And that’s without even getting into the blatant racism and nativist, reactionary glee, which overtook events and emerged from almost every corner of the European Imaginary.
There are important differences between this incident of weaponised migration and others, such as what has been cooked up along the Polish-Belarusian border. Yet a glaring non-sequitur runs through the entire Fortress Europe narrative.
The argument falls apart at a simple question: If “Europe”—however ill-defined—is as prosperous and enviable as its proponents claim, how can those same proponents be so afraid of the world’s most desperate and disempowered people?
What’s a migrant in Morocco gonna do—the jobs that Europe badly needs filled to safeguard its own economic viability?
Touting Europe’s strength while fretting over unarmed civilians as existential threats to your supposedly superior way of life has never made sense.
The motivation of those who occupy this paradox can only be ignorance, cynicism, or a desire to preserve racial order that runs deeper than socioeconomic self-interest.
These predictable outbursts of moral panic reveal more about how weak the West is than about how dangerous any outsider might be. The reaction to Ceuta earns Europe the insults it receives from its ornery ally across the Atlantic: pathetic.
Ironically, that is for acting like the American bully—not for standing up to it. Yet in an era of low bars and broken clocks, sometimes the bully is right.
At the 2025 Munich Security Conference, US Vice President JD Vance told an audience of transatlantic liberals that “if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with”.
That truth applies equally to the United States, where I’m-with-her Clintonites prefer to project the failures of a tone-deaf presidential campaign in 2016 onto Russian interference rather than on their snubbing the votes of 80,000 “deplorables“.
Insecurity masquerades as strength and externalises itself. If Europe were truly confident in its societal advantages and systemic resilience, the response to strategic challenges—whether refugees seeking their right to asylum or a revanchist Russia struggling to hold even a corner of Ukraine—would be cool-headed composure.
A non-weapon, such as a human being crossing a border, can only be weaponised against you if you allow it.
What better way to show Russia we are “better” and the US that we are different than with a collective shrug? And then keep on doing what Europe does best: Investing in the public’s general welfare so 450 million people can enjoy their “cathedrals and lovely wines and cheeses“.
Of course, Europe is neither better nor different. It was simply able to avoid having its alleged values tested by staying out of the great-power game for longer.
Human rights and the rule of law are easy at the End of History, but the borders of belonging ebb and flow depending on how stormy the geopolitical currents are.
If even eurozone countries like Greece and Ireland can be othered when crisis hits, it costs nothing—to the contrary, much can be gained, politically—to demonise and dehumanise anyone more peripheral.
Yet those doing the demonising can still get away with the “pro-European” badge because they get to define what it means. Like obscenity was for US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, you know it when you see it.
The term has always been as vague and shifting as the idea of “Europe” itself. It often seeps into news copy, from the jargon of Brussels Bubble-speak to serve as lazy shorthand for anyone who broadly supports the prescriptive nature of centrist European consensus.
In its most idealised form, the concept is perhaps best expressed in Jens Stoltenberg’s response to a white supremacist terror attack that killed dozens of children in 2011.
As Norway’s prime minister at the time, he said that “defending our values” against extremist violence meant “more democracy”. It was a refreshingly sane answer to ideology that cannot be securitised out of existence.
Within a decade, “pro-European” itself had been securitised and so had Stoltenberg.
As NATO Secretary-General, the social democrat converted to the hard-power church of militarisation. Stoltenberg’s rhetorical register was less open, more fearful, and more civilisational—and more “pro-European” than ever.
In the same period, those the “pro-European” lot derided as “Eurosceptic” changed tactics. The Brexit disaster taught them that it was better to co-opt the system than to try to undo it. In the process, they became “pro-European” too.
Their Europe is proudly and loudly white, nationalist, and Christian—as fundamentalist as the Islamist danger they see everywhere and the Jewish settler violence they condone.
It’s a scary and dangerous version of Europe, but at least it’s more historically honest than the post-political liberal one. To its Westphalian core, Europe has always been exclusionary, imperial, and racially ordered.
The postwar “peace project” was supposed to change that, but how transformational an institution built on colonial extraction and the fossil fuel cravings of coal and steel could be is questionable.
With deportation now official policy, Israel’s genocidal and apartheid terror gone unchecked and actively enabled, and Schengen’s promise of freedom of movement increasingly in doubt, once competing visions of what it means to be “pro-Europe” have become one.
A manufactured sense of permanent crisis has allowed a state of exception to become the rule, justifying almost any deviation from the democratic norm and making fundamental rights more a privilege to earn than a right to exert.
In this climate, the EU consensus has coalesced around impulses that have repeatedly led Europe to catastrophe and unleashed eliminationist violence. The only truly pro-European position is therefore Euroscepticism—in its most humane sense.
Photograph courtesy of HazteOir.org. Published under a Creative Commons license.
