There are occasions when the European Union’s capacity for self-parody becomes almost impressive, even when it is predictable, as the readout from today’s Council of Ministers meeting to discuss the Ceuta crisis certainly was.
A recap: last week, tens of thousands of migrants crossed the EU’s external border from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Scores of people died. Reception facilities were overwhelmed. Thousands remained sleeping on beaches. European governments restored checks on travelers arriving from Spain, while questions mounted about Spanish intelligence failures, Moroccan involvement and the credibility of Madrid’s increasingly inventive statistics.
On Tuesday, EU interior ministers convened an emergency meeting to consider this catastrophe, and whether any urgent action might be needed.
Their conclusion? Spain had done a splendid job. Just splendid.
Spain Praised for "Swift and Effective" Response
The official Council readout says that EU governments were “united in expressing strong solidarity with Spain”. Ministers “appreciated the swift and effective efforts of Spanish authorities” and accepted that the “very large majority” of those who entered Ceuta had been returned to Morocco.
There had also, ministers were assured, been no significant onward movement into mainland Spain or other EU countries. Nothing to see here, then. Border secure. Crisis over. Please stop asking awkward questions.
It is worth considering what the EU has just described as “swift and effective”.
According to Spain’s interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, approximately 72,000 migrants entered Ceuta and 70,000 have now returned to Morocco. Earlier Spanish estimates had put the number of arrivals at closer to 50,000, while Madrid subsequently claimed that 69,500 people had returned.
The number supposedly returned was therefore, for a time, nearly 20,000 higher than the estimated number that had arrived. This discrepancy has not prevented the European Commission from treating Spanish figures as authoritative.
Local officials in Ceuta, meanwhile, estimated that between 3,000 and 5,000 migrants remained in the enclave as recently as Monday. Its reception centers had “collapsed”, while the authorities were processing 862 unaccompanied minors who cannot simply be pushed back across the border.
Council of Ministers versus Math: Who Wins?
The official Spanish numbers, the local numbers and the original estimates cannot all be simultaneously correct. The EU’s solution to this difficulty was not to seek independent verification. It was to repeat Madrid’s preferred formulation that the “very large majority” had returned.
This is how accountability works in modern Europe. A national government presents its own assessment of its own performance to a meeting convened partly at its own request. The European Commission endorses that assessment. Other governments are invited to express solidarity. The resulting communiqué is then presented as the collective judgment of Europe.
Spain investigated Spain and found that Spain had done very well.
There was, naturally, no announcement of an independent inquiry into how such an enormous number of people reached the border without an adequate response. There was no attempt to reconcile the contradictory figures. There was no new Frontex deployment, no immediate border-security package and no concrete action against any state suspected of facilitating the crossings.
Instead, ministers agreed that Europe should improve “early-warning systems”, including pre-frontier intelligence and social-media monitoring. They also called for better-coordinated communications to combat “foreign information manipulation and interference”.
The border was breached by tens of thousands of people, and Brussels has concluded that the communications strategy requires improvement. As ever.
Morocco Avoids Scrutiny
The question of Morocco was treated with similar delicacy. Ceuta’s regional president, Juan Jesús Vivas, has said there is a widespread belief that Morocco allowed, encouraged or even orchestrated the influx. Morocco has previously demonstrated its willingness to use migration pressure against Spain, most notoriously during the 2021 Ceuta crisis.
Madrid, however, has praised Moroccan cooperation and insists that Rabat helped return the migrants without imposing conditions. The Council’s response was to say that Europe requires “deep partnerships with third countries” – as if the country on the other side of the Ceuta fence were an unidentified theoretical partner rather than Morocco.
The EU is now so dependent upon neighboring states to control migration that it is reluctant even to ask whether one of those states deliberately opened the tap. Morocco understands this perfectly. It can apply pressure to Spain, watch Europe panic and then receive praise for helping to relieve the pressure it is accused of creating.
What, then, did Tuesday’s emergency meeting actually achieve?
Meeting Achieves Exactly What It Was Supposed to
Spain received the political absolution it wanted. The Commission validated Madrid’s disputed account of events. Governments that had questioned Spanish border management were told that solidarity required them to stop doing so. Everything substantive was postponed until meetings of interior ministers and EU leaders in October.
By then, the beaches may have been cleared and the photographs forgotten. The dead will remain dead, but the crisis will have been absorbed into the European vocabulary of “partnerships”, “situational awareness” and “coherent communication”.
The EU has not established how many people entered Ceuta. It does not know with confidence how many remain. It has not explained how the border collapsed, whether warnings were missed or what role Morocco played.
But it has established the important thing.
Spain did a great job.