Donald Trump has a familiar way of turning compromise into conquest. Announce a deal, declare victory, repeat the word “permanent” often enough, and let everyone else argue over the small print. His Greenland announcement follows precisely that choreography. Washington gets to celebrate an expanded military presence in the Arctic; Copenhagen gets to say Greenland remains Danish; Nuuk gets to say its sovereignty and right to self-determination have survived. Everybody has apparently won. Which, naturally, raises the more interesting question: who actually paid the price?
Trump certainly did not get the Greenland he demanded. For months, he threatened to acquire the island, refused to rule out force and treated the territory of a NATO ally as though it were an attractive piece of real estate sitting on an auction table. Denmark and Greenland repeatedly answered with the same message: Greenland was not for sale. The emerging agreement does not change that. That matters.
If Trump wanted sovereignty, he did not get it. If he wanted ownership, he did not get it. If he wanted Denmark to surrender Greenland, Denmark has not surrendered Greenland. The Danish government insists that the agreement respects the kingdom’s sovereignty and Greenlanders’ right to self-determination. The Greenlandic leadership says essentially the same thing. And the agreement still requires parliamentary approval.
Yet it would be naïve to pretend that nothing has changed. The United States appears set to obtain a substantially stronger military position in Greenland, with arrangements designed to prevent rival powers from establishing bases or making certain sensitive investments. Trump says Washington will begin developing a larger military presence almost immediately. The United States already operates Pituffik Space Base, so this is not an American arrival in Greenland. It is an American expansion.
And that is where the Danish victory becomes rather more complicated. Denmark resisted the extraordinary proposition that an ally could threaten to seize its territory. But after months of pressure, the result may be an agreement giving Washington considerably more strategic influence over that territory. The flag does not change. The constitutional relationship does not change. But the strategic balance does.
Trump therefore gets something extremely valuable without having to acquire anything formally. He gets the political theatre of victory and much of the strategic substance he wanted. That is clever diplomacy or clever branding, depending on one's perspective.
But there is another player whose position deserves greater attention: Greenland itself. For years, Greenlanders have discussed greater autonomy and possible independence from Denmark. Now the island finds itself caught between two enormous strategic realities. Denmark retains sovereignty, while the United States wants Greenland to become an even more important military platform. The Greenlanders are being told that this strengthens their security and development. Perhaps it will. But security arrangements involving great powers have a habit of producing consequences that extend far beyond the wording of treaties.
There is also a dangerous precedent here. An American president threatened the territory of a NATO ally. The threats created enough anxiety to bring Denmark and Greenland into negotiations. The eventual agreement may be entirely consensual and may protect sovereignty. But the diplomatic lesson could nevertheless be uncomfortable: pressure works.
That is not the same as saying Trump won. He did not get ownership of Greenland. He did not get Danish sovereignty transferred to Washington. He did not erase Greenland's right to self-determination. Indeed, the agreement appears to reaffirm precisely those principles.
But he may have demonstrated something more subtle and potentially more consequential: a sufficiently aggressive demand can change the starting point of a negotiation.
The danger for Denmark is therefore not that Greenland has suddenly become American. It is that the meaning of Danish sovereignty could gradually become thinner while remaining perfectly intact on paper.
And perhaps that is the real Greenland deal. Trump can call it a victory. Denmark can call it sovereignty preserved. Greenland can call it security strengthened. The final judgment belongs to what happens after the signatures. Because sometimes a country does not lose its territory. It merely discovers that somebody else has become very comfortable inside it.
On 21 September, the world will once again observe the International Day of Peace. The United Nations has chosen an unusually appropriate theme for 2026: “Invest in Peace - For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day.” It is difficult to imagine a more necessary message, or a more uncomfortable one. Peace today sounds almost like an old-fashioned word, something placed carefully in speeches while governments count missiles, redraw red lines and calculate how many civilians can be described as “collateral damage”.
The calendar offers little encouragement. War continues in Ukraine. The Iran war has become another major source of instability. Yemen, after years of suffering and a fragile truce, has again been pulled into intensified fighting, with tens of thousands displaced in the latest escalation. Around these wars sit many others, from Sudan and Gaza to conflicts that barely survive a paragraph in international news. The geography changes; the vocabulary does not. Security. Retaliation. Deterrence. Victory. Strategic interests. National sovereignty. And, eventually, another cemetery.
The uncomfortable truth is that modern politics has become remarkably good at explaining why peace is impossible.
There is always a reason to postpone it. The enemy must first be weakened. The border must first be secured. The terrorists must first be defeated. The nuclear programme must first be destroyed. The territory must first be liberated. The alliance must first demonstrate strength. The other side must first make the first concession.
And while everyone waits for the other side to blink, ordinary people lose homes, families, livelihoods and futures.
Yemen offers perhaps the most brutal lesson. A country can disappear from the headlines without disappearing from war. The latest Houthi offensive has displaced more than 100,000 people, reminding the world that a conflict does not become peaceful simply because international attention has moved elsewhere.
Ukraine offers another lesson: prolonged war does not become normal merely because it has lasted for years. Behind military maps and diplomatic statements are prisoners, refugees, destroyed towns, traumatised families and generations growing up with the sound of drones and missiles. Even the language of negotiation has become another battlefield.
The greatest failure, however, is not that governments wage wars. Humanity has been doing that for thousands of years. The failure is that governments continue to treat peace as the period between wars rather than as political work requiring investment, patience and imagination.
Peace requires institutions. It requires diplomacy before missiles. It requires international law that powerful states cannot simply reinterpret when inconvenient. It requires schools instead of military recruitment, functioning hospitals instead of field clinics, food security instead of blockades and economic opportunity instead of another generation of grievance.
Most importantly, peace requires people to be regarded as people before they are regarded as Ukrainians, Iranians, Yemenis, Israelis, Palestinians, Russians, Americans or anything else.
The International Day of Peace should therefore not be another annual performance of solemn speeches, white doves and carefully photographed politicians. It should be an accusation against our political imagination.
If humanity can mobilise billions for war, surely it can mobilise something for peace. Peace is not naïve. War is not realism. Sometimes stopping violence requires strength; sometimes protecting people requires force. But strength without diplomacy becomes an addiction, while military victory without political settlement merely prepares the next war.
The world does not need another beautiful declaration about peace. It needs governments to make peace as concrete as war: funded, organised, negotiated and defended.
Because somewhere tonight, a child is sleeping beneath a roof that may not exist tomorrow. That child does not care who won the argument. That child wants peace. And perhaps that is the simplest definition we have.
We have created a wonderfully efficient modern illusion: go to the gym for an hour, sweat heroically, lift something heavy, run until the treadmill begins to look like an instrument of torture and then declare yourself an active person. After that, sit down.
Sit in the car. Sit at the desk. Sit through meetings. Sit while eating lunch. Sit on the train. Sit while scrolling through the phone. Sit for television in the evening. Perhaps even sit while discussing how important exercise is.
Welcome to the strange modern species known as the active couch potato. The phrase sounds amusing, but the contradiction behind it is serious. Exercise and sedentary behaviour are not simply opposite ends of the same scale. A person can exercise regularly and still spend most of the day barely moving. And that distinction matters.
We have become obsessed with the workout as an event rather than movement as a lifestyle. Fitness has been packaged into sixty-minute blocks, complete with gym memberships, smart watches, workout clothes and motivational slogans. The implication is wonderfully convenient: complete the ritual and you have earned the right to return to the chair.
But the human body did not evolve to negotiate with office furniture. An hour of exercise is unquestionably valuable. It strengthens muscles, improves cardiovascular fitness, supports mental health and provides countless benefits. The mistake is believing that this hour somehow cancels the remaining hours of near-total inactivity. It doesn't.
The problem with prolonged sitting is precisely that it is prolonged. The body is not designed merely to receive one heroic dose of movement and then spend the rest of the day switched off. Research increasingly distinguishes between exercising and simply moving throughout the day. People who exercise but remain sedentary for long periods can still have poorer metabolic health than people who combine exercise with regular light movement.
And here is the irritatingly simple solution: move more. Not necessarily another hour at the gym. Not another punishing workout. Not another expensive gadget telling you that you have failed to close a brightly coloured activity ring.
Stand up. Walk to the other room. Take the stairs. Walk while making a phone call. Get off the bus one stop earlier. Carry the shopping. Wander around the office instead of sending an email to someone sitting twenty metres away. Break up the great uninterrupted slab of sitting that has become one of the defining characteristics of modern life.
The irony is that our grandparents probably did much of this without knowing they were engaging in “non-exercise activity”. We have invented a society in which walking ten metres is considered an inefficiency and then created fitness industries to compensate for the consequences.
That is the absurdity. We have mechanised movement out of daily life and then pay money to recreate it artificially. The answer, therefore, isn't to abandon the gym. Quite the opposite. Keep going. Exercise remains important. But stop treating exercise as absolution.
The real goal should be a day in which movement is scattered rather than imprisoned inside one precious hour. The active couch potato isn't lazy. Often, quite the opposite: he or she is disciplined enough to exercise regularly. The problem is conceptual. We have confused being physically active with having an active life.
They are not the same thing. A healthy routine should contain both: deliberate exercise and ordinary movement. So by all means spend an hour sweating at the gym. Just don't spend the next eight hours worshipping the chair.
Ulf Kristersson has left office, the centre-left has squeezed through the electoral door and Magdalena Andersson is preparing to return to Rosenbad. Sweden has changed government, but it has not necessarily changed direction.
The arithmetic is almost comically Swedish, 176 seats for the centre-left bloc, 173 for the right. A majority so narrow that one might be tempted to measure it with a ruler. Kristersson has accepted the result and resigned, as parliamentary democracy requires. The Social Democrats can celebrate. The champagne may even be poured.
But nobody should confuse an electoral defeat with an ideological defeat. The Sweden Democrats lost seats and slipped from second to third place, their first decline in national support since entering parliament in 2010. That matters. But the more interesting question is what remains after the electoral furniture has been rearranged. For four years, the Sweden Democrats were not simply shouting from the political wilderness. They became central to the governing arrangement, helping define the political vocabulary of Sweden on immigration, crime, integration and national identity.
And political vocabulary has a nasty habit of surviving the government that popularised it. This is the great paradox of the Swedish election. The centre-left has won, but much of the political terrain on which the election was fought had already moved rightwards. Immigration became a problem to be managed rather than primarily a human and social question. Crime became a political currency. Integration was increasingly discussed through the language of obligation, control and punishment. The old Swedish argument about how to build a society was gradually replaced by an argument about whom society should distrust.
Changing the government does not automatically change that atmosphere. There is an even more uncomfortable problem. Far-right politics is no longer dependent upon spectacular electoral victories. It can lose an election and still win something more durable: normality.
This is particularly important among younger Swedes. Political movements become dangerous when they stop looking dangerous. A teenager encountering the Sweden Democrats on a social-media feed does not necessarily encounter their historical baggage, ideological evolution or controversies. He or she encounters a meme, a joke, a furious video about crime, a complaint about taxes and a declaration that politicians have forgotten ordinary people. Politics arrives disguised as entertainment.
The algorithm is wonderfully democratic in the worst possible sense: it does not care whether an idea is wise, humane or historically literate. It cares whether somebody will click.
And young people click. The far right understands this environment rather better than many traditional parties do. It knows that political recruitment does not always begin with a manifesto. It can begin with resentment, humour, irony, masculinity, cultural grievance or the apparently harmless question of why everything used to be better. By the time the political label appears, the emotional architecture may already be built.
That is why Sweden's centre-left victory should not become an excuse for political sleepwalking. Andersson inherits a country in which the traditional parties themselves have spent years arguing over how far to accommodate the anxieties that propelled the far right. If the response to the election is merely to reverse a few policies, restore a few subsidies and declare democracy victorious, the deeper problem will remain untouched.
Democracy is not a four-year cleaning service. It requires schools capable of teaching history rather than merely testing memory. It requires journalism capable of challenging propaganda without turning every controversy into theatre. It requires politicians who can discuss immigration without either romanticising its difficulties or weaponizing them. And it requires young citizens to be given something more substantial than perpetual outrage to believe in.
The Swedish far right may have lost this election. That is a fact. But it has already demonstrated that political influence does not require occupying the prime minister's office. Sometimes all that is required is to make everybody else speak your language.
That is the part Sweden should worry about. Because governments change rather quickly. Political habits do not.
For years, Europe treated economic interdependence as a promise. Trade would make countries richer, investment would make them partners and supply chains would make conflict irrational. It was an attractive theory, and for a long time it looked like common sense. But interdependence has acquired a darker meaning. The same pipelines, markets, technologies and financial networks that bind countries together can also become instruments of coercion.
The European Union is finally learning this lesson. Its Anti-Coercion Instrument is not simply another item in Brussels’ expanding alphabet soup of regulations. It represents something more consequential: the beginning of a European doctrine of economic deterrence. The EU is discovering that its greatest strategic asset may not be an army but the sheer attractiveness of access to its market.
This is an uncomfortable transformation for a bloc that has traditionally preferred rules to retaliation. Europe likes to imagine itself as the continent of regulation, negotiation and multilateralism. Yet rules without the capacity to enforce them are merely polite suggestions. In an age when states increasingly use tariffs, trade restrictions, investment controls and economic dependencies as political weapons, politeness can become a strategic liability.
The Anti-Coercion Instrument changes the calculation. If another government attempts to bully the EU, or one of its members, through economic pressure, Brussels can contemplate a response extending beyond diplomatic complaints. Market access itself can become leverage.
That is the important shift. Europe is not suddenly becoming a mercantilist power. It is learning that economic power has to be usable power.
The distinction matters. The objective should not be to punish every unfriendly government or turn trade policy into permanent economic warfare. That would merely reproduce the coercive behaviour Europe claims to oppose. The instrument is most useful precisely when it remains credible but difficult to trigger. Deterrence works because the other side believes retaliation is possible, not because retaliation happens every Tuesday.
There is also a larger European paradox. The EU has spent decades integrating its economies while leaving many strategic dependencies inadequately diversified. Cheap energy, critical minerals, advanced technology and important industrial inputs were often treated primarily as commercial questions. Governments discovered too late that the cheapest supplier can become the most expensive strategic mistake.
The answer is not autarky. Europe cannot build a fortress economy around itself. Nor should it abandon global trade because authoritarian governments have learned how to manipulate it. The answer is resilience: diversified suppliers, stronger European production where strategically necessary, closer partnerships with democratic economies and institutions capable of responding collectively.
This is where the EU's enormous single market becomes more than an economic achievement. It becomes geopolitical infrastructure.
A country may ignore a European declaration. It is considerably harder to ignore access to hundreds of millions of consumers, sophisticated financial systems, industrial supply chains and a regulatory market that shapes commercial behaviour far beyond Europe's borders.
But Brussels should be careful. Economic weapons have recoil. Restrictions can hurt European companies, consumers and workers as well as foreign governments. Excessive use could encourage other powers to construct rival economic blocs, accelerating the fragmentation of global trade.
Europe therefore needs something it has often lacked in foreign economic policy: strategic discipline. The emerging lesson is simple. Interdependence is neither inherently peaceful nor inherently dangerous. It is power. Whoever controls the points of dependence possesses leverage.
For decades Europe possessed that leverage without quite understanding it. Now it is learning to use it. The real test will be whether Brussels can wield the weapon without becoming addicted to the fight.
Like me, you may have read some books on politics, diagnosed the problems, and come up with your own theories on how to fix Nigeria’s politics. But have you experienced it in practical terms?
You may have, but I had not until very recently. I detest our nation’s politics and stay away from the fray. I only discussed it. But I decided to observe it from the actions of practitioners. I took advantage of the current lifting of the ban on political campaigning to watch politicians at close quarters.
Furthermore, my community is grappling with an issue previously experienced by other communities, but which I am now confronting for the first time. The ugly Nigerian, who made life difficult for ordinary people, crept into our community transformer while everybody slept, climbed the very tall electric poles and cut the transformer cables.
Their job was easy. There was no current flowing through those cables and they were cut off easily. They carted the cables away. Our leaders had just returned from the Disco that controls our community to plead that the fuse of the transformer which they had removed because as they alleged we were not up to date in the settlement of our electricity bill be put back. They were successful and we were plluged back.
But two days later, cable thieves struck a deadly blow and we went back into pitch darkness. Our leaders went back to see what could be done. We need to raise 3 million naira to connect another cable back. That amount was negotiated down to N2.2 million. Even at that, our community could still not afford it. We are a very poor community. We are the ones that politicians tell lies to then use and dump.
What was a calamity became for me an opportunity to satisfy my new quest to watch politicians do their business in Nigeria. At least I will be at a vantage position to watch and learn. I joined the elders and suggested to them that we seek help from politicians jostling for offices. Ordinarily, replacing cables, I told this set of mostly illiterate leaders, is not the job of electricity consumers. Once we pay our tariffs and pay out taxes, it is the job of the Disco to fix our cables.
I told them that politicians could help us by making noise about the stolen cables and the resultant darkness that had descended on our area. If our representatives make a little noise in the House, our Disco will immediately rise to the issue. If we don’t do that we may just be in darkness for many years. Another way is to suggest the politicians buy the cables for us.
We set to work and suggested two prominent politicians, one, a gubernatorial candidate and the other a senatorial candidate who is said to be a moneybag. We drafted our letters and planned to deliver the letters to each one of them. I advised that we deliver the letters personally to the politicians. Some who have experience with politicians said we must hire a vehicle to convey many people to the house of the politicians because they like crowds.
The real experience of Nigerian politics for me began from this stage; behind my back some people who probably heard we were making plans to seek the politicians for help began to visit them with fabricated messages. They claimed they have been sent by these politicians to beg the community not to allow anybody but themselves to do the job. Their pleadings were so fervent that you would think once we got to them the job would commence immediately. After a while I began to discern their lies but those elders did not.
These jobbers probably have a distant connection with the politicians but not one that is able to make any impression or get anything done. In the evening while we were at a small political rally for our ward, our chairman had a call that he must get home quickly because a jobber was bringing the amount we had requested to him in cash. The chairman told me, and we arranged that he must be on the way immediately while an old political warhorse stayed behind to continue with our chase of a member of the House of Representatives who was to address the rally.
Another footman had promised he had arranged for us to see this Honourable. But when the man came and our letter was handed to him, his reaction showed vividly that he had never been briefed that we were coming. He immediately returned the letter to the ward leader who gave it to him. The Rep only came with one million naira meant for all in attendance that night to share. The politicians in all their hierarchies are the most disorganized people. That is obviously why our government is disorganized.
Over ninety percent of attendees for that rally were women. They were very poor. I had seen a particular one among them in the street many times looking to me to give her some money. On a few occasions when I had money I had given her some. On this particular occasion, when she spotted me in the place I sat beside the bigwigs she came to specially greet me. I gave her five hundred naira and she was so happy that she introduced her son, a member of the party ward leadership to me.
I asked our chairman why women outnumbered the men in attendance. He told me “women had more time available to them than men. The men by now, even though it was about 6 pm must be at their places of work but the women even if they engage in petty trading, don’t mind packing up their wares to attend a rally. At another political rally, a meeting of 12 wards of a popular political party, women attendance was up to ninety percent.
They danced to the local musicians who sang the praises of the contestants, they danced waving their handkerchiefs in the air, they created their own music and danced to it. They sang to thank their husbands who allowed them to participate in politics. They called themselves ‘Obinrin Rere’ (Good Women). They must have borrowed that from the “Good Women Choir” of the Christ Apostolic Church, a popular evangelical church in Nigeria.
At both rallies, the pattern was similar: no difference, no creativity. Even the sitting and standing arrangements are the same. I think it is because many of them have wandered into virtually all political parties. Their menfolk had no kind opinion of these women, and everything about their demeanour bore the description of the men. They are regarded as ones who don’t keep a home, ones who flirt around and ones who may not stay long in the house of any man, what modern day calls single women. They are the lower rung of the ladder.
With the preponderance of women in the political parties, why is it that they are scanty in the legislature and the executive arm of government? The men who are not as many dominate these offices. It may be a factor of education as women’s education is still discouraged in many parts of the country even in the so-called educated south. The women do all the dancing and the men get all the votes.
There were very aged women among the women folk who could barely walk. There were many and they sat down. What could bring them to the rallies? I found out it was money, a paltry one thousand naira. The women were especially poor; the men were too but they were younger.
Because our own plan to get the Rep to help us failed, I left in frustration and anger. As I left the young man, one of those who had gathered around the leaders, ran after me, “Baba, won’t you stay back to collect your envelope?” This was not new to me, I knew that politicians bait these poor people with as little as one thousand naira. But the words dropped out of my mouth effortlessly: “I don’t need the envelope.’’ As the words dropped from my mouth, it was echoed by other youths standing by and the boy chasing after me left off the pursuit.
Shortly after exiting the gate, I heard a commotion. I later gathered that the one million naira provided by the Honourable member for sharing had triggered altercations among attendees, as their leaders had absconded with the funds.
Only God knows the fate of those women, especially the frail old ones among them. I was too angry to look back. But I was so sure that democracy is a farce in Nigeria. But I need to continue to get you into the home and the campaign office of the gubernatorial candidates.
First Published in METRO
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Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos.
A policy paper inspired by the work of Dr Anis H. Bajrektarevic on the "Diaspora Hedge Fund"
Irregular migration between Morocco and the European Union is not a problem that can be solved through deterrence, nor through a single financial instrument. We propose here the creation of a Diaspora Fund for Moroccans Abroad (MDM), in an operational version adapted to the Moroccan context, inspired by the foundational work of Dr Anis H. Bajrektarevic on the "Diaspora Hedge Fund" concept, itself rooted in his work at the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) in Vienna in the 1990s. This proposal starts from a shared observation: migration must be understood as a movement of capital, knowledge and opportunity, as much as of people. But it can only bear fruit if it addresses a deeper misalignment between three agendas that, today, largely ignore one another: the prospects of Morocco's youth, the Kingdom's strategic interests, and Europe's economic and security needs. As long as these three agendas fail to converge in a shared framework, every migration agreement, including a diaspora fund, will remain fragile, reversible, and hostage to the next diplomatic dispute.
I. Rethinking the diagnosis: why previous approaches have failed
Euro-Moroccan migration policy has long favoured a security-first approach. Between 2001 and 2019, the EU allocated at least €215 million to Morocco for border security projects¹. This spending has since accelerated: an additional €140 million in 2018 alone, including €55 million for the Border Management Programme for the Maghreb region, of which €30 million went to Morocco, with the Ministry of the Interior as the main beneficiary², followed by €222 million committed between 2021 and 2024, and a further €190 million planned by the end of 2027³. In total, Morocco is expected to have received more than one billion euros in European and Spanish funding for border control by 2027⁴. This approach treats the symptom rather than the cause, and feeds a tension that Rabat has voiced publicly: as early as 2018, Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita rejected the idea that Morocco should act as Europe's outsourced border guard, a position he reaffirmed during the 2021 Ceuta crisis⁵.
Meanwhile, conventional development programmes have too often neglected geographic targeting and local governance. The clearest symptom of this underinvestment is that King Mohammed VI himself noted that diaspora investment accounts for only 10% of national private investment, a level he called unacceptable⁶, even as remittances exceeded $11.7 billion in 2024, or more than 8% of Morocco's GDP⁷. The idea that these flows are captured by urban networks already close to the central government is plausible and well documented in the broader development literature, but at this stage it remains a qualitative hypothesis rather than a measured fact for the Moroccan case. It deserves to be verified region by region before being presented as an established finding.
Both approaches share the same flaw: they ignore the geopolitical dimension of the issue. Ceuta has seen two major crises in recent years. In May 2021, around 10,000 people crossed the border within 48 hours, amid diplomatic tension over Spain's decision to admit Polisario Front leader Brahim Ghali for medical treatment. More recently, on 30 and 31 July 2026, the day of Throne Day, a far larger wave occurred: between 60,000 and 80,000 people according to various sources, with a heavy and evolving human toll. Early counts from Reuters and the Associated Press put the death toll at 34 to 41, while later estimates put it at more than 111. This second crisis illustrates why it would be a mistake to look for a single culprit: it unfolded against a backdrop of shared responsibility and tangled institutional, diplomatic and socio-economic factors on both sides of the border, discussed in detail in section I.1. This does not change the underlying conclusion: a migration agreement that fails to acknowledge the geopolitical and structural dimension of these episodes remains a house of cards, ready to collapse at the next crisis.
I.1, What the official responses reveal: shared responsibility
A review of government statements and international press coverage of the July 2026 crisis reveals a picture shaped by multiple factors, one that would be misleading to pin on a single actor. On the Spanish side, several institutional elements contributed to the vulnerability of the situation: a Supreme Court ruling of 8 July 2026, whose interpretation was distorted and spread through disinformation and human trafficking networks; an extraordinary regularisation drive, with more than one million applications filed by the end of June 2026, which heightened the perceived appeal of Spain; and, according to a Euronews investigation, intelligence warnings received before the crisis whose handling by the Spanish government remains disputed. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez himself chose to rule out any deliberate Moroccan involvement, stating that this crisis could only be resolved through cooperation, not through distrust of Morocco, and attributing the episode to disinformation and criminal networks rather than to a decision by Moroccan authorities.
Some media outlets and analysts noted that the episode followed, by ten days, Pedro Sánchez's official visit to Algiers as part of the normalisation of Spanish, Algerian relations, a coincidence of timing that several commentators considered significant given the precedent of 2021, although no evidence has formally established a causal link. On the Moroccan side, officials and observers instead described authorities as overwhelmed by events, with the surge fuelled by viral social media rumours falsely claiming that Spain would not systematically return people who arrived by sea. A later report by the Spanish police unit CENIF did note a Moroccan deployment noticeably lighter than usual, which, in its own words, went beyond what the security mobilisation for Throne Day would explain. However, the Spanish Interior Ministry itself declined to draw a definitive conclusion, publicly stating that the mastermind behind the surge remained unknown at that stage.
Taken together, these elements point to a crisis of overlapping responsibilities rather than a single cause: a Spanish court ruling whose effects were poorly anticipated, a migratory pull effect reinforced by Spain's own immigration policy, criminal networks that exploited the confusion, a possible and disputed lapse in Moroccan border security whose scale and intent remain unclear, and, underlying it all, the structural socio-economic causes detailed in section II. None of the parties involved, Spanish, Moroccan or European, can alone account for the scale of this episode, which is precisely the argument for the shared governance architecture proposed in this article rather than for assigning unilateral blame.
On the Moroccan side, the first official statement, issued in early August 2026, was described by the Moroccan press itself as a carefully calibrated communication exercise designed to protect the State's image: it emphasised social media disinformation and the role of smuggling networks, and reaffirmed Morocco as a reliable and committed partner in the fight against irregular migration, without a single mention of unemployment, social hardship or the domestic economic climate. This silence is not incidental: it reflects a blind spot shared by official communications on both sides, Moroccan and Spanish alike, which both favoured institutional and security explanations over the deeper socio-economic causes that this article seeks to place at the centre of the analysis.
On the European side, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the images as unacceptable, expressed her full support for Spain, and proposed strengthening financial and technical support to Morocco for border management, confirming the funding trajectory already described above. But the crisis also exposed a rift among member states: 22 countries, led by Italy and Denmark, called for an emergency meeting of interior ministers, while Sánchez accused some partners of an asymmetric response to the solidarity Spain expected. Ceuta thus became the first real test of the EU's new Pact on Migration and Asylum, a test that exposed the limits of European coordination as much as those of bilateral border management.
II. Solving the problem facing Morocco's youth without relying solely on diaspora capital
It must be said plainly: Morocco is neither a country at war, nor in a state of internal political instability, nor struck by a major economic or humanitarian catastrophe. This distinction still holds even after the tragedy of Ceuta in July 2026: the severity of that episode's human toll, at least several dozen deaths, possibly more than a hundred according to the most recent estimates, reflects a one off and dramatic migration event shaped by shared responsibility among several actors (see section I.1), not the collapse of the state or an armed conflict on Moroccan territory. Unlike the departure dynamics seen in Syria, Libya or the Sahel, Moroccan migration is not structurally a flight from violence or state collapse. It is a migration of aspiration, driven by a stable, educated and globally connected youth confronted with a labour market that cannot absorb them at the level they expect. This distinction changes everything: it means the underlying problem is not securing a fragile country, but making better use of a stable one, even though isolated episodes such as July 2026 remind us that a lack of prospects can, under certain circumstances and combined with institutional factors on both sides of the border, produce mass movements with human consequences as severe as those seen in more classic crisis settings. Figures from Morocco's High Commission for Planning (HCP) illustrate this clearly: while the national unemployment rate stood at 13% in 2025, it reached 38.4% among people aged 15 to 24 and 25.7% among university graduates⁸, a structural gap between education and opportunity within an otherwise stable context, not a matter of survival or security. A credible retention policy must therefore act on four levers at once:
Geographically targeting productive investment on the actual areas of emigration, the Rif, Al Hoceima, Nador, the South East, rather than concentrating it, as is too often the case, on the Casablanca, Tangier, Rabat corridor.
Building industrial and technology hubs that meet the real needs of the Moroccan economy, rather than showcase projects designed to satisfy the metrics of international donors.
Mobilising the diaspora as a channel for skills and mentorship, through temporary return programmes for professionals, as a complement, never a substitute, for financial investment.
Reforming the link between training and employment: Morocco's problem is not only quantitative, the number of jobs, but qualitative, the mismatch between the qualifications produced and the needs of the market.
Only by demonstrating real, local change, a factory opening, a skilled job created, a young engineer choosing to stay, will the language of capitalising migration stop being a diplomatic formula and become a lived reality.
III. Safeguarding Morocco's strategic interests: a condition for sustainability
No migration agreement will survive the next crisis unless it explicitly recognises that Moroccan cooperation on border management carries geopolitical, not merely operational, value. Three principles should structure this recognition:
A permanent strategic dialogue between Rabat, Madrid and Brussels, rather than a reactive dialogue convened only after each crisis, one that explicitly includes sensitive political issues, foremost among them Western Sahara.
Shared governance of the migration and development framework, in which Morocco has a genuine voice, rather than the role of a paid contractor providing a border control service.
European diplomatic coherence: positions taken by individual member states on sensitive issues should not, on their own, be able to derail the entire cooperation framework.
It is precisely this disconnect, treating migration as a full geopolitical issue rather than a mere technical matter of flow management, that has been most lacking so far, and that explains the recurring fragility of past agreements.
IV. What Europe must contribute: beyond financing
Europe's contribution can no longer be limited to one off budget envelopes. Three structural commitments are needed:
Reciprocal legal mobility, with structured work quotas, both seasonal and skilled, offering a credible and predictable alternative to irregular migration, along the lines of programmes already tested by Spain in agriculture.
A genuinely strengthened advanced status between the EU and Morocco, covering market access, research and education, and above all decoupled from the diplomatic ups and downs linked to Western Sahara.
Direct European investment in Morocco's emigration regions, in partnership with local businesses, rather than funding channelled exclusively through multilateral donors far removed from the ground.
The benefit for Europe is clear: a lasting reduction in irregular migration pressure, a stable partner on its southern border, and access to a skilled workforce and a growing market, within a predictable framework rather than a cycle of migration based pressure tactics.
V. The Diaspora Fund for Moroccans Abroad (MDM): an operational proposal
The four preceding sections converge on a single conclusion: prevention requires regionally targeted productive investment (Part II), which can only be sustainable if Morocco's strategic interests are recognised within the partnership framework (Part III), and Europe can no longer simply fund border control, it must invest directly in emigration areas (Part IV). One question remains open: through what concrete instrument should this investment be channelled, without repeating the pattern of one off, untargeted funding that has so far characterised conventional development aid? The proposal that follows answers this question.
We propose the creation of a Diaspora Fund for Moroccans Abroad (MDM), a financial and institutional framework designed to convert part of Moroccan diaspora capital into productive investment serving the regions of origin identified in Part II. This proposal belongs to a broader intellectual tradition, that of diaspora bonds already tested by Israel, Ethiopia and Nigeria, and more directly to the "Diaspora Hedge Fund" concept developed by Dr Anis H. Bajrektarevic, building on his work at ICMPD in Vienna in the 1990s. Our contribution is to translate this into an operational version specifically adapted to the Moroccan context, drawing on the lessons from the weaknesses of conventional development instruments already discussed in Part I.
The choice to mobilise this particular lever is not arbitrary: it responds directly to the financial diagnosis set out in Part I. The Euro-Mediterranean migration debate has largely been shaped by an economics of containment, border controls, coercive measures and the rising cost of managing irregular migration, a cost already set to exceed one billion euros by 2027. The experience of Ceuta is a powerful reminder that this logic treats symptoms more readily than causes. A more strategic approach must start with an economics of prevention: if substantial resources are already being mobilised to manage migration pressures, it makes more sense to invest a share of them upstream, in local development, socio-economic inclusion, entrepreneurship and opportunity in the regions migration comes from.
This points to a largely untapped resource already identified in Part I: diaspora capital, whose transfers exceeded $11.7 billion in 2024 but remain mostly directed toward household consumption, with only 10% going into domestic private investment. The challenge is not to divert remittances from their social purpose, but to create additional channels through which part of this transnational financial capacity can become productive, bankable and lasting investment. The MDM Fund we propose rests on three institutional pillars: sovereign guarantees from the Moroccan state, the involvement of multilateral development banks, and dedicated financial vehicles.
We situate this proposal within the broader ambition already set out in Parts III and IV: a renewed Euro-Mediterranean compact, in the spirit of the Marrakech Global Compact, shifting conventional border security subsidies toward high impact development partnerships, a process of capitalising migration that links diaspora, development and opportunity across the Mediterranean.
V.1, Operational version: four conditions for implementation in Morocco
For this framework to work without repeating the weaknesses of conventional development instruments, we propose building it, from the outset, on four operational principles:
Regionalisation: explicitly targeting the actual areas of departure, rather than the national territory as a whole, undifferentiated.
Local co-governance: involving credible actors on the ground, local authorities, cooperatives, regional business associations, rather than banks and central administration alone, to prevent the fund from being captured by already well connected elites.
Complementarity, not substitution: funding additional productive projects, without ever diverting existing remittances from their essential social role, education, health, family housing.
Diplomatic integration: making the fund one tool among others within the broader strategic partnership, rather than the sole showcase or political symbol of the migration file, which would otherwise place on it a burden no financial instrument alone can carry.
Designed this way, the MDM Fund stops being a simple transplant of a theoretical model and becomes a credible lever, tailored to the Moroccan context. Without these four conditions, it would remain an elegant financial tool disconnected from the real causes of departure and the real geopolitical balance of power.
VI. Conclusion: toward a partnership rather than a transaction
The measure of success for this approach is not the amount of capital mobilised, but the number of young Moroccans whose prospects have changed locally, without this requiring, at any point, a diplomatic concession wrung from Rabat under the pressure of a border crisis. Sustainability is measured by the structural alignment of interests, not by the repeated management of crises.
Morocco and Europe share, on this issue, more converging interests than their respective diplomatic postures admit. The question is not who needs the other more, but how to build a framework in which stability, regional development and strategic recognition stop being negotiated separately, and finally become the three pillars of a single structure.
Hakima El Haite is a Moroccan climate scientist, entrepreneur and politician. She is a former President of Liberal International and former Minister of Environment of Morocco.
Anis H. Bajrektarevic, professor of international law, author of 10 books. Co-founder of the Geneva-based Global Academy for Future Governance.
References
1. Statewatch, "Aid, border security and EU-Morocco cooperation on migration control," 2019, €215 million between 2001 and 2019 for border security in Morocco.
2. Statewatch, ibid., €140 million committed in 2018, including €55 million for the Border Management Programme for the Maghreb (BMP-Maghreb), €30 million of which went to Morocco.
3. Euronews / European Commission, August 2026, €222 million committed between 2021 and 2024, with a further €190 million planned by the end of 2027.
4. Statewatch, October 2022, more than €1 billion in combined EU and Spanish funding for migration control in Morocco, projected through 2027.
5. Morocco World News, August 2026, statements by Nasser Bourita in 2018 and May 2021 rejecting the role of Europe's "gendarme."
6. Morocco World News, December 2024, statement by King Mohammed VI on the share of diaspora investment, 10% of national private investment.
7. Africanews / Morocco's Foreign Exchange Office, 2026, Moroccan diaspora remittances of $11.7 billion in 2024, more than 8% of GDP.
8. Haut-Commissariat au Plan (HCP), "Activité, emploi et chômage," 2024 to 2025 results, national unemployment 13%, unemployment among people aged 15 to 24 at 38.4%, unemployment among university graduates at 25.7%.
9. Bajrektarevic, Anis H., "Capitalising Migration: The Diaspora Hedge Fund as a New Governance Architecture for Cross-border Development and Migration Governance," foundational work on the Diaspora Hedge Fund concept and the inspiration behind the MDM Fund proposal developed in this article.
10. Wikipedia (EN/FR), "2026 Ceuta migrant crisis"; Reuters, AP, El País, Euronews, France Info, The Conversation, July and August 2026, the Ceuta crisis of 30 and 31 July 2026: 60,000 to 80,000 entries, with a death toll of 34 to more than 111 depending on the source and the date of the count.
11. France 24, Le Temps, CNews, La Libre, 2 September 2026, report by Spain's CENIF police unit describing a reduced Moroccan deployment and "permissiveness" during the crisis, and the public pushback against this reading from Spain's Interior Ministry.
12. Maghreb Online / Maroc Mail, 3 and 4 August 2026, analysis of Morocco's first official statement on the Ceuta crisis, noting the absence of any reference to unemployment or domestic socio-economic hardship.
13. CNBC Africa / Reuters, 3 August 2026, Ursula von der Leyen's proposal to strengthen EU support for Morocco; Euronews, 1 August 2026, letter from 22 member states requesting an emergency meeting of EU interior ministers.
14. Le Devoir, Wikipedia (FR), Histoires Crépues, Zoom Algérie, Le JDD, July to September 2026, Pedro Sánchez's visit to Algiers on 20 July 2026, his statements ruling out deliberate Moroccan involvement, Spain's mass regularisation drive of more than 1 million applications, and intelligence warnings prior to the crisis according to Euronews.
In a land of plastic And shattered dreams, They came from across The sea searching for dreams, Instead they found an illusion And live in plastic shanty towns And wander the streets begging, Bedraggled, depressed and hopeless, Living on charity and a life that Offers no future or dignity, And they remember home Fondly that it wasn’t so Bad after all.
******************************* With a digital painting from Nikos Laios
