A couple of years ago, an ominous decision of the European Union passed almost unnoticed: the plan to establish an all-European border police force to secure the isolation of the Union territory and thus to prevent the influx of the immigrants. THIS is the truth of globalization: the construction of NEW walls safeguarding the prosperous Europe from the immigrant flood. One is tempted to resuscitate here the old Marxist »humanist« opposition of »relations between things« and »relations between persons«: in the much celebrated free circulation opened up by the global capitalism, it is “things” (commodities) which freely circulate, while the circulation of “persons” is more and more controlled. We are thus not dealing with “globalization as an unfinished project,” but with a true “dialectics of globalization”: the segregation of the people IS the reality of economic globalization. This new racism of the of the developed is in a way much more brutal than the previous one's: its implicit legitimization is neither naturalist (the »natural« superiority of the developed West) nor any longer culturalist (we in the West also want to preserve our cultural identity), but the unabashed economic egotism - the fundamental divide is the one between those included into the sphere of (relative) economic prosperity and those excluded from it.

When, at the beginning of October 2005, the Spanish police dealt with the problem of how to stop the influx of desperate African immigrants who tried to penetrate the small Spanish territory across Gibraltar, they displayed the plans to build a wall there between Spanish and Morocco border. The images presented - a complex structure with all the electronic equipment - resembled uncannily those of the Berlin Wall, only in the opposite direction, destined to prevent people from coming in, not getting out.

The cruel irony of the situation is that it was the government of Zapatero, at this moment arguably the most anti-racist and tolerant in Europe, that is forced to adopt these measures of segregation - a clear sign of the limit of the multiculturalist “tolerant” approach which preaches open borders and acceptance of Others. If one were to open the borders, the first to rebel would be local working classes. It is thus becoming clear that the solution is not “tear down the walls and let them all in,” this easy empty demand of soft-hearted liberal “radicals.” The only true solution is to tear down the TRUE Wall, not the police one, but the social-economic one: to change society so that people will no longer desperately try to escape their own world.