The Ceuta Crisis: Europe’s Low Crisis Resilience and the Geopolitical Test for Schengen

Political impact

However, there is a significant paradox here. While the EU’s rhetoric of solidarity has grown stronger, its actual policy response continues to be largely driven by securitization and externalization. While the New Pact aims to institutionalize the sharing of responsibilities among member states, the measures that came to the fore in the early days of the Sebta crisis included internal border controls, accelerated returns, maritime barriers, and support for Morocco’s border capacity. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s statement following the crisis that more support could be provided to Morocco on border management was one of the most concrete indicators of this trend. In other words, while the EU’s institutional learning is progressing at the technical level, its political learning is not keeping pace.

The scale of the crisis’s political impact is even more striking when compared to general migration trends. According to EU Council data, there was a 37 percent decline in irregular entries across the Union during the first six months of 2026. Nevertheless, the surge in Ceuta over the course of just a few days has reignited debates across Europe about the future of the Schengen Area. This situation demonstrates that in migration policy, sudden surges, the circulation of dramatic imagery, and fears of secondary movements can be more decisive factors in shaping political decisions than overall numbers. In this sense, Ceuta has revealed not only Europe’s border capacity but also how quickly the perception of a crisis can alter political behavior. It is precisely at this point that a broader issue—which could be described as “Europe’s low crisis resilience”—becomes apparent. In a well-functioning crisis management system, a shock automatically triggers predefined common mechanisms. In the EU, however, crises often lead not to the consolidation of common rules but to the proliferation of national exceptions. While member states benefit from the mobility, security, and economic advantages provided by the common area in normal times, they renationalize risks in times of crisis. Solidarity thus ceases to be an automatic reflex and becomes a political bargaining chip that is renegotiated after every crisis.

The humanitarian issues in Ceuta that remained unresolved as of mid-August also illustrate the cost of this structural shortfall. The fact that thousands of people are stranded in the city, that reception centers have exceeded their capacity, and that there are issues regarding shelter in open areas and, in particular, the safety of women, serves as a reminder that “border protection” and “crisis management” are not the same thing. The return of a large portion of the migrants to Morocco within a short period may have alleviated the acute pressure; however, this has not eliminated the economic, social, legal, and geopolitical dynamics that gave rise to the Ceuta crisis. Therefore, the Ceuta crisis is not a sign that the Schengen Agreement has come to an end, but rather that the political resilience of European integration in the face of crises remains limited. The real threat is not the temporary passport controls themselves. The more fundamental problem lies in the fragility of member states’ trust in common mechanisms and the EU’s increasing reliance on cooperation with third countries for the security of its external borders. Ceuta has become a testing ground where these two vulnerabilities have emerged simultaneously.

The true success of the new Migration and Asylum Pact will not depend solely on how many people are resettled, how many millions of euros are allocated, or how much the external borders are strengthened. The decisive question is whether, when the next shock hits, Europe will retreat back behind its national borders, or whether it will be able to transform solidarity from an option negotiated after a crisis into an automatic political reflex that kicks in during a crisis. The initial answer provided by Sebte, however, is not very optimistic at this point.

(Originally published in Turkish by Kriter)