Fifteen days after 80,000 young people swam across the border separating Morocco from Ceuta, the origin of the incident remains shrouded in the fog that defines relations between Spain and the neighboring African country.
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Jean Raspail published The Camp of the Saints in 1973. In the novel, a fleet loaded with hundreds of thousands of poor people runs aground on the French beaches. The continent’s elites hesitate on how to respond. The incident turns into a serious institutional crisis and ultimately leads to the dissolution of Western society.
In 2011, another Frenchman, Renaud Camus, revisited Raspail’s demographic nightmare and published The Great Replacement. If the first book is a dystopia, the second is a political essay. His thesis is that the migratory pressure on Europe is not the product of demographic dynamics, but a project driven by shadow elites.
Raspail was a traditionalist Catholic, nostalgic for the old order. Camus started on the woke left. They were united only by their concern about immigration and rejection of multicultural society. Both were talented writers, but their success came with two works that were denounced by critics.
The ideas of Raspail and Camus remained marginal until the far right began to gain space in the European debate. The Syrian civil war was one of the triggers. Between 2015 and 2016, Germany hosted 850,000 Syrian refugees. During that period, an anti-euro party on the periphery of the German political system, the AfD, focused all its policy on rejecting immigration. Its voting expectations improved.
Images of the Syrian exodus, of entire families wandering through the Balkans heading north, filled European news for two years. But they did not have the impact caused by the 80,000 young Moroccans and sub-Saharan Africans who between July 30 and 31 swam across the Moroccan border with Ceuta.
For 48 hours, an anthill of exhausted young people – 140 drowned – roamed a city with the population locked in their homes and shop shutters down. The videos from those hours are now part of the European far-right imagery, the closest portrait, due to its intensity and massiveness, to the “invasion” referred to by the two French writers. Written these days by an analyst from their orbit: “Ceuta was an accelerated vision of Europe’s future.”
Immigration has a great corrosive capacity on the unity of the European Union
What led thousands of young people to cross the border? Spain blamed social networks and migrant trafficking mafias. Morocco remained silent for four days. But the inaction of its authorities made people think that someone, in the hermetic network of interests around King Mohammed VI (the so-called Majzen), could have used the incidents to probe Spain’s reaction capacity.
Morocco has built stadiums, high-speed lines, and a large industrial port opposite Gibraltar. It manufactures cars and planes and exports fertilizers. The country grows at a rate of 4.8%, but its social system does not work, and many young people think their future lies in leaving.
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Morocco has known how to adapt to the new world disorder. The signing of the Abraham Accords with Israel earned it an ally that supplies espionage programs like Pegasus. In the hours following the incident, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, wondered why Spain maintains two colonial enclaves in Africa (referring to Ceuta and Melilla). The U.S., which supports Rabat in its annexation of the Sahara and sympathizes with its claims over the two autonomous cities, took advantage of the events to attack the government’s migration policy. Russia said nothing, but there are analysts who also mention it, for its ability to be involved in all the sauces that could destabilize Europe.
In contrast, Spain defends the old order. Its economy is ten times larger than Morocco’s. It relies on China for its automotive industry, is a tourist power, and practices immigrant regularization policies criticized by other European capitals, despite having done the same.
Spanish President Pedro Sánchez is the most prominent European leader in rejecting Israel’s policy in Gaza. And also the greatest antagonist of Trump, whom he has prevented from using bases on Spanish soil during the Iran war. None of this excites his European partners, who favor appeasing the American.
Relations between Spain and Morocco are complex and not very transparent. The equation includes trade relations: Spain is Morocco’s main customer. And also migration policy: Spain, and with it the European Union, has delegated to the African country the containment of migratory flow. But one must not forget the political-emotional aspect: Spain’s colonial past in the region.
In 2021, Spain hosted a seriously ill Sahrawi independence leader, which outraged Rabat. In response, thirty days later, 8,000 young people jumped the Ceuta fence. This summer, it is unclear what may have triggered the crisis, perhaps Sánchez’s visit to Algeria, Morocco’s natural competitor in the Maghreb.
Morocco is a rising country in the new global disorder. As Trump would say: it has the cards
The 2021 crisis cost Sánchez’s government a change of policy in the region and acceptance of the Sahara’s integration into Morocco. It is legitimate to ask what the price of this latest incident will be (there are still at least 4,000 young people who arrived by swimming in Ceuta). The silence endorses this doubt. To the perplexity of observers, Sánchez, who has described what happened as a “violation of Spain’s territorial integrity,” has not convened parliament to explain himself. And in view of the concern caused by the call on social networks for a new assault on Ceuta (and perhaps Melilla) on August 15, the only thing that seems clear is that only Morocco holds the key to the border.
The crisis has shown how corrosive immigration is for the unity of the EU. Turkey in 2015 with Greece and Belarus with Poland in 2021 already used immigration as a form of hybrid warfare on the continent’s borders. But instead of reading what is happening in Ceuta in that key, leaders like Giorgia Meloni or Mette Frederiksen have preferred to blame Spain and reinstate border controls, in Italy’s case. Their only concern has been the effects of the crisis on their electoral expectations in a Europe where the far right today occupies a space increasingly close to its center of gravity.
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