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

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.