What happened last Thursday in Ceuta was a
border spectacle
of surprising scale and scope. Tens of thousands of mainly young fellow Moroccans stormed the gates while others braved the water to enter the enclave. All the elements of the spectacle were there: from images of boisterous youngsters jockeying for entry, to a diplomatic slanging match, to border patrols scrambling to push migrants back to Morocco.
It sounds like a geopolitical déjà vu — almost the same border antics: scene, actors, protagonists, and victims staged in May 2021. In fact, what happened in Ceuta is the third episode of the border spectacle: the first staged in May 2021, the second in September 2024, and here we are watching the third — and perhaps not the last — episode, marking a shift in Morocco’s migration diplomacy to a more coercive approach.
There is no conspiracy theory behind the Ceuta border spectacle; there is only a geopolitical buildup to understand Morocco’s coercive migration diplomacy. The latter has shifted migration governance from policies, practices, and discourses to the direct use of its youth and other racialized African migrants in diplomatic sparring.
Here is the buildup: On December 10, 2020, the Trump administration recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara. This historic moment led Morocco to garner further diplomatic recognition, especially from its traditional allies — not least Spain as a former colonizer. In January 2021, a diplomatic logjam between Morocco and Germany started to simmer following the latter’s criticism of Donald Trump’s proclamation to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. This diplomatic friction with Germany prompted Morocco to push the European Union.
Meanwhile, the possibility of meeting Morocco’s expectations, whether by the EU or its member states, proved far-fetched. The diplomatic spat between Morocco and Spain reached its nadir when the latter hosted Brahim Ghali, the leader of the Polisario Front, in April 2021 to seek medical treatment. In a tit-for-tat response, Morocco unleashed over 8,000 migrants, including around 3,000 minors. Santiago Abascal, the leader of the anti-migrant far-right Vox party in Spain, denounced the arrivals, stating Morocco was “launching minors like battering rams” against the Spanish borders.
Now, the same scenario is unfolding after Pedro Sánchez visited Algeria to parley with President Abdelmajid Tebboune over natural gas and Western Sahara.
In Europe, the border spectacle sparked a moral panic that feared the invasion of the southern flanks of Europe, raking up right-wing opprobrium over Sánchez’s progressive yet lax migration policies. Far from being an invasion, the border spectacle staged produced anti-migration fodder for far-right politicians.
The border spectacle has resurfaced the centuries-old colonization of Ceuta and Melilla.
The international public that redeems Sánchez as the proponent of the Palestinian cause and progressive migration reforms is bewildered by Ceuta’s tiny geography at the outer fringe of the African continent, wondering how Spain, and for that matter Europe, will be invaded while in Africa. Some historical context is urgent here to disentangle these “only land borders between Africa and EUrope.”
Depending on one’s geopolitical stance, Ceuta and Melilla are at once enclaves and exclaves. From the colonial standpoint of Spain and the European Union, they are seen as exclaves, embodying the external sovereign extension of Spain and, more recently, Europe. In most academic literature, however, the two cities are enclaves standing as the last remnants of European colonization on the African continent. For Moroccans, the two cities are occupied territories, whose recovery remains an unfinished national project of decolonization.
The dispute over Ceuta and Melilla has shaped a long history of sporadic tensions in the relationship between Morocco and Spain. Its historical roots extend back to the Reconquista (c. 718–1492), culminating in the fall of Al-Andalus, and ended with the expulsion of the Moors, between 718 and 1492, from the Iberian Peninsula to North Africa.
Spain extended its sovereignty beyond the Peninsula to vie for external territorial sovereignty in North Africa, seizing Melilla in 1497 and Ceuta — initially conquered by Portugal in 1415 and then ceded to Spain — in 1668. The two towns served as external bulwarks for the clash between the
Ummah
of Islam and Christendom. Well …