Ceuta Shows How Borders Test the Nerves of States

A strip of rock in Africa, garrisoned by Europe, is again the stage where necessity speaks louder than homilies. Around Fnideq, three kilometres from Ceuta, Moroccan police detain 111 people, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, and disperse others with gas on the hills. Spain, on its side, masses more than 1,500 officers and makes security at the breakwater “ten times stronger than the previous day”, as one of your papers reports. Earlier, Rabat warns it will prosecute organisers and participants in a mass crossing planned through messages on social channels. No one here speaks of charity. They speak of numbers, deployments, arrests. When I read that language, I know I am not in a pulpit; I am in the council chamber.

In Florence I learned that a frontier is not a line on parchment but a test of nerve and of the state’s reality. Ceuta is such a test for both Spain and Morocco. Their first incentive is not to be called good, but to remain states: to preserve territory and the monopoly on force. A mass, coordinated attempt to cross is therefore not a simple petition; it is an assault on the ordering of space and authority, whatever private misery moves each individual foot. In The Prince, in W. K. Marriott’s translation, I advised rulers to look to “the effectual truth of the thing rather than to the imagination of it”. The effectual truth here is that if thousands pass unresisted today, tomorrow the law no longer commands that shore.

Thus they act as rulers must act when fortuna begins to swell. Rabat says it is monitoring calls for a crossing on the fifteenth and threatens prosecution; then it arrests 111 before they reach the fence and drives others from the hills with gas. Madrid deploys 1,500 officers and thickens controls at the breakwater. This is the dyke raised while the water is still in the riverbed. When, in The Prince, I compared fortune to a raging river that overwhelms where there are no barriers, I meant precisely this: past surges had shown their old embankments ridiculous; now they try, belatedly but sensibly, to build higher.

Many will say the measures are harsh. They are. But severity must be judged by its whole account, not by the single image that circulates. One must ask: what follows if the crossing succeeds, is seen to succeed, and is echoed again and again? The lesson of every frontier is that an unpunished breach becomes a custom. If you are gentle at the beginning, you must often be savage at the end; and the violence then will be wider, less governed, and carried out not by officers but by frightened citizens or emboldened bands. Well-used severity, applied early and declared clearly, wounds the few to spare the many. Ill-used mercy congratulates itself while it prepares a greater calamity.

Yet I do not counsel rulers to live forever with the sword drawn and the law asleep. In the Discourses on Livy, in Ninian Hill Thomson’s version, I praised Rome because “the tumults between the nobles and the commons” strengthened her liberty when they were given institutional outlets. Here the “people” are migrants with no recognised tribunes, no legal channel strong enough to absorb their pressure, while the “great” are two states that answer first with police. The conflict is therefore managed physically, not politically. This can succeed for a time; Rome too sometimes used force on the plebs. But when a pressure is constant, to rule only by repression is like holding down the lid of a boiling pot while adding wood to the fire.

Still, between the mistake of doing nothing and the mistake of doing only this, I judge the first worse. A ruler who, from pity or fear of scandal, allows an organised breach of his frontiers invites not love but contempt. Weakness at the edge invites tests in the centre: if the state cannot guard a few kilometres of fence and sea-wall, why should its laws be obeyed in the capital? You are now governed as much by images as by decrees; a triumphant video of a mass crossing into Ceuta injures Madrid more than a parliamentary defeat. Power, now as in my day, rests on reputation as much as on arms. He who will not appear to command, soon cannot command.

However, there is a danger the rulers on both shores may not weigh. Arms alone, though necessary, cannot suffice against a phenomenon that is regular, expected, and driven by hopes and desperations that no gas cloud can disperse. If they trust only in batons and deployments, they risk slowly corrupting their own peoples, teaching them to see every stranger as an invader and their own laws only as weapons. A free state must guard its borders, yes, but also preserve the civic spirit that makes citizens willing to defend it. If you build only dykes and never canals, the flood will one day find a crack you did not strengthen, and then it will be too late to learn other arts of rule.