In the last few decades, the world has been witnessing contradictory processes of accelerating consequences of globalization on one side and the border-hardening on the other. The European Union has become a theatre, where a difussion of these inconsistent phenomenons has become the most visible. Paradoxically, at the Schengen external border ideas of borderless and gated worlds are converging. Although the process of border hardening is anything but new in the system of states, the reasoning is changing. Although the prophets of borderless world arguing that border walls, as the strongest markers of political territoriality, is waning and the institution of the sovereign state is in retreat or anachronistic, has been proven to be wrong over the past few years, a comprehensive theory explaining why the states build walls is still missing. With the latest development at the EU´s external border and in the US, general assumption is that the process of the increasing enclosure of political space between sovereign states through the border-hardening process is closely linked to illegal or uncontrolled migration flows. According to Rosiére and Jones, the era of teichopolitics (coined by Ballif and Rosière (2009)) is aiming at controlling cross-border flows, undesired flows from impoverished global periphery (source countries of migration). While according to Rosiére and Jones, rising fences and walls are symbols of the emergence of a privileged world trying to keep those unprivileged ones out. Similarly the Political Economic Theory of Wall Construction introduced by Carter and Poast (2015) emphasizes the cross-border economic inequality as the most important indicator of border hardening. The contribution argues, that the whole phenomenon requires a comprehensive approach as both theories of teichopolitics and the Political Economic Theory of Wall Construction simply ignore some empirical findings.
