The word "neighbour" is doing a lot of work today
In Kyiv, neighbourliness this week looked like missiles landing before sunrise, killing at least eight people. Moscow calls Ukraine a brother nation. Brothers, apparently, get cruise missiles for breakfast.
Meanwhile in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the North African coast, neighbourliness looked like something smaller and less cinematic: a government reversing itself. Madrid had been holding roughly 500 unaccompanied migrant children in Ceuta rather than transferring them to the mainland. This week it reversed course and will let them go. No missile, no headline drama — just a bureaucracy admitting it had drawn the line in the wrong place, and moving it.
These are not equivalent stories. One is an act of war against a sovereign country; the other is an administrative correction inside a functioning democracy. But put side by side, they say something useful about what "cooperation between neighbours" actually requires, as opposed to what it merely claims.
Slogans versus habits
Every authoritarian government loves the vocabulary of neighbourliness. Russia speaks of "brotherly peoples." It is a slogan, and slogans are cheap precisely because they cost the speaker nothing and the listener everything.
A habit is different. A habit is something you do even when it is inconvenient, even when reversing yourself makes you look, briefly, as though you were wrong the first time. Spain's decision on the Ceuta children is a habit of a mature democracy: notice the harm, absorb the embarrassment, fix it. No revolution required. No tanks. Just the ordinary machinery of accountable government doing what it is built to do.
Consider, too, the more distant case of accountability making noise this week: Israel confirming an investigation into the killing of Hind Rajab, and Australia's public anger over Israel's decision not to prosecute over the death of an aid worker in Gaza. Whatever one thinks of the underlying events, notice the mechanism — a government being asked, by its own citizens and by an allied democracy abroad, to answer for what its soldiers did. That asking, however imperfect, however incomplete, is itself a form of cross-border neighbourliness. You do not audit strangers you have given up on. You audit people you still expect to answer you.
Russia does not do this. There is no Russian equivalent of Australia's outrage, no internal mechanism asking Moscow to explain Kyiv's missiles, because the entire point of the system is that no one gets to ask.
The unglamorous case for the EU model
European cooperation is rarely thrilling to describe. It produces committees, delayed tariffs, reversed housing policies, and long arguments about children in transit camps — including, elsewhere in the news, more than a thousand Afghan refugees still waiting in Qatar since 2021, a reminder that even democracies can let a promise go stale if no one keeps checking.
But the unglamorous parts are the actual product. A union of states that can admit an error about 500 children and correct it within the ordinary press cycle is demonstrating something Moscow's missiles cannot: that power answerable to citizens tends, eventually, to notice its own mistakes. That is not a small thing. It is the entire difference between a neighbour and an occupier.
A question worth sitting with
So what makes someone a neighbour — proximity, or reciprocity? Russia is geographically closer to Ukraine than Australia is to Gaza, yet only one of those relationships currently contains anything resembling mutual accountability.
The golden rule was never a slogan either. It is a habit, tested daily in unglamorous decisions: whether to let the children through, whether to open the investigation, whether to answer when someone asks you to explain yourself. Europe's cooperation is worth defending not because it is inspiring on a poster, but because, this week, it corrected itself. Ask the alternative to do the same.