Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani today demanded something that until yesterday was unthinkable to say out loud in Brussels: that Spain be suspended from Schengen. „I support closing the Schengen area with Spain,” he wrote, condemning „irregular and uncontrolled immigration”.

The trigger is Ceuta - the Spanish enclave on the North African coast. Migrants flooded the border today, overwhelming police on the city's breakwater after swimming across from the Moroccan side, the Spanish Civil Guard said. Nine died. The Spanish military is sending 60 personnel to reinforce the police.

The numbers are chaos, which is itself a data point. State broadcaster TVE reported that between 2,000 and 3,000 young people crossed the border. Some media mention a figure of 20,000. The Spanish state agency EFE reported that hundreds of young people were seen climbing over the protective fence - which at that moment was not under police supervision at all.

The fence nobody was guarding

That last sentence carries all the weight. This is not a defence that was breached, it is a defence that was not there. Ceuta, together with Melilla, is the European Union's only land border with Africa. Both cities periodically see waves of migrants. Not a surprise, not a first, not unpredictable. And still - the fence was unsupervised.

Tajani is not asking for that to be fixed. He is asking for Spain to be shut out. That is the difference between solving a problem and finding a culprit, and Europe increasingly picks the second. Schengen was conceived as a promise that internal borders disappear. When the first reaction to pressure on the external border is a demand to bring the internal ones back, the promise starts to sound conditional.

Macedonia knows this scene from the other side of the table. For years the same Union explained to the region that borders are a technical standard, not a political message - while fences went up across the Balkans and people were counted. Now the same vocabulary is being used among the member states themselves. Do the rules apply equally to everyone, or do they depend on who is under pressure at that moment?

The nine who died in Ceuta will not be an agenda item at the meetings in Brussels. They are the end of a sentence that begins with an unsupervised fence and finishes with a demand to suspend another country.