Good fences don't make good neighbours – British colonial legacy is proof enough

A bikers group for UK Veterans take part in a gathering in London, on April 18, for Northern Ireland veterans who served in the British Army during Northern Ireland Troubles. AFP

There’s an ancient piece of wisdom in the English phrase “good fences make good neighbours”. I’ve never been convinced by this supposed insight. I’m of a generation that visited Berlin before the fall of communism and recall the fortified fences of the Inner German Border that divided East from West.

British soldiers were stationed in West Berlin, and I watched with them the East German Grenztruppen – border guards nicknamed “Grepo”. The Grepo had vicious German shepherd dogs on long wires in the land between East and West Berlin to prevent East Germans escaping the Soviet-imposed communist system to a better life in the West. It was, I suppose, a “good fence”. But it was a horrible border.

A warning sign in front of a wall equipped with barbed wire reading 'Neutral zone - will be fired upon immediately without announcement' during an event part of the commemorations for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the former concentration camp Sachsenhausen, in Oranienburg near Berlin, Germany, on May 4. EPA

Thankfully that wall and the Inner German Border remain only as memorials to the divisions of east and west. But the reason this comes to mind is relief – perhaps temporary – that the US and others have tried to calm the military escalation between Pakistan and India.

As the world knows, these are two nuclear-armed powers. And as the world also knows, there have been four full-scale wars between these neighbours since the British Empire ended. In great haste and at great human cost, the British pulled out of “British India” provoking what is still considered the greatest mass movement of populations in history.

Partition meant that millions of Hindus and Muslims from what is now Pakistan and India moved to a country where they felt safe. Up to 20 million people are supposed to have moved. They, their children and children’s children have formed part of a great diaspora. Some of these displaced families are resident in the UK today.

Muslim refugees crowd onto a train bound for Pakistan, as it leaves the New Delhi, India area, on September, 27, 1947 AP

But while diplomats try to calm fears of further escalation in South Asia, what is striking is that the historical legacy of the British drawing lines on the map in the 19th and 20th centuries remains in many places a running sore in the 21st century. There is little evidence that “good fences make good neighbours” when Kashmir has plenty of “good fences”.

The 1972 Simla Agreement dividing Indian-and Pakistan-administered Kashmir seemed, at least diplomatically a “good fence”. But by 1999, the two nations were fighting over the Line of Control once more, and the resentment and hostilities have never faded.

Readers in the Middle East need no instruction in how the British and French colonial powers in 1916 divided lands into spheres of influence in the Sykes-Picot agreement

For Britain, the first and most obvious supposedly “good fence” came after the First World War when 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties were granted independence after the Anglo-Irish war. Every Irish person I know is familiar with this historic partition of what was the UK. People in England, Scotland and Wales not so much.

The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland has been the subject of dispute – and often violence – ever since the 1920s. That mostly ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. While peace is welcome, the border issue is not entirely resolved. The border still exists, and so do aspirations from some in Northern Ireland to leave the United Kingdom and form a United Ireland.

Cyprus is another British colonial example of fences not necessarily making good neighbours. Cyprus was a colony formally annexed by Britain in 1914 after being under Ottoman rule for more than 300 years. It became a Crown colony in 1925. British rule lasted until Cyprus gained independence in 1960 but since 1974, it is now also divided between Turkish and Greek Cyprus – another “line of control” if not in name.

Readers in the Middle East need no instruction in how the British and French colonial powers in 1916 divided lands into spheres of influence in the Sykes-Picot agreement. Those borders, walls, fences and battle lines have shifted at various times, especially after the creation of the state of Israel, but – to put it politely – there is no obvious sign of a good fence in the Middle East making necessarily good neighbours.

In fact, considering the legacy of empire and the profound diplomatic questions raised by conflicts from Gaza to Kashmir, there may be some evidence of the opposite. Fences merely contain festering and unresolved grievances on both sides. Good neighbours require no fences – or at least limited border security.

For example, until US President Donald Trump’s recently expressed ambition to make Canada the 51st state of the US, most of us paid little attention to the world’s longest border, the 8,850 kilometres that separate these two giants in North America. Much of this border is so remote from any population centre that you could walk across unchallenged. Unlike the US-Mexico border, even Mr Trump has no ambitions to “build a wall and make Canada pay for it”.

The hackneyed old phrase about neighbours and fences, therefore, should be turned around. Good neighbours do not need good fences, as you will notice driving across the EU from Madrid to Brussels to Berlin, then down to Sicily or Athens. The EU is a group of (mostly) good neighbours.

Elsewhere, and especially now in South Asia, the post-colonial legacy of fences, borders and aggrieved neighbours is not one that the British should boast about.