It remains unclear why over 50,000 Moroccans were able to cross into the fortified Spanish exclave of Ceuta last Thursday (30 July). The European right immediately blamed Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s left-wing prime minister. Manfred Weber, the leader of the European People’s Party (EPP), the centre-right group in the European Parliament, declared that the incident was “the direct consequence of the pull factor of massive regularisation” – a reference to a decision by the Sánchez government earlier this year to allow some undocumented immigrants to apply to regularise their status. Sánchez himself said the surge into Ceuta was the result of confusion about a recent Spanish supreme court decision restricting the government’s ability to deport those who arrived in Ceuta and Melilla (the other Spanish exclave in north Africa) by sea.
Others blamed the Moroccan government and said that such a sudden surge into Ceuta could not have happened without its help. Some reports even suggested that Moroccan authorities had actually encouraged people to cross into Ceuta, which was acquired by Portugal in 1415 and can be thought of as the place where European colonialism began. A few weeks ago, Sánchez visited Algeria – with which Morocco has a competitive and fractious relationship – and promised a closer relationship and discussed importing more Algerian gas. A similar surge into Ceuta occurred in 2021 after Spain provided medical assistance to a leader of the Western Sahara independence movement, which Morocco opposes. In short, Morocco was “weaponising” migration – something that the European Union has also accused Belarus and Turkey of doing.
Whatever the explanation, the number of Moroccans who made it to Ceuta was relatively small. In that sense, the situation is not at all comparable to the refugee crisis in 2015, when over a million asylum seekers arrived in Germany. (If it’s comparable to anything from that crisis, it is the situation at Keleti railway station in Budapest in September 2015, when several thousand people gathered, trying to get to Germany.) In any case, most of those who made it into Ceuta seem now to have gone back – apparently they either had no intention of getting into the EU or quickly realised that they would not be able to. To the extent that there was a crisis, it is already over.
Predictably, however, the far right in both Europe and the United States immediately spoke of an “invasion” not just of Spain but of Europe as a whole, which had lost control of its borders and was now being overwhelmed. The incident in Ceuta quickly merged in far-right minds with the terrorist attack on the Berlin Pride parade the previous weekend as part of a general sense of threat from Muslim men – Spain’s left-wing government had opened its borders and was allowing tens of thousands of potential terrorists into Europe.
The reason why an incident like this could be turned into a European crisis at all is Schengen, which is usually referred to as the EU’s border-free zone but is actually a zone without border checks, something slightly distinct. (This should not be confused with the principle of freedom of movement within the EU, which is something quite different again – not least because it only applies to citizens of member states.) This means that, at least in theory, once a migrant is in one Schengen country, they can travel on to any other country in the Schengen area, which includes most of the EU (and also some countries outside the EU). If countries like Morocco are “weaponising” migration against the EU, it is Schengen – and Europeans’ fear of a repeat of the refugee crisis of 2015 – that enables them to do so.
On Thursday, before the facts of what had happened in Ceuta were clear, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni immediately responded by threatening to impose border controls with Spain, and Italy has since suspended its Schengen agreement with the country for one month. Denmark and Finland supported the idea, while France also strengthened its border patrols with Spain. Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš even called for Spain to be temporarily excluded from Schengen altogether. But it is simply not true that once migrants had made it into Ceuta, they could easily travel on to the European mainland – their passports would be checked before they did so. In other words, however many Moroccans had got into Ceuta, this was never going to be a crisis for the EU as a whole.
Nevertheless, the incident in Ceuta, and especially the idea that Morocco is “weaponising” migration, is likely to increase pressure for a further militarisation of the EU’s external border – a process that has already been ongoing for over a decade. Weber, the EPP leader, urged the EU to immediately implement its new Migration Pact and to further strengthen Frontex, the EU border agency, whose budget has grown from €143 million in 2015 to €1.1 billion in 2025.
Since the refugee crisis, member states have again and again re-introduced checks on the borders between them, which the Schengen agreement allows them to do temporarily – and it is not only far-right but also centrist governments that have done this. But they are unlikely to abandon Schengen altogether – the commitment of “pro-European” elites to it, mainly for economic reasons, is simply too strong. Rather, since 2015, the logic has been that if Schengen is to survive, which it must, it is essential to harden the EU’s external borders. The incident in Ceuta is therefore likely to give a further impetus to the transformation of the EU into “Fortress Europe”.
[Further reading: Trump has not solved Gaza]
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Subscribe here to commentSomething that has stood out so far in the British mainstream media is their refusal to see this for what it was: a weaponising of migrants by the Moroccans. Instead we’ve had the ludicrous alarmism of Reform politicians (‘declare a state of emergency’) and wilful ignorance of Morocco’s opposition to Spanish foreign policy (nothing about Algeria). This article does a lot to correct that perception of the crisis, yet I wonder if there is a still deeper level that would take account of Israel’s view. They have been critical of Spain’s continuing presence in Africa as a colonial power. Morocco is party to the Abraham Accords and was the first country to recognise American independence. There’s quite a few dots still to be joined here.