Europe’s standards paradox

Thumbnail photo by Alex Shuper on Unsplash.

For many, the crisis in Ceuta was seen as the collapse of European unity. Tens of thousands of migrants arrived on the Spanish territory in a single day. Italy said it would suspend its Schengen arrangement with Spain and called for the country’s broader suspension from the zone. Denmark and Finland backed the demand, and the escalation culminated when twenty-two leaders of EU countries signed a letter criticizing Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s migration policies for undermining the security of the bloc’s external borders.1

Reading the comments, I thought: has such a thing as European unity really ever existed? What about standardization?