Ex-Border Guard: Europe Is Losing Control of Its Borders, and the Ceuta Crisis Is Just the Beginning

The mass attempts by migrants to storm the Spanish enclave of Ceuta are not an isolated incident but a symptom of a deep-rooted crisis in the entire system protecting the European Union's external borders. That's the assessment of a former border guard officer known by the pseudonym Solvin.

"It was only a matter of time before something like this happened," he says. According to his forecast, such situations will become more frequent — both in the near future and further down the line. He describes what happened in Ceuta as nothing less than the collapse of Europe's joint border protection system.

Europe's Weak Spots

Ceuta and the neighbouring Spanish city of Melilla have long been regarded as the most vulnerable points along the EU's external perimeter. But according to the former officer, the real problems run much deeper: structural flaws in the system have gone unaddressed for decades.

Europe still lacks a single, functioning system for protecting its external borders — control remains in the hands of individual member states, each primarily looking out for its own interests. The result, as Solvin puts it, is a years-long "game of ping-pong with migrants": countries on the external perimeter try to wave as many people as possible onward into Central and Northern Europe, while states further inside the bloc try to send them back.

The Canary Islands — the Next Pressure Point

Solvin believes migrants will keep hunting for new weak links in the system. "If it's not Ceuta and Melilla, it will be the Canary Islands. Migrants will find their way into Europe by any means necessary. The current European migration system is doomed to fail," he said.

He is convinced that the newly enacted Common European Asylum System (CEAS) won't change the situation, since it fails to fix the fundamental structural flaws underlying the whole framework.

Two Ways Out of the Deadlock

According to the former border guard, Europe has only two real options for escaping the crisis. The first is to transform the Frontex agency into a body with genuine powers to intervene — effectively creating a central authority responsible for guarding the EU's entire external border. The catch is that member states would have to give up part of their sovereignty. "That would mean the Spanish or Italian government would no longer control its own borders. That won't be an easy thing to push through," Solvin noted.

The second path is a return to national borders, with dramatic consequences: the Schengen zone would have to be dissolved, and freedom of movement across Europe would disappear. Every country would have to guard and control its own frontiers on its own. That's technically feasible, the expert believes, but it would bring about "massive economic consequences" and tear down one of the central pillars of the European Union.

Source: novinky.cz