From a Distance

Today is hockey night, or more accurately, hockey morning in Switzerland. Team Canada takes on the Swiss Team and, in what will be my only chance to see any of Canada’s Olympic hockey action while I am overseas, I am downing coffee in anticipation of the 1:30 a.m. start, local time.

Watching the Vancouver Olympics from afar is an odd sensation. For one thing, even though they are being held in my home country, it feels like they could be anywhere, given the amount of coverage the actual city of Vancouver or Canada have gotten since I arrived here. For all the internationalist ideals embodied by the Olympics, the games inevitably reduce to base patriotism once the actual competitions get under way.

From my perch in Geneva, I have access to the national passions of two countries: France and Switzerland. My geographic location explains how I know so much about Jason Lamy Chappuis, the 23-year old French sensation who stormed the finish line of the Nordic Combined event and whom the French announcers were so excited about that they actually stopped calling the race resorting to hoarse shrieks of “Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y! Vas-y!” Likewise, it is only because I am here that I know the Swiss nation has been pining for a Gold in downhill skiing for 22 years, their desperation and desire only a slightly paler imitation of Canada’s hunger for a gold medal on native soil. I’ve been accused of turning Swiss-French, so enamoured am I with the athletes of these two nations. Geography is messing up my loyalties.

My sense of how geography skews things actually began during the Opening Ceremonies, which I watched in Montreal before getting on my trans-Atlantic flight. Having lived in Vancouver for the past three years, I have borne witness to an extremely grumpy city’s reluctance and refusal to embrace the Olympics until days before it started. The University of British Columbia, where the women’s hockey tournament is being staged, only tidied itself up with fresh paint jobs and pretty new banners the day before the Opening Ceremonies. Most of my friends have left the city: for New Zealand, Argentina, San Francisco. Anywhere but Van. And I shared this apathy, which partly explains my current location. I was unsure about the benefits of hosting the Olympics while being quite certain that there would be no room for the city’s social justice issues, especially as the preparation and count-down to the games intensified.

And yet, last Friday night, I was excited! Eager to see how Vancouver was going to showcase itself to the world, who was going to perform what the Canadian team was going to wear, the works. I gathered with friends at a favourite Montreal bar, home to regular viewings of our Habs’ on the bigscreen, and we made a party of it. Imagine. Not even the surly bar staff who refused to turn the sound on for the first part of the ceremony could dampen our spirits. What did sober me up, about halfway through the ceremony, was the realization that the Vancouver that I know and love, with all its beauty spots, and scars and wrinkles, was nowhere to be seen. There was no indication of the city’s rich Asian heritage or if its oddly-British attachments. No sign of the crazy weekend warriors or the coffee shops on every corner. It had been transformed in to a glossy, high-tech show, which was glitzy and glamorous and totally soulless.

And then I realized that in my excitement about the Olympics, I had lost sight of the heart of the city, which is exactly what everyone said would happen, that there would be no room for the Downtown Eastside in the XXI Winter Olympiad. It’s brutal. Apparently there are Red Tent protesters camped out around the city, to draw attention to Vancouver’s impoverished and homeless but I heard that word of mouth, not from CTV, NBC or SRG SSR (Swiss Broadcaster). They don’t have room for heart amongst their patriotic aspirations. And what’s further discouraging is that from a distance, no one seems to have room for Vancouver proper either.

Voicing Voicelessness

I often tell people that the one thing I have in doing my PhD is how important, yet hard, it is to speak with my own voice. So much of academic life involves being able to show that you have had read, and synthesized, all the right and pedigreed works that one hundred books into a research project, it’s pretty hard to remember what it was exactly that you wanted to communicate. Really, with all the opinions and expertise that live in academe, the only way that you can distinguish yourself is to have something really original to say or to say it really loudly or really creatively.

Recently, I attended a workshop of budding academics and what was striking was that everyone in attendance, both presenters and participants, were determined to find some way to express the results of their research outside of the conventional outlets. No more academic journals, no more stuffy conference papers. New media, new formats and blurred boundaries between fact and fiction were the order of the day.

The most animated conversations were around the use of creative writing to express the essence of a situation or an experience when conventional means of academic communication not only inhibit such expression but its guardians actively deter budding scholars from using hallowed venues in “inappropriate” ways. A number of people present, myself included, pursue research that places human subjects at the centre of their narrative or theoretical frameworks. I study the flight of refugees out of Communist China after 1949. Many were intellectuals opposed to the Mao and his regime. Others were businessmen, protecting assets of a different kind. Still others were villagers who fled at the risk of personal injury to themselves and the families they left behind. (An important CCP tactic to keep people from leaving was to abuse and threaten those whose disloyal relatives fled). In 1962, Canada resettled 100 such Chinese families from Hong Kong. They were featured in newspapers of the day and then they disappeared from the collective memory of the Canadian people. My project focuses on their story.

On one level, my work is extremely political, concerned with the powers of governments and humanitarian organizations to determine the fate of individuals even as they move without awareness of the power machinations at play. So I can, and will, write several chapters about the nature of modernity, citizens, subjects and outsiders of the nation-state. Dry stuff when the heart of my research really is about the stories of the people who move and their stories. Why the focus on the personal? Because too often history is (clichéd as this sounds) written for the victors, if not always by them. Refugee stories are taken from individuals and generalized into triumphant tales of state compassion and rebirth in new, and better, lands. Refugees become symbolic of both bad and good governments. The bad ones are those that persecute. The good ones are those that save.

In moving to get away from danger, refugees make their stories available to compassionate interveners in a way that people in statis do not. As a historian, I feel removed from the immediate violence perpetrated against the refugees I study. Fifty years ago, states forced them to flee and the governments that rescued them consumed their voices. But an honest accounting forces me to acknowledge that I too am appropriating refugee voices and experiences for my own ends: the coveted tenure-track position. How can I, in good conscience, proceed with a project that benefits me but may do little for the refugees in question other than make a forgotten history known?

It is in this place of contradictory motives that ideas about creative writing are percolating for me. The leader of the workshop, Julia Christensen, is the author of a piece of non-fiction called “The Komatik Lesson”* about a young woman’s struggle in an isolated northern community. We never learn the woman’s name but we learn about her battles to keep her family together and to keep her children safe. The anonymity of the protagonist speaks to her role as a representative of the many women whose lives echo hers and whom Julia has encountered in her research. So “The Komatik Lesson” is not just the words of one woman, it is a blending of many. As a result, it is a powerful narrative that conveys the results of a research project in a way that no academic publication ever could. The very essence of what it means to be homeless and vulnerable in the harsh environment of Canada’s north is vividly portrayed.

I was very moved by “The Komatik Lesson” in part because it brings me back to the question of voice in the academic world. What is the relationship between the scholar’s voice and the voice(s) of those they study or work with? How do scholars find and use their own voices when part of the task, for many, is also to give voice to those who cannot? Do individuals need to have their own independent, singular voices to be heard? Or does the universalization and representation of an experience serve the same purpose? Why does generalizing in the academic context remind me of Walter Benjamin’s observation that “every document of civilization is a document of barbarism” while works of creative fiction don’t leave me with quite the same sense of discomfort?

I haven’t come up with the answer even though I have been mulling these questions over for a few days now. I do, however, think that these questions are the making of a fabulous short story. Stay tuned for “The Voiceless Academic.”

*(Northern Review Fall 2009: 125+. CPI.Q (Canadian Periodicals). Web. 30 Jan. 2010. .)

Going public about privacy

Privacy has been on my mind a lot lately. First, Tiger Woods’ personal escapades become national and international fodder. And then days and days of private grief and mourning laid bare as Haitians and their families search and pray for their loved ones. Privacy doesn’t seem to be an option for anyone, anywhere; rich or poor. How ironic, that it is in this public space that the world’s richest and poorest are united on common ground. Somehow, we masses have decided that neither the most affluent nor the most devastated are entitled to the same privacy as the rest of us. Yet, invading someone’s privacy is a violent, harmful act and one that no one should be subject to, regardless of their social standing.

The problem is that it is hard to balance the fact that we are all social beings with the need to maintain something of our own. Our bodies our public. As the feminist scholar, Judith Butler sees it, “the body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well.”

It is precisely because we are embodied subjects, at the mercy of friends, family, neighbours, colleagues and governments that our right to privacy is so valuable. Privacy is a basic human right. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation.” Apparently, "arbitrary interference" is a pretty arbitrary concept.

The question that the past few weeks raises is whether or not there are occasions in which an individual can legitimately be denied their right to privacy? In the case of the earthquake victims in Haiti, one could argue that by making their personal stories of searching for loved ones or of loss public, they are garnering international attention, support and aid. So publicity is positive. And yet, I can’t imagine how it makes anyone feel good to have a microphone shoved in to their face as they talk about finding family members crushed under buildings, or not finding people they care about. There is no doubt that in Haiti, personal stories give human voice and face to the massive humanitarian tragedy. But individuals are being made to expose the rawest, most painful of human emotions for this greater good. I don’t know if it is better or worse that those in Haiti will never hear themselves reproduced over national and international airwaves. To hear some of the interviews or see some of the images, would be to relive a thousand wounds, again and again and again.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have Tiger Woods. Wealthy, attractive, successful and a man whom many believe invited the public scrutiny he is now enduring because his personal self did not live up to the public image in which Nike and other companies invested so much. As Buzz Bissinger wrote in Vanity Fair, “In an age of constant gotcha and exposure, (Woods) had always been the bionic man in terms of personality, controlling to a fault and controlled to a fault…With Woods, everything was crafted to produce a man of nothing, with no interior—non-threatening and non-controversial.” So the public feels betrayed and now everything he has ever done and said, to women, is under the microscope.

So all this has me thinking about privacy and how we take it for granted until it is gone. And I wonder if I will ever face public scrutiny. I certainly don’t seek the limelight but it seems that in this day and age, whether or not you live a public life is beyond your control. Tiger Woods didn’t choose to live a public life. In fact, he clearly chose not to. It was the 911 call that changed everything – a call that for anyone else would have remained in the hands of a single dispatcher. And then Haiti happened. And although they are on extreme ends of the public spectrum, they are linked by our insatiable quest for the anguish and torment of others. We can do nothing for Tiger Woods and his family, so why do we have to know about every gory detail? (Ironically, I was ignoring any details of the story until the privacy issue started to bug me and then it was very easy for me to learn the latest, including his visit to a sex therapy clinic). And why can’t we help the two million homeless or the families and friends of the 200,000 dead without hearing about a sister finding her sibling’s bloated body hanging from a tree (thanks As It Happens)?

I don’t understand our public fascination with the private and the personal. Don’t people realize that it could very easily be their lives that become the next headline on-line, in the papers, on the news? A scary thought. And a personal one that I am willing to make public.

High Speed Internet is a Human Right

Not everyone in Canada is e-connected. Shocking but true. In our Google universe, it is still possible to find people in Canada who are computer illiterate and suffering as a result. Worse, people are suffering because for some reason, Canada – proud member of the G7, elite club of the world’s most industrialized countries - can’t provide all Canadians with the means to access the digital universe. According to a 2008 Statscan survey, only 65% of residents living in small towns or rural areas accessed the Internet, compared to the 76% of urban residents that did so. What the survey figures don’t explain is that rural folks aren’t necessarily disinterested in Internet access, rather the telecommunications industry in Canada provides nothing but obstacles to those rural Canadians who wish to get plugged in.

This rant comes as a result of Internet service providers in “la Belle Province” and their complete failure to consider that while 80% of Quebecers live in cities, there is still 20% who do not. My mom happens to be a member of the second group of Quebecers. She lives in a small rural community and her current dial-up Internet connection is so slow that she reads, knits and tidies the house while she waits for a single page to load. Rip Van Winkle could sleep a lifetime before an attachment successfully downloads. This situation has real repercussions. As the historian Gerald Friesen explained in Citizens and Nation, “the way in which a society communicates shapes popular assumptions about how the world works.” The fact that rural Canadians are missing out on efficient communications technology means that there is a significant segment of the Canadian population that is out of the loop. This disconnect is a big problem.

After years of suffering with an archaic, hamster-driven computer setup, our family decided to take action and contacted several service providers in the area to see what our options were. It turns out they consist of bad, worse, none, and none. First, we called Bell and were told that high speed internet is not an option. I guess there aren’t enough people in Compton County for Bell to change the phone lines or whatever it takes to provide high speed. Then a neighbour mentioned using cable companies for Internet. Sweet. Or not. It seems the cable companies are no longer answering their phones. We could have e-mailed them…but it would have taken days for our dial-up connection to identify their web page and create a clickable link. Then we were told that we could buy faster technology for our modem, only to learn two days later (after it downloaded!) that it doesn’t work on Macs. The customer service agent I dealt with then informed me that it was our fault because most people do not have Macs so when buying software technology, we should be providing the companies with the makes of our computers. Somehow my “you are the one selling things” tirade didn’t resonate. (Never mind that Apple owns a third of the personal computer market according to a recent New York Times article, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/technology/22apple.html).

The worst part is that all of my interactions with these companies had to take place over the phone because our Internet connection is so slow that we couldn’t even browse the web to look for good deals. Attempting to talk to four different companies about the services they offered took 4.7 hours. I will never get those hours back and I am deeply resentful. But what really gets my goat (forgive me – I have been on the farm without Internet distractions for days now) is that this is an issue that is difficult to mobilize politically. People in urban areas can get high-speed Internet, if they have money. But even if they can’t afford it, at least they have the option. People in rural areas have other more pressing concerns to worry about. Weather and crop conditions come to mind. The sad thing is, awareness about issues that matter to rural people, might be greater if the rest of the country was more aware. I bet you if the melting ice floes and dying polar bears had been on YouTube when global warming first became a reality, urban Canadians would be engaged in a much more significant way. Knowledge is power people!

We talk about the death of the farm but I don’t think people appreciate that the farms wouldn’t be dying if people in fast-paced cities could actually connect with what is going on in the hinterland. Rural Canada is dying because we are shutting it out. And that is a shame. If it isn’t possible to provide every Canadian with the possibility of accessing efficient Internet services in the twenty-first century, then modern Canada is just a sham and this century, just like the last one, will definitely not belong to us.

And now that I have ranted, I am going to go back to the country where I won’t be blogging or communicating because I will be banging my head against a big wall (and not the firewall variety) until some Internet service provider thinks there might be profit in my plight. 

The politics/optics of apology

On November 16, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized for a long-gone immigration practice that resulted in the migration of thousands of British children to Australia and Canada in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. With the apology for “not providing what was promised” British home children are the latest to join the ranks of the officially victimized. Ironically, given that the apology was intended to highlight the suffering of a particular group of migrants, the Australian government’s intervention, is a giant, flashing neon reminder that we are all victims of liberal democratic governments that care more about their own agendas, then those of their citizens and non-citizens. We don’t elect politicians to make apologies, and yet they do it anyways.

The past three decades have witnessed a flurry of apologies from Western governments for offensives as diverse as the Irish potato famine, African slavery, wartime internment in the United States and Canada and wrongful prosecutions.  Recently, the government of Alberta apologized for giving the Calgary Flames the swine flu vaccine before everyone else. Only in the last example did the same government responsible for the wrongdoing, actually assume responsibility with an apology. All the other governments were apologizing for somebody else. Yet no one has yet to apologize for the fact that is the very institution of government that leads to harm. It would be awesome to see someone apologize for being a coercive nation-state bent on nothing else but securing and safeguarding power. Somehow that seems like an unlikely possibility.

But if governments aren’t apologizing for the real thing, why apologize at all? More pointedly, why apologize for something your predecessors did? Why assume responsibility for something that you didn’t do? It’s akin to me apologizing for a racist ancestor. Politics is obviously a factor. Apologies are popular with interests groups representing the personally aggrieved, or people whose families were subjected to harm. The idea is that apologies can heal wounds. Campaigner Art Miki talked about finally feeling Canadian after the Mulroney government apologized for the wartime internment of the Japanese Canadians.

Certainly, apologies can put an end to potentially damaging political campaigns by pressure groups for redress. The Chinese Canadian community fought for decades for an apology for the punitive head tax that fed the coffers of the Canadian state full at the turn of the century.

But by apologizing for everything under the sun, governments are also trying to put an end to history, as championed by Francis Fukuyama in his book of the same title. Drawing on the philosopher Hegel’s work on the nature of history and historical practice, Fukuyama argued that liberal democracies are as good as it gets in terms of political systems and claimed that with the end of the Cold War, the great ideological battles were over. Liberal democracies had won and therefore history as progress had reached its ultimate pinnacle. Similarly, apologetic governments seem to be banking on the possibility that by making an official apology they can wash their hands of history. Notice the recently released Canadian Citizenship Guide. The document acknowledges that Japanese Canadians were interned during the Second World War and that aboriginal children in residential schools suffered abuse but the document also notes the government apologies issued in 1989 and 2008 respectively. It is all very neat and tidy.

Jason Kenney, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, has made it clear that his government will not be apologizing for the home children who came to Canada through government programs. Instead, Kenney is proposing a Year of the Home Child in 2010. What tone this year might take is unclear. It is a fine line between commemoration and celebration. If done properly, it will be an educational year. And as such, it won’t be about the end of history but about the very real impact of historical events on Canadians and Canada today. And there’s no need to apologize for that. 

Vikings to Blackberries: A Brief Look at Canadian Citizenship

After reading the new Canadian Citizenship Guide, all I can say is that I am so glad I was born here so I don’t have to go through the process of becoming Canadian. It’s tough and expectations are high.

For migrants to Canada, citizenship is one of many steps that government and society require to ensure that people are truly integrated and contributing members of the national body politic. The release of the new Citizenship Guide this week, coinciding with Remembrance Day, is a timely reminder of the inherently political nature of citizenship and the tremendous power the state exerts over rites of citizenship. Citizenship tests give the Canadian government an opportunity to mold people in a way that, ironically, it never gets to do with Canadian-born citizens. And granting citizenship makes people grateful in ways that do not occur amongst the native-born. There is a reason that books such as The Triumph of Citizenship, which celebrates the granting of citizenship for Japanese and Chinese Canadians after the Second World War, proliferate.

Because citizenship in liberal democratic societies offers protection and security, it is a truly powerful incentive for encouraging particular behaviour and views. This summer, the British government introduced legislation requiring ten years of residency and a decade of “British behaviour” before people can obtain citizenship. The Canadian requirements aren’t so demanding but a perusal of the Citizenship Guide reveals how hard the state (this is above and beyond Harper’s Tories) works to make sure that it gets the citizens it wants. To quote the guide, “The prosperity and diversity of our country

depend on all Canadians working together to face challenges of the future. In seeking to become a citizen, you are joining a country that, with your active participation, will continue to grow and thrive. What contribution will you make?” And by the way, “barbaric cultural practices” will not be tolerated. Ouch. Pressure is on.

Democracies require informed citizens to function well. Informed and educated citizens. The trick with the citizenship ritual is that it is the state that both tells people what they need to know to be good citizens and through citizenship tests determines whether they meet the grade. I don’t envy the bureaucrats tasked with putting together the guide. How do you decide what people need to know about to be good Canadians? History? Politics? Sports? Arts? Geography? Yes, all of the above. Can you get away with providing the “what” answers without tackling the “why” and “how”? Again, the answer is yes. Unfortunately.

The new Citizenship Guide is a 62-page mix of solid building blocks that emphasize the responsibilities of citizens above all else. Case in point: the rule of law is mentioned three times in the first four paragraphs of the guide lone. A significant portion of the document is devoted to the practicalities of voting, which given the recent voter turnouts, is probably something all Canadians should read. But above and beyond the instructions on nuts and bolts democracy, the guide instructs would-be Canadians on what it sees as the most important elements of Canadian history and society. From the perspective of value-transmission, it makes for fascinating reading. Military history such as the war of 1812 or the rebellions of 1837 fall appear next to the “Beginnings of democracy”, raising questions about the relationship between peace and democracy. Residential school abuse, the internment of the Japanese Canadians, and the Chinese head tax are all mentioned and the government’s recent apologies for these incidents is also noted. So Canada might do something wrong, but then it apologizes and everything is okay.

Ironically, one of the main points the guide does not cover is the history of citizenship in Canada. The 1947 Citizenship Act, which not only created the distinct category of Canadian citizenship but also inspired other Commonwealth countries to do the same is not discussed. This was a major innovation and sent London into a panic resulting in a compromise whereby where citizens of Commonwealth countries are also “British subjects.” More importantly, the 1947 Act enfranchised Chinese and Japanese people who had lost their right to vote in 1875. I happened to be at the Chinese Canadian Military Museum the day after the Citizenship Guide came out where many of the exhibits how important the Chinese soldiers’ sacrifice was to the Canadian war effort and how wartime service was a major factor in the community getting citizenship in 1947. I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate the nature of rights and responsibilities than by telling the actual history of Canadian citizenship. Maybe it’s too hard to test. 

Borders as theme parks?

This past week, thousands of people gathered in Berlin of celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. They may as well have been celebrating twenty years of burgeoning tourism. Travel agents beckoned prospective clients with promises of “revelations of the Cold War”. Borders are big business and with increasing frequency, governments around the world are exploiting contested divides for commercial purposes. In doing so, borders have become theme parks while the real life struggles of people living inside oppressive regimes such as North Korea or Burma are forgotten.

The twinning of history and the novelty of going where no one has gone before is the hook that transforms political borders into destinations of choice. It’s a formula that produces great commercial and political gains for the savvy.

Take divided Korea for instance. North Korea is seen a rogue state, closed to most of the world. We only get the tiniest of peaks into what goes on there, which is why it was big news when the first fast food restaurant opened in Pyongyang this summer (serving “minced beef with bread” rather than good ol’ fashioned hamburgers). And unless you are the former President of the United States on a humanitarian rescue mission, you can’t try the beef and bread for yourself. But what you can do is visit the demilitarized zone that keeps North and South apart.

Once called the “scariest place on earth” by the very same Clinton who swooped into the North earlier this year, the DMZ is a strip of land about 4 kilometres wide at the 38^th parallel that is heavily guarded by both sides. The South knows how to use the border. The American USO and the Korean Travel Bureau both run tours to the north, giving visitors a chance to look out over the other side. And they charge a pretty penny too: $42 US per person. More importantly, the tours give the South and the US an opportunity to present their views on the politics that keep Korea divided. For instance, the Panmunjon Travel Center offers tours with a real-life defector. Tourist dollars flow in and the public relations agenda flows out.

North Cyprus, officially known as the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, is another country that is now exploiting its border for political and commercial gains. Like North Korea, North Cyprus operates on the fringe of the international community. The North declared its independence in 1983 but only Turkey has offered it official recognition. In theory, you can’t even visit the North. Nevertheless, in the interest of acquiring the almighty tourist dollar both sides have developed a system to get around their own rules. Here’s how it works: when you go to the North your passport it is not stamped. Rather, you are handed a piece of paper that you can return, or keep as a souvenir, on your way back to the Republic. Your passport remains blank. You were never there.

Why the charade? Both sides benefit. The North is happy to get valuable tourist dollars (an eight day tour averages about $1000 Cdn, day trips from the Republic go for $100) while the Republic invites tourists to view an exhibit that at the entrance to the North that discusses the events of 1974 and the refugees who fled the violence of the Turkish invasion. And tourists can write home about their border crossing.

Many politicians see tourism as an important tool in the battle for international support. Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned Burmese opposition leader, is hoping that if more people visit her country they will understand the plight of the Burmese people and lend weigh to the pro-democracy movement. After being sentenced to 18 months of house arrest this summer, she issued a statement through the National League for Democracy, that encouraging the growth of private sector tourism so that people could learn about the oppression of the Burmese first-hand. It was a complete turnaround from her earlier positions. But if Korea and Cyprus are any indication, tourism is hardly the path to great insight. Similarly, the nature of Communism in Cuba is complicated by tourist impressions of beautiful beaches and five-star resorts. In Cuba, official tour guides tell visitors about the free liposuctions available to Cubans but don’t explain why tourists are encouraged to bring syringes and other basic medical equipment into the country.

Celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall is great because the Cold War is over and there is space to consider what the divide meant to the people of East and West Germany. But what is gained from commodifying current conflicts or divides? It’s great for novelty-seeking tourists but it is hard to see what tourism does for those behind the walls. Upon crossing the border into North Cyprus, one fellow traveler wanted “her money back.” “This is it?” she asked, as we had dinner on one side and drinks on the other. She seemed disappointed by the relaxed atmosphere. Apparently, she wanted to see tall towers and spotlights. Most shockingly, she was impervious to news that two guards had received two days of holidays for catching a would-be defector from the North the day before.

It’s a sad state of affairs when tourism blinds people to the realities of life in divided territories. The Berlin celebrations are a reminder of how wonderful tourism can be, once the divide is no more.