The rush on Ceuta has deep historical roots. Several clear precedents prove that the massive violation of sovereignty on July 29, 2026, was predictable. Should no consequences be drawn from these events once again, further escalations are already preprogrammed. For example, Moroccan authorities have so far not even allowed most sub-Saharan refugees to reach the border.
In the shadow of an insufficient historical awareness, a threat scenario was able to build up unnoticed on Europe’s southwestern flank. For centuries, Arab pirates had rendered the Mediterranean unsafe, plundered port cities, and abducted people into slavery. However, the mistress of the seas during the colonial era, the British naval fleet, was either unable or rather unwilling to put a stop to it. Only when the pirate strongholds in North Africa—Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers—attempted to extort protection money from the merchant fleet of the young USA did the US Navy under Thomas Jefferson put an end to these activities in the Barbary Wars (1801–1805 and 1815–1816). It was simultaneously the supposedly final clarification of the hierarchy between two civilizations—the European-Western and the Islamic-Oriental.
Yet since then, Western civilization has been weakening itself through disunity, civil wars, and world wars. While the population of Arab countries has roughly tenfold in the past 100 years, in the Western cultural sphere it has less than doubled and is now shrinking as a result of a collapse in birth rates.
Besides demographics, a Western foreign policy characterized by irrational appeasement above all undermines the stability of the hierarchy settled in 1816—as the recent events in Ceuta confirm.
Together with Melilla, the small enclave forms the remnant of a Spanish territory in North Africa that, until 1969, also included Ifni (at the latitude of the Canary Islands) and, until 1975, Western Sahara. In 1957, a military challenge to the old order occurred when Moroccan troops instigated the Ifni War, but failed. Yet even earlier than in the ongoing conflict over Palestine, the Islamic side learned that the nations of Western civilization cannot be conquered by military power alone. Just 12 years later, in 1969, Morocco succeeded through diplomatic efforts in persuading Spain to hand over Ifni. The main argument was not the geographical character of an enclave, but the Moroccan population majority.
Very soon, the Spanish had to realize that appeasement without guarantees and counter-performance inevitably leads to growing demands. In 1975, armed conflicts broke out again, this time in the border area with Western Sahara. With only 75,000 inhabitants, the territory was then one of the most sparsely populated areas on Earth. The Moroccan government exploited this demographic weakness in October 1975 for an unprecedented action: the Green March. Around 350,000 Moroccans crossed the border with the force of the mass, thereby violating both Spanish sovereignty and the will of the predominantly Bedouin population. For even without a referendum, it was clear to independent observers that a distinct majority favored independence rather than annexation to Morocco.
Yet the strategy of the mass rush prevailed. Although almost all of the 350,000 people returned, Morocco annexed Western Sahara. The US government has already recognized this territorial acquisition. There is only a single formal concession: Western Sahara is to receive autonomy within the Kingdom of Morocco. However, this status comes too late for the native Sahrawis, because the population has increased significantly in the meantime and today consists predominantly of Moroccan immigrants.
1975 was also the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War, which lasted until 1990. Negligently ignored in Europe, demographic effects were used there as a weapon as well. In the resulting migration movement, hundreds of thousands of people gained entry to Europe, but not only truly persecuted Christians, who at the time still constituted the majority in the country, but also Muslims. Together with differing birth rates, this civil war has left behind a today predominantly Muslim Lebanon. The parallelly initiated Islamic expansion in Europe now overwhelms all well-meaning integration efforts and instead creates the breeding ground for a Sharia Islam resistant to reform.
Since these beginnings in Lebanon which were ignored in Europe, Islamist leaders in the Middle East and North Africa have recognized and exploited the benefit of widespread suffering of their civilians in wars and civil wars. https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/06/11/hamas-leader-yahya-sinwar-depicts-palestinian-casualties-as-necessary-sacrifices/
No other mechanism allows them to achieve their goals so effectively as setting off refugee flows toward Europe while media coverage ensures broad sympathy.
The maximization of European appeasement predictably had and has further demands and disrespect as a consequence. In May 2021, events unfolded at Ceuta's border crossings—a precedent to the rush of July 2026. At that time, around 8,000 to 10,000 people made it into the enclave, across border fences and partly with swimming aids across the sea. In doing so, the intruders relied on Article 33 of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention, according to which individuals may not be expelled or turned away at the border to a country where they face persecution. This assumes the necessity of an individual case review. These individual proceedings force European legal systems into an immense effort that has long exceeded the limits of proportionality. In addition to the aforementioned Article 33 of the Geneva Refugee Convention, Article 4 of the 4th Additional Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights, also stands in the way of sustainably practical solutions, as it declares collective expulsions inadmissible.
In the case of the illegal rush on Ceuta in 2021, however, judges at the European Court of Human Rights drew a line. They clarified that persons who, while avoiding legal entry options, use the path-clearing effect of the mass to cross the border by force forfeit their right to an individual case review.
For the deployment of demographics as a weapon in the competition of cultures, this principle-guided judicial decision presented a disruptive obstacle. The correspondingly predictable renewed violation of sovereignty in the summer of 2026 has indeed produced a judicial decision that seeks to dilute the 2021 stance. Now, a distinction is to be made as to whether someone entered clearly illegally as a swimmer or fence-climber, or through the gates that could no longer be controlled. Such hair-splitting undermines the rule of law oriented toward clear principles, because exploiting the force of the mass when passing through a gate is an act of violence through which individualized claims must be considered lost.
Yet even this clear legal stance is being challenged through an adventurously inconsistent setting of priorities. Because asylum law protects against torture and death in extreme cases, it is regarded as an inalienable right that is not forfeited even by one's own acts of violence. This, however, grants asylum law an unfair priority over the sovereignty claim of states—in practice, the protection of asylum seekers over the right of nations to maintain their constitutional order.
The significance of the constitutional order is grossly underestimated in this context, for the life, freedom, and well-being of all residents depend on it, including those of asylum seekers already accepted. Anyone who uses the mass to force a border crossing (whether over the fence or through an unguardable gate) thereby demonstrates a lack of willingness to respect the very same constitutional order that they subsequently wish to claim for themselves.
A solid benchmark exists for assessing the value of an existing constitutional order compared to the value of an individual's life. This benchmark becomes recognizable at the latest in times of war, when thousands to millions of individual human lives are sacrificed in defense of sovereignty—which is thus evaluated as exorbitantly high.
This real value of the constitutional order enters current asylum practice decidedly too little and continues, among other things, in the unprincipled toleration of Sharia courts. In view of increasing autocratic tendencies worldwide, the long-term stabilization of the remaining free constitutional states must be accorded a significantly higher appreciation. If, on the other hand, developments are accepted that over a few decades bring us ever closer to a shift in majority proportions like in Lebanon, then something must be wrong with the priorities.