Morocco's leverage reveals less the strength of Rabat than the structural dependence created by the European Union's externalisation of border control

The recent events in Ceuta, one of Spain's two North African enclaves bordering Morocco, have once again reignited a familiar debate. Morocco is accused of using migration as a tool of diplomatic pressure against Spain. The debate has many ramifications, including the alleged complicity of the United States and Israel, Morocco’s longstanding claims over Ceuta and Melilla, political unrest within the EU - including Italy's reintroduction of internal Schengen border controls - and other geopolitical factors. Beyond the specifics of the ongoing situation, the accusation is hardly new. Like Turkey on the EU's south-eastern border or Belarus on the border with Poland and Lithuania, Morocco has repeatedly demonstrated that migration management forms part of its broader foreign policy, with cooperation fluctuating according to wider political interests. 

This diagnosis is compelling, but incomplete. There is a paradox that has received remarkably little attention: a country with far less geopolitical weight than Spain - let alone the European Union as a whole - has managed to turn migration management into a bargaining tool capable of extracting significant political concessions. From this perspective, the crucial question is not simply whether neighbouring countries instrumentalise migration, but why this strategy has become so effective. The answer lies not only in the conduct of these countries but, above, all in the transformation of European migration governance over the last decades. 

Following the collapse of the European migration architecture during the so-called 2015 refugee crisis, persistent disagreements over asylum reform and responsibility-sharing prevented Member States from reaching a common approach to migration. As internal negotiations repeatedly stalled, cooperation with countries of origin and transit emerged as one of the few areas capable of generating political consensus, eventually becoming a central pillar of the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. Through financial assistance, operational support, political agreements and development cooperation increasingly linked to migration objectives, the EU has progressively delegated key border-management functions to third countries (by way of example, see here, here or here). The objective is to prevent irregular arrivals from reaching European territory and to facilitate the return of those who nevertheless do. As a result, these countries have become indispensable actors in the day-to-day functioning of Europe's migration system.

This has produced an important paradox. A model repeatedly presented as necessary to enhance Europe's control over irregular migration has, in practice, increased Europe's dependence on external actors. The more the success of European migration policy is measured by preventing irregular arrivals, the greater the political leverage acquired by those capable of preventing - or facilitating - those movements. Migration control has therefore become a valuable geopolitical resource. Not because neighbouring countries suddenly became more powerful, but because the EU itself has created a system in which their cooperation is indispensable. In other words, the EU has played a decisive role in turning migration control into a bargaining chip in its relations with third countries, effectively dealing itself a weak hand in the process.

Spain's response to the recent events in Ceuta is illustrative of this dynamic. Rather than publicly condemning Morocco's overtly hostile and reckless conduct, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez emphasised the importance of bilateral cooperation while placing primary responsibility on migrant smuggling networks. The relationship becomes asymmetrical: the more the EU relies on third countries to deliver migration control, the greater the political concessions it may ultimately be willing to make in order to preserve that cooperation.

And yet the instrumentalisation paradigm tends to shift this dependency away from the centre of the analysis. The state that claims to be the object of instrumentalisation appears, above all, as the victim of external aggression, while the aggressor state bears the brunt of political and legal criticism. The crisis always seems to come from outside, as if the vulnerability of the European system were solely the result of an external threat and not also of the decisions that have contributed to creating that dependency.

The paradigm also produces a number of less obvious effects, two of which deserve particular attention. First, the instrumentalisation framework risks narrowing public debate into a dispute between states while pushing the people most affected into the background. Diplomatic confrontation dominates political attention, whereas those who lose their lives or fundamental rights are too often reduced to passive objects of interstate conflict. It is therefore unsurprising that the 72 deaths documented by the time of writing - making the crisis in Ceuta one of the deadliest incidents at a Spanish border - have taken a back seat in much of the media coverage. However, it is precisely these deaths that serve as the primary evidence of the failure of a migration policy that has turned border management into a matter of security rather than the protection of life and human rights.

Second, instrumentalisation is not merely an analytical category; it activates an exceptional legal regime to deal with the alleged crisis. Under the Crisis Regulation, Member States may derogate from a range of procedural guarantees and reception standards otherwise applicable under ordinary EU asylum law. At the same time, several European governments have urged the European Court of Human Rights to revisit aspects of its case law in order to allow greater flexibility in responding to similar situations. The political debate in Spain is heading in the same direction: in the wake of the recent events in Ceuta, there has been no shortage of proposals to tighten Spanish legislation. The irony is striking: a concept developed to describe the unlawful conduct of third countries increasingly serves to justify restrictions affecting the very migrants who have been used as instruments of political pressure. Instrumentalisation thus ceases to be merely a strategy employed by third countries and becomes a legal category that reshapes the balance between control and protection within European immigration law.

None of this denies that migration instrumentalisation exists or diminishes the responsibility of governments that deliberately exploit vulnerable people for geopolitical purposes. Rather, it suggests that the effectiveness of this strategy cannot be explained solely by the intentions of those who employ it. Morocco’s current leverage also stems from a prior decision by the EU itself: to make the containment of migration flows the primary indicator of the success of its migration policy and to have designed a legal and institutional framework geared primarily toward that objective.

The recent events in Ceuta illustrate this fragility. Not only do they highlight the vulnerability of those who attempt to cross a deeply unequal border and end up losing their lives, but also that of an EU that has built a migration control system whose viability increasingly depends on decisions made outside its own borders. Contrary to the prevailing narrative, a system that requires third countries to perform essential border control functions can hardly be presented as a fully autonomous or sovereign system.

In sum, the central problem is therefore not only that neighbouring states have discovered the strategic value of migration. It is that the EU has designed a migration system in which that strategy has become extraordinarily profitable. Similarly, as long as the debate continues to focus exclusively on Morocco’s conduct, we will continue to treat the symptoms rather than the underlying causes.