The Ceuta Border Peripeteia: Tasting the Externalities of EU Border Externalization

On May 18th 2021 more than 8000 people irregularly crossed the EU external border between Morocco and Ceuta. Morocco was accused of not acting diligently enough to prevent this unprecedented influx. Interestingly, this occurred in a geopolitical context of rising tensions within Spanish-Moroccan diplomatic relations-triggered by Trump administration’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Spanish former colony of Western Sahara in 2020. Things reached a peak of complexity when Brahim Ghali, the secretary-general of the Saharawi Polisario Front, travelled to Spain in order to receive treatment for COVID-19 in April 2021. In this light, this contribution argues that, what happened in Ceuta in May 2021 constitutes a handbook example how to manufacture a border/migration “crisis” for foreign policy purposes. The text interrogates the limits and costs of increasing foreign reliance vis-à-vis EU migration and border management policies. And in so doing, it points at two mutually reinforcing consequences of outsourcing strategies, here referred to as the “externalities of externalization”. On the one hand, the growing diplomatic leverage at the disposal of neighboring gatekeeper-countries like Morocco or Turkey; and, on the other hand, the EU-wide electoral growth of far-right, anti-immigration political discourses advocating for even more strictly securitized border practices.