Ceuta in History

Brian, who also blogs at American Footprint, has a short and interesting post up on the Spanish exclave of Ceuta. As someone with a keen interest in enclaves and exclaves, I offer some of it for our readers:

What’s more, Ceuta has historically been a gateway to Europe rather than one to Africa. As noted above, the city was difficult to take, but even after it was taken, the mountains surrounding it meant that you couldn’t easily advance into the Moroccan interior. However, many invasions of the Iberian Peninsula and reinforcements of Muslim positions there were launched from its harbor. In fact, one could take this “gateway” pattern even up to the present, where desperate African economic migrants try to use it as a stepping-stone to continental Europe.

These historical and geographical factors make the competing Spanish and Moroccan claims to the enclave more complex than it might first appear. The Moroccan claim draws its legitimacy primarily from geography, in that everything on the North African coast is properly the territory of North African states. Spain, on the other hand, claims it not primarily on the basis of the 1415 conquest, but rather as part of a broader claim to the territies of the 10th-century Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba.

Go read the rest.