A fence is not a policy
Somewhere between fifty-seven and sixty-seven people have died this week trying to reach a strip of Spanish land attached to Africa by nothing but a fence and a treaty. Tens of thousands crossed. Tens of thousands are now crossing back, toward Morocco, in scenes nobody planned and nobody controls. The European Union has called an emergency meeting. Interior ministers will sit at a table on Tuesday and try to describe, in careful language, something that happened over a weekend in ordinary shoes.
It is worth asking, calmly, what an emergency meeting is for. Is it to manage a border, or to manage the appearance of managing a border? Pedro Sánchez built a reputation as a friend to migrants; now he faces the oldest trap in democratic politics — the gap between the values a leader campaigns on and the arithmetic a country can actually carry. That gap is not hypocrisy. It is the honest shape of the problem. Any government that pretends otherwise, in either direction, is not being brave. It is being lazy.
Two truths that refuse to cancel each other
Here is the first truth: human beings crossing a border in desperation are not a security threat by nature. They are neighbours whose luck ran out somewhere south of the fence, and the golden rule does not pause at Ceuta. A union that speaks of human rights in Brussels and lets people drown or crush each other at Ceuta is a union speaking two languages at once.
Here is the second truth, less comfortable to say out loud: solidarity that is not sustainable is not solidarity, it is a slogan. A town, a country, a continent can absorb people — but not without limit, not without planning, not without the schools, jobs, and housing to receive them with dignity rather than dump them in tents. Pretending capacity is infinite insults both the newcomer, who deserves competence, and the citizen, who deserves honesty.
The wise position sits between these truths, not above them. Reception with humanity; management with rules; and above all, coordination — because no single Mediterranean country should be left alone with a fence that Europe as a whole decided to draw.
Why "the EU" is not a dirty word this week
It has become fashionable in several capitals to treat European cooperation as a costume rather than a commitment — useful for subsidies, optional for burdens. Ceuta is the test of that fashion. If interior ministers arrive Tuesday only to trade blame, the meeting will have failed before it starts. If they arrive to actually share the load — processing, resources, resettlement, and yes, honest limits — then "the EU" earns its name as something more than a customs union with a flag.
This is also, oddly, where Europe's voice to the rest of the world is decided. A continent that cannot coordinate a few thousand crossings at its own southern edge has little standing to lecture anyone about order elsewhere — whether in Kyiv, where nine people died overnight under Russian bombardment while air defences strain, or in any capital where power is tested against people. Credibility abroad is built at home, at fences, in committee rooms nobody photographs.
The wider table
Europe's usefulness in the world was never going to be military dominance or moral perfection. It was meant to be the demonstration that democracies can disagree loudly and still govern together — that a Spaniard, a Pole, and a German can sit at one table and produce something more humane than any of them could alone. That is worth defending, and worth doing properly, especially when the cameras are pointed at a fence rather than a summit hall.
So here is a modest, unglamorous standpoint: support the emergency meeting, but judge it by outcomes, not photographs. Ask whether ministers leave Tuesday with shared numbers and shared costs, or merely shared statements. A union is proven not in its treaties but in its Tuesdays.