travel more easily across countries and continents, and experiences and actors are more easily exchanged. Secondly, this great transformation has, so to speak, set the individuals free, through the network and social media, from the traditional intermediaries of public debate (educational bodies, political parties, associative movements, etc.). But this liberation is fraught with ambiguity and danger: individuals who are ever more alone and culturally defenseless travel the “ocean” of the network and risk more and more often “drowning”, that is, falling victim to opportunistic leaderships, even explicitly criminogenic, present and active in the world. Identity nationalism is sold by these leaderships on the political market, for the purpose of conquest and maintenance of power, as “a kind of antidepressant” (as defined by the French-speaking semiologist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva). A drug to be taken in increasing doses, even at the risk of total addiction, until complete recovery.

It can be useful, to better understand the processes in progress and conclude, to take a step back. We shall bring memory back to life, in an age like ours in which amnesia, the loss of memory, takes the shape, throughout Europe and throughout the West, of a “disease of the soul” and of a condition which favors the rebirth, in new forms, of tribalisms and identity nationalisms. The twentieth century, as is known, has theorized and practiced the logic of the clash between “us” and “them”, up to the extreme experience of Hitler's “final solution”. If “they” are a mortal danger to “us”, and if “they” do not make themselves available to become like “us”, there is nothing left to save us but physical elimination. So believe, in essence, the Islamist terrorists, the Hindu nationalists, the Buddhist nationalists of Myanmar, the white American supremacists, and all the others who accompany them, of the most diverse cultures and belongings.

But we must also know, and the historical experience of the twentieth century teaches that, that the logic of “them” and “us” is not only murderous, but also suicidal. In fact, “they” and “us” often switch roles in history, with fatal outcomes for contemporaries, or in other cases for their children and grandchildren. In the latter case, it is an unwanted and undeserved gift to descendants on the part of the political leaders who hold power and guide peoples: to give two examples, remember the year 1945 in Germany and in Japan. We have known for a long time that after the antidepressant there is no healing, we simply die.

Translated by Lionello Casalegno