Tens of Thousands of Migrants Enter Ceuta from Morocco, Most Return
Morocco Opened the Gates, Spain Blinked
When a neighbour turns migration into a weapon, the state that has not raised its dykes in fair weather will drown in the first flood.
Sixty thousand people do not simply “pour” into a walled enclave by mistake. When tens of thousands swim or rush into Ceuta in a single day, and when this happens, as reported, “with the cooperation of the Moroccan state”, the first fact is not humanitarian but political: a neighbouring power has tested Spanish sovereignty with human bodies as battering rams. At least 57 and perhaps more than 70 lie dead in the water. This is the effectual truth. A state has used the misery of migrants as artillery against another state that preferred to think of its frontier as a moral question rather than a strategic one.
Spain’s first duty is not to display compassion on social media, nor to satisfy the sermons of allies, but to maintain the state. This means controlling who enters, on what terms, and at what pace. Here, by the Spanish government’s own admission, around 50,000 people cross in hours; Ceuta’s president speaks of 60,000. Most are then escorted back by soldiers and police. This is not policy. This is a rout, followed by improvised counterattack. As I wrote in The Prince, in W. K. Marriott’s translation, fortune is like a raging river that overwhelms those who have not raised dykes in time; Spain let the riverbed silt up.
Morocco has shown more virtù, though in a manner that should worry every free republic. It has looked at Europe’s divisions, Spain’s legal constraints, its past regularisation of over a million undocumented migrants, and it has seen appetites and fears ready to be exploited. To open and close a human floodgate at will is to acquire a new kind of artillery. In my day princes hired Swiss and German mercenaries; now some hire desperation. In both cases the rule is the same: whoever can unleash forces on your territory that you cannot swiftly master, owns a piece of your sovereignty at a discount.
The Spanish government replies that its border is, by European measures, one of the least porous; that it respects court rulings forbidding immediate pushbacks at sea; that most of the 48,000‑plus who entered have “voluntarily” returned under escort. All this may be true and yet useless. Laws written for calm seas become ropes around your wrists in a storm. In the Discourses I argued, with Ninian Hill Thomson’s pen, that those who found a state must assume men are bad and will give loose to their inclinations when field is free. A neighbour who has already used this route once will use it again, unless he meets a wall of both law and force.
The presence of Spanish soldiers and additional police, the escorts back to Morocco, even the deaths, are not the cruelty; they are the price of earlier softness. Severity well used is harsh and brief, and prevents a greater calamity; severity ill used is the gentle hand that lets the wound fester until amputation is needed. Here, Spain combined the vices of both. It advertised itself as a place where, in past years, over a million without papers could be regularised, and where those arriving by sea could not be immediately expelled, then tried to improvise fear on the beach. This is the middle course I always despise: it pays for the worst of both policies, enjoying the benefit of neither.
Around this breach, the larger game begins. Italy suspends Schengen with Spain. EU interior ministers hold urgent meetings. Some European leaders point fingers; others talk of solidarity. The global right, we are told, is “hyperventilating with happiness”; a distant president calls it an “invasion”. This is the tumult of the great, not of the people. Yet here too the Roman lesson holds. In a healthy republic, conflict between orders is channelled into institutions and laws; in a sick one it becomes spectacle. If Europe cannot agree on who holds the shield at its external borders, each frontier city becomes a lonely outpost, and every enclave a bargaining chip for foreign courts.
What should Spain learn from this humiliation? That borders are not defended by declarations but by arms of one’s own, and “arms” today means not only soldiers and fences but coherent law, fast procedures, real capacity to detain, process, and remove, and alliances that do not leave you begging neighbours who hold the tap. It must decide openly what volume and kind of migration it can absorb without losing order, then align its rhetoric, its courts, and its forces to that number. To appear weak is to invite the next test, this time perhaps on a rougher sea. States that live at the water’s edge either build dykes in sunshine, or they learn policy in the dark, by drowning.
From the works cited
- The Prince — Virtù versus fortuna — the raging-river figure: preparation in fair weather is the whole difference between the drowned and the dry.
- The Prince — Arms of one's own versus mercenaries and auxiliaries: power borrowed is power owed, and it will be collected at the worst moment.
- Discourses on Livy — Managed conflict between the great and the people is the source of a free state's vigor — Rome's tumults produced its liberty.