On this morning’s Statement staff call, my colleague Elisabeth Dampier made a point about the scenes unfolding in the Spanish city of Ceuta and the likely political impact across Europe. Migration, she said, is increasingly removing the basic rights and freedoms of regular European citizens.
One does not need to look far to see the point she was making in action. Last night, Michel Barnier, rivaled only by Ursula von der Leyen for the title of definitive modern Eurocrat, declared that the French government should give serious consideration to closing the border with Spain. Along the Pyrenees, a Donald Trump-style wall would not be necessary, but alarm has now reached such a level in European capitals that freedom of movement for European citizens is under real threat, through no fault of their own.
That such measures must now be considered – including border checks within Europe and reviews of the Schengen Agreement – represents the apotheosis of political failure. The scenes from Ceuta simply provide visual confirmation of the same thing.
A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words
The scenes themselves require no narration: thousands of men – and they are, almost entirely, men – forcibly crossing a European border without facing any significant resistance. There can be no mistaking these men for refugees. This writer, as it happens, has been to Morocco on several recent occasions. The country is as far from being an impoverished, war-torn, human-rights-abusing hell as it is possible to be on the African continent. It is a relatively wealthy modern kingdom, slated to host the next World Cup. There is no objective need for thousands of young men to flee from it.
What is happening instead is transparently opportunistic: migrants seeking the imagined riches of Europe pour across an undefended border, confident that their crime will not be punished.
That it is happening in Spain is no coincidence, because that is the country which, under Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, has actively decided that immigration laws are effectively optional and that breaching them should be rewarded. Just this year, Spain decided to hand out citizenship to more than three million people who had broken its laws and taken up residence within its borders illegally. When a country and a people signal this kind of weakness, nobody should be surprised when the signal is received and acted upon.
A Disturbing Historical Resonance
Those who do not understand history are, it is said, doomed to repeat it. Alas, it is also true that those who do understand history are doomed to watch everybody else repeat it. What history shows, very clearly, is that great mass migrations such as that presently underway into Europe have a tendency to kill civilizations.
Between 376, when Rome admitted the Visigoths, and 439, when its African province was overrun by the mass migration of a group of immigrants whose infamous impact bequeathed the world their name – the Vandals – the empire’s failure to protect its borders from mass migration shattered what remained of its civilization, at least in part by shattering faith in imperial authority.
That is far from the only example. In the sixth and seventh centuries, unchecked Slavic migration into the Balkans eventually destroyed Byzantine imperial authority over those regions. That bequeathed us the modern peoples of that region, but at the cost of the empire's ability to govern one of its most important provinces.
Nor are such stories unique to Europe: in the 400s AD, the Jin dynasty permitted the unchecked migration of what it called the five barbarian tribes – the Xiongnu, Jie, Di, Qiang and Xianbei – into north-western China. Those peoples eventually formed their own states and armies, destroying the dynasty that permitted their entry.
This is not, for the avoidance of doubt, a jeremiad against all migration. But one need only look to Ceuta to see that the present events on Europe’s borders bear far more resemblance to the circumstances described above than they do to any theoretical idea of a balanced and fair migration policy worthy of a modern state.
A Gut Check for Europe
This is a gut-check moment for Europe. The impact that scenes like those in Ceuta, and in Lampedusa before it, are having on the continent’s politics and culture is undeniable. Brussels can rail all it wants about the wrongthink of Germany’s AfD or the dangers of Le Pen in France, but without Ceuta, there is no AfD, and without decades of mass migration on this scale, there is no Le Pen.
What the peoples of Europe are doing is what their own leaders will not do: they are reaching for a defense mechanism, however imperfect.
Further, Ceuta destroys the credibility of mainstream politics in Europe in a way that everyone, it appears, other than mainstream politicians, can see. When hard-right activists like Martin Sellner and Eva Vlaardingerbroek say “Europe is being invaded” and mainstream politicians deny it, the voter needs only look to Ceuta for visual confirmation of who is closer to the truth and who is deluding themselves.
Sovereign Irrelevance or Civilizational Decline?
It is not racist to desire to stop a horde of foreign men literally storming your beaches. In fact, preventing hordes of foreign men from storming one’s beaches or borders is the primary historical purpose of states. People did not give up their freedom to kings, emperors and potentates because they enjoyed paying taxes: they surrendered sovereignty to sovereigns entirely in return for protection and safety.
In Europe, the sovereigns, elected though they may be, are failing to provide it.
In a sane Europe, the scenes in Ceuta would first spell doom for the rotten government of Pedro Sánchez in Spain. They would secondly bring about an emergency summit on migration and border control, with two or three clear proposals, including one that says that a country which fails to protect its borders is automatically stripped of free-movement rights and will have its borders controlled by the rest of Europe. Third – and perhaps this is wishcasting – they should bring about an apology from those leaders who have insisted for years that mass inward migration is a problem of the right-wing imagination, rather than the foremost civilizational issue facing the continent.
Alas, Europeans can be fairly confident that none of those things will happen. Perhaps, like Rome in 376, our civilization has simply become too tired to continue.
