Spanish PM calls for urgent EU meeting after ‘selfish’ responses to Ceuta crisis

August 2, 2026.

They have won. They have the union, the treaties, the shared institutions, the single market. They have the flag. And now, at the first real pressure, they look at each other across the table and see not partners, but foreigners. The crisis arrives, and the coalition of convenience reveals itself. The shared project was prosperity, and the shared enemy was the memory of war. But a boat full of desperate people is a different enemy. It is not a memory; it is a fact. And against a fact, the coalition has no shared language, only a scramble for national advantage they call “sovereignty.”

This is the old, bitter lesson. You build the grand alliance against the empire, and you win. Then you must govern the morning after the victory, and you find the alliance was only ever an agreement on what to destroy. Building requires a common vision of what should be, and that vision does not exist. It is a constitution written for a people who are not yet a people. Madrid calls for a union; Paris and Berlin and Warsaw calculate the domestic cost. They are not betraying the idea; they are revealing that the idea was always a parchment shield against a reality it was never meant to face.

The enclave is a perfect, terrible symbol. A fragment of Europe grafted onto another continent, held by history and force. The union itself is such an enclave - a fragment of an ideal, grafted onto a continent of old jealousies and older fears. When the tide of need rises, the walls are tested. And each member looks to their own section of the wall, blaming the others for the water at their feet. They call the responses “selfish.” But what did they expect? The institution was designed for fair weather. The storm was always coming. The tragedy is not the failure of solidarity, but the belief that solidarity could be legislated into existence without a common soul to animate it. We plowed the sea. They are building a dike of sand. The tide is patient, and it always returns.

“Selfish.” “Polarising.” “Unlawful.” Three adjectives flung like stones - each one a shield against the question of why the enclave exists at all. The grammar of crisis management: first the moral condemnation of those who react, then the passive construction (“mass crossing”) to obscure who crossed, from where, under what conditions. The crossing did not happen; it was “mass.” The reaction is not policy; it is “polarising.” The adjectives do the work of analysis so the analysis need not be done.

And the call for a meeting - always the meeting, the urgent convocation where nothing will be decided except the need for further meetings. The crisis is not in the crossing but in the language that describes it: “enclave,” not colony; “reaction,” not violence; “urgent,” not overdue. The words are the crisis, and the crisis is the words.

They will meet. They will speak. The adjectives will multiply. The enclave will remain. The crossing will be “managed.” And the language will again have done its only real work: to make the intolerable sound like policy.

I have read today of a crisis at a gate, and of the reaction to it. The gate is in a wall, and the wall is in Africa, though it belongs to a European power. A great many people, driven by need or hope, have sought to pass through this gate. This is presented as a crisis. I find myself wondering what constitutes the crisis: the movement of people, or the wall itself? But one must not ask such questions directly.

The Prime Minister of Spain has declared the responses of certain other nations to be ‘selfish’. He calls for an urgent meeting. This is, I am told, a polarising and unlawful reaction. It is a curious thing, to label a reaction as unlawful. Is not the law itself often a reaction to a prior condition? But I digress.

What strikes me most is the language of the garden, applied here to nations. Each nation tends its own plot, builds its own fence, and declares the weeds to be blowing in from the neighbour’s untidy yard. When the wind carries seeds over the fence, the gardeners meet in solemn congress to discuss the selfishness of the wind. They draft declarations on the proper direction of the breeze. They do not, it seems, consider that the soil on their side of the fence is what makes the seeds sprout so vigorously.

They will meet, these gardeners. They will speak of solidarity and burden-sharing. They will, I am sure, produce a document of admirable complexity. It will have many clauses. It will satisfy the legal minds and offend the humanitarian ones, or perhaps the reverse. And through it all, the fundamental arithmetic will remain: there is more need outside the wall than there is room, or welcome, inside it.

The truly philosophical mind must see the silver lining. Such meetings are excellent for the hoteliers and interpreters of Brussels. They provide employment for clerks and printers. They allow statesmen to be seen being statesmanlike. And they offer the rest of us a valuable lesson in metaphysics, demonstrating how a thing can be both urgently necessary and eternally deferred. One might call it the best of all possible processes.

For my part, I shall attend to my own small patch of earth. It is a humble thing, but its boundaries are clear, and I find the work of tending it to be a remedy for grander confusions.