BBESW Podcast EP4: After Ceuta Is Before Ceuta

so Yeah, I've been following the best person to follow.

I think

we've all been kind of like, you know, following and also writing commentaries and sharing our opinions.

I think it'd be really great also for you to share, you know, what you think, what you've observed about the last couple of days.

Well, when the news broke, I was traveling, so I wasn't able to... to follow as closely as I might if I was home or in one place and I didn't quite know what was going on and it happened so suddenly it seemed and I just see all these headlines of thousands of people and all the usual language that you see of surge and invasion and all this kind of crazy hyperbolic language and it was one of those instances when it's not quite clear who's right, who's wrong, who's good, who's bad.

I don't want to say surprised or shocked because I don't think much surprises or shocks any of us anymore, but the intensity and the swiftness from EU member states of just locking down Fortress Europe.

You know, it's like in this was like, OK, so here's where, you know, a few months ago, within the last few months, we had the basically the deportation pacts get passed.

We'll talk about we'll talk more about.

And we've we've this has been coming for a very long time.

But now we're here and it feels like we're in this new moment where we don't need to pretend anymore.

Right.

EU leaders don't need to pretend anymore to be nice.

They don't need to pretend anymore to say the right things.

They can just be outright racist.

They could be outright nativist.

They could be out.

bringing up the proverbial drawbridge, and just saying, this is our border, and these are the people who are allowed to be in, and these are the people who are not allowed to be in, and that's the way it is.

And the swiftness and the intensity of that really took me by surprise.

William, I hear you on this, and of course, it doesn't strike us by, it doesn't take us by surprise, but still, there was, I think, a lot of surprise online from some commentators, not only in Europe, but across the Atlantic as well.

We saw a lot of commentaries coming from North America, from different sides of the spectrum.

And Chela, this is something that you really follow closely in terms of the discourses on migration.

So can you like maybe share what you've observed, especially around how the discourses have been mobilized by different actors, but also what are the consequences of the mobilization of certain discourses? Of course, primarily on migrants, but I think generally on democracy and human rights in general.

So, you know, I've been thinking about it as well.

And when I was trying to figure out what had happened and trying to sort of put it in a bigger picture, right, what struck me was how Europe's past and its future have collided over Ceuta.

So the past, obviously, Ceuta is a Spanish enclave.