Part I — Situation overview

On Thursday 6 August 2026, at an extraordinary sitting of the European Parliament’s committee on civil liberties, justice and home affairs, EU migration commissioner Magnus Brunner formulated a sentence that touches the founding assumption of the past decade of EU migration policy: “We must cooperate with our neighbours, of course. But as long as control depends on the goodwill of a single neighbouring state, we remain vulnerable.” The commissioner described the events in Ceuta as a test of flexibility and of the security of the external borders, and put it that what happened gives firm proof of the need for strong and effective — several different — instruments for action against people smuggling. The statement came a week after people entered the Spanish exclave en masse from Morocco within a few hours. The figures differ by source: Politico mentions some 72 thousand, the BBC roughly 78 thousand, and EUobserver, citing local authorities, more than 80 thousand arrivals.

Juan Jesús Vivas, mayor-president of Ceuta, set out the balance sheet at the same sitting: about a hundred people died, approximately 75 thousand returned to Morocco, and 3,000–5,000 remained in the city. By his account the situation has not returned to its normal course: there is a humanitarian state of emergency and public order disturbances, and the return of unaccompanied minors is practically impossible, because that would require their consent. An improvised count by Ceuta residents totalled more than five thousand minors; the 4,860 children registered by volunteer groups is twice the official estimate. The Spanish interior ministry has set aside 25 million euros for the care of the minors.

The second, less spectacular but for Hungarian public policy more direct development is that the European Commission confirmed: during the events in Ceuta not a single member state initiated the application of the crisis instrument under the EU regulation on digital services. According to Brunner, however, the mass crossing was brought about by criminal networks spreading disinformation, and the Spanish prime minister agreed with this too. The instrument therefore existed, yet did not come into operation.

MIAK’s reading: the change of doctrine — from externalisation towards internal capacity — is for Hungary not a question of principle but of allocation and institutions, and of the two developments the less spectacular is the more important. An EU instrument that nobody triggers functionally does not exist. On the Hungarian side this is not a question of intent: there is no actor designated in law whose remit would include initiation in the case of a similar border event supported by an information operation.

Part II — Literature foundation

The situation requires three conceptual frames built on one another. Henry Kissinger (German-born American diplomat and foreign policy thinker, former US secretary of state) argues in his work World Order that the Westphalian order spread across the whole world because its provisions are procedural, not substantive. The state border and sovereignty are in this frame not a value but a procedural guarantee, which has to work for the other agreements to be meaningful. If border control is built on a neighbour’s goodwill, it is precisely this procedural guarantee that is missing. The second frame is the source text of the very doctrine under review: the European Union’s 2016 global strategy (Shared Vision, Common Action) made the state and societal resilience of the neighbourhood a strategic priority, and the same document introduced the concept of principled pragmatism, on which MIAK’s foreign policy doctrine is also built. The third is the study of Kristian L. Nielsen (Danish political scientist, researcher of the EU’s foreign policy performance), which applies Christopher Hill’s classical concept, the capability–expectations gap, to EU soft power, and concludes that soft power by itself does not narrow but widens this gap. The detailed treatment of the literature — author by author, with quotations — can be found in the 6.4 Literature in detail section.

📖 Source: Henry Kissinger: World Order; EU Global Strategy: Shared Vision, Common Action — A Stronger Europe (2016); Kristian L. Nielsen: EU Soft Power and the Capability-Expectations Gap

Part III — MIAK’s concrete proposal

MIAK proposes three measurable measures. None of them requires EU legislation; all three can be done within domestic competence, exploiting the existing EU frame.

3.1 Designation of domestic initiating responsibility for the crisis instrument (within 90 days)

The EU regulation on digital services knows two separate instruments. Within the frame of the crisis response mechanism under Article 36, the Commission may, on the recommendation of the Board — that is, the European Board for Digital Services, made up of the member states’ digital services coordinators — oblige the very large platforms to carry out a risk assessment and concrete measures, for at most three months. The regulation regards as a crisis those extraordinary circumstances which may lead to a serious threat to public security or public health in the Union or in a significant part of it. The crisis protocols under Article 48 are voluntary, and the Board may recommend their elaboration to the Commission; their content includes, among other things, the prominent display of information from member state authorities and the appointment of a platform contact point responsible for crisis management.

Both routes lead through the Board, so Hungary can initiate through its own digital services coordinator — the media authority, the National Media and Infocommunications Authority (NMHH). MIAK proposes that legislation should designate in what internal procedure and on whose signal the coordinator may launch this initiative, and that the procedure should be public. This is the missing institutional link of the D8 disinformation detection system and the A13 disinformation resilience programme points: detection by itself is not enough if there is nobody to turn it into action.

3.2 An “information operation as trigger of a border event” scenario in the national risk assessment (by the end of 2026)

In the case of Ceuta both the migration commissioner and the Spanish prime minister identified networks spreading disinformation as the triggering cause of the events; this explanation is contestable and to be contested, but the scenario itself is unavoidable. MIAK proposes that the national risk assessment should include as a separate item the situation in which an information operation triggers a mass physical border event within a few hours, and the handling of which requires law enforcement, humanitarian, diplomatic and platform regulatory steps at the same time. The scenario should be run through in at least one simulation exercise, within the frame of the National Foreign Policy Crisis Management Group proposed by the KP7 foreign policy crisis management protocol, whose target value is a first situation assessment within six hours. The most important output of the exercise is not the plan but the gap list: at which step it turns out that there is no designated responsible actor.

3.3 A data-based Hungarian position in the Pact’s externalisation debate (before the autumn Council meeting)

If the centre of gravity of EU migration policy moves from agreements concluded with third countries towards internal capacity and solidarity instruments, then a new fault line opens in the implementation debate on the Migration and Asylum Pact — not along quota and contribution, but along externalisation and internal capacity. MIAK proposes that Hungary should prepare a written negotiating position supported by figures for this: how large domestic reception and procedural capacity is, how much its expansion costs, and under what funding-sharing formula it can be undertaken. The position is worth carrying in an issue-based coalition — with similarly transit-exposed or external-border-exposed member states, according to the logic of programme point KP17 — and, following the KP4 principled pragmatism doctrine, a written weighing document should be prepared for every position: what the value basis is and what the strategic interest is.

The three proposals are bound together by the same thing: the change of doctrine will come about even if Hungary does not shape it, whereas Hungarian exposure depends on whether there is a data-based Hungarian position and whether there is an institutional chain that actually triggers the existing EU instruments. Nielsen’s proposition (see 6.4.3) holds at national level too: the existence of an instrument by itself creates expectation, and if there is no procedure behind the expectation, the disappointment is greater than if the instrument did not exist at all.

Part IV — Expected effects and risks

Dimension Expected effect Risk
Foreign policy With a written position supported by figures Hungary can be a shaper, not a sufferer, of the Pact’s implementation debate If the position is not built on real capacity data, it is quickly exposed at the negotiating table and damages credibility
Digitalisation and AI regulation Designated initiating responsibility makes the existing EU crisis instrument operable The crisis instrument concerns platform content, so its use carries a freedom of expression risk; a narrow set of statutory conditions is indispensable
Public safety and law enforcement The simulation exercise reveals the gaps in responsibility before they come to light in a live situation The exercise may become formal if it is not accompanied by a public gap list and a remediation plan with deadlines

The main question to be weighed stands between speed and fundamental rights safeguards. A disinformation crisis instrument by its nature intervenes in the structure of public information: this is why the regulation limits the measures of the crisis response mechanism to at most three months, and why it makes the proportionality of the measures an express condition. Hungarian regulation has to take over the same strictness: the right of initiative cannot be free discretion, but must be tied to concrete, pre-fixed sets of facts. If designation happens without this, the proposal brings in exactly the risk it would serve to avert — and in that case MIAK would regard the absence of designation as the lesser trouble than an open authorisation. The second risk is the allocation side of the change of doctrine: if the EU moves towards internal capacity, that also means a reallocation of funds, and the Hungarian balance of this has not been calculated today.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth tracking? (proposed KPIs)

Four proposed performance indicators (KPIs, Key Performance Indicators):

  • Designated initiator: whether it appears in legislation by the end of 2026 in what procedure the digital services coordinator may initiate the application of the EU crisis instrument at the Board. A document-based, binary indicator.
  • Simulation exercise: whether at least one exercise on the “information operation as trigger of a border event” scenario is run in the first half of 2027, and whether a public gap list appears at the end.
  • Written negotiating position: whether the Hungarian position supported by capacity and cost figures is completed for the Pact’s implementation debate before the autumn Council meeting.
  • Coalition participation: with how many member states Hungary forms a common position in this matter — it is worth tracking whether the circle of partners reaches beyond the usual regional format.

5.2 Summary

MIAK’s message: the Hungarian lesson from the Brussels change of doctrine is not who was right in the migration debate, but that an EU instrument with no domestic initiator is not an instrument. Concretely, it asks the government to designate in law, within 90 days, the initiating responsibility for the crisis instrument with a narrow authorisation tied to sets of facts, to run a simulation exercise on the border event scenario, and to put the Hungarian position supported by figures on the table before the autumn Council meeting. And it asks the public to hold these three documents to account — these are verifiable, declarations of intent are not.

Two MIAK foundational values are in play here. Data-drivenness, because the externalisation debate has so far run almost exclusively in a symbolic frame, while the real stake of the decision is numerical: how much capacity, how much funding, what sharing formula — without these the Hungarian standpoint is not a negotiating position, only a standpoint. And openness, because the initiating regime of the crisis instrument has to be published: a power which may touch the structure of public information is legitimate only if its procedure is foreseeable and verifiable by anyone. Without these two the change of doctrine is for Hungary not an opportunity but merely one more adaptation pressure arriving from outside.

Part VI — Justifications and further sources

6.1 The press framing by spectrum

The Brussels specialist press used two sharply diverging frames. Politico Europe highlighted the doctrine dimension: at the centre of the article stands Brunner’s sentence on the goodwill of a neighbouring state, and the paper interpreted this sentence as a reopening of the wider debate on the security of the external borders, treating the Ceuta event figure (some 72 thousand persons) as background data. Euractiv, by contrast, focused on the institutional gap: this paper carried the Commission confirmation that not a single member state initiated the crisis instrument, and in a separate opinion piece formulated the diagnosis that the border held but Europe’s trust did not — these articles were not publicly downloadable at the time of editing, so the present analysis relies on references to them at the level of title and claim.

The general news providers carried the humanitarian aspect. The BBC worked from the local leader’s parliamentary account, and alongside the return rate highlighted the situation of the minors, and also the legal antecedent that under a decision of the Spanish supreme court migrants intercepted at sea cannot be sent back to Morocco under a summary procedure. That decision preceded the mass crossing, and it matters for the framing because it suggests a causal connection without asserting one. EUobserver brought the most concrete local data: the residents’ count of more than five thousand minors, the saturation of the reception places, and the fact that the number of children registered by volunteers is twice the official estimate.

The transatlantic dimension appeared as a separate thread: Politico also reported that the American administration at once stated Ceuta’s Spanish territorial status and criticised the Spanish prime minister for a failure of defence. This framing is instructive for the Hungarian reader because it shows that a member state border event immediately enters a great-power communication space — precisely the mechanism the scenario proposed under point 3.2 has to model.

6.2 Facts and data

Item Value Source
Number of entrants into Ceuta ~72,000 / ~78,000 / 80,000+ Politico / BBC / EUobserver (local authorities), 6 August 2026
Fatalities about 100 persons Mayor-president Juan Jesús Vivas before the European Parliament committee
Returned to Morocco approximately 75,000 persons Vivas, 6 August 2026
Remaining in Ceuta 3,000 – 5,000 persons Vivas, 6 August 2026
Unaccompanied minors 5,000+ (residents’ count), 4,860 (volunteer registration; twice the official estimate) EUobserver, BBC (after El Mundo)
Spanish government envelope for the care of minors EUR 25 million BBC, Spanish interior ministry
Number of member states initiating the crisis instrument 0 Confirmation of the European Commission, Euractiv (the article was not publicly downloadable)
Maximum duration of a crisis response measure 3 months Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, Article 36 (3) point c)
The concept of a crisis extraordinary circumstances capable of leading to a serious threat to public security or public health Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, Article 36 (2)

The first row of the table is in itself a public policy lesson. A week after the events three credible sources differ by a band of eight thousand persons in the number of entrants, which means that not even the base datum serving as the foundation of decision-making was available in time — Vivas himself argued that the absence of the exact headcount shows how few resources are available to handle the situation. The Hungarian lesson to add to this is that in a similar scenario the designation of data collection responsibility is just as important as that of law enforcement responsibility.

6.3 Policy dimensions

  • Foreign policy (programme points) — the review of the externalisation doctrine affects the Pact’s implementation debate; the Hungarian position should be formed in an issue-based coalition (programme point ID: KP17), the weighing with a written document (programme point ID: KP4), crisis management in an institutionalised group (programme point ID: KP7);
  • Digitalisation and AI regulation (programme points) — the designation of the domestic triggering chain of the EU crisis instrument and the connection of detection capacity with action (programme point ID: D8);
  • Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points) — the long-term educational and fact-checking layer of societal resilience against disinformation (programme point ID: A13);
  • Public safety and law enforcement (background material) — the structure of the national risk assessment and the regime of simulation exercises.

6.4 Literature in detail

6.4.1 Henry Kissinger: World Order

Kissinger’s central observation about the Westphalian order is that it could spread across the whole world because it set procedural, not substantive, conditions. In his formulation “the genius of this system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive” — if a state accepts these basic requirements, it is recognised as an international citizen and may preserve its own culture, politics and internal order. At the same time the volume also records that today’s global Westphalian system seeks to restrain the anarchic nature of the world with a network of international legal and organisational structures. In this frame the Ceuta case is not a migration but a systemic event: if the control of the external border depends on the case-by-case goodwill of a neighbouring state, then precisely the procedural guarantee that would make the system work is missing. Brunner’s sentence — that we remain vulnerable as long as control depends on a neighbour’s goodwill — is in Kissingerian language an admission that the EU exchanged a procedural function for contractual goodwill.

📖 Source: Henry Kissinger: World Order

6.4.2 EU Global Strategy: Shared Vision, Common Action — A Stronger Europe (2016)

The source text of the doctrine now coming under review is itself available, and names precisely what it made a strategic priority: “State and societal resilience in our neighbourhood is our strategic priority.” Within the frame of neighbourhood policy the document envisages cooperation extending from action against terrorism through migration to energy and climate, and the same text also introduces the concept on which MIAK’s foreign policy doctrine is built: “Principled pragmatism will guide our external action in the years ahead.” Read together, the two elements show the present tension: principled pragmatism prescribes a weighing between value basis and strategic interest, whereas the neighbourhood resilience priority has in practice often been simplified into a presumption of the partner’s reliability. The Hungarian KP4 programme point prescribes a written weighing document for every foreign policy decision precisely so that this simplification should be visible in documented form — and now, at the review of the doctrine, that document could be the basis of the Hungarian position.

📖 Source: EU Global Strategy: Shared Vision, Common Action — A Stronger Europe (2016)

6.4.3 Kristian L. Nielsen: EU Soft Power and the Capability-Expectations Gap

Nielsen starts from Christopher Hill’s 1993 concept, according to which the essence of the European Union’s foreign policy weakness is the capability–expectations gap: a divergence between how much expectation it creates towards itself and how far it is actually able to carry through the policies that the roles it undertakes would require. The study’s central claim contradicts the received assumption: in the author’s view soft power by itself hardly remedies this weakness, indeed “where present, it further widens this gap by raising expectations, thus leading to even greater disappointment when the EU’s hard power capabilities do not measure up to them”. The Ceuta case is a precise illustration of this: EU regulation created a crisis instrument — that is, created the expectation that in a crisis situation supported by disinformation the Union would react — but nobody triggered the instrument, and the gap thus became larger than if the instrument did not exist at all. At the Hungarian level the same logic applies to the designation proposed under point 3.1: the existence of a possibility is not in itself a capability.

📖 Source: Kristian L. Nielsen: EU Soft Power and the Capability-Expectations Gap

6.5 International comparison

The best-known working examples of the externalisation logic — cooperation-based border management agreements concluded with third countries — share a structural weakness: for the partner, withholding cooperation becomes a negotiating instrument, because the other side’s exposure is asymmetric. In Ceuta this mechanism became visible over a single weekend, and the direction of the answer — more instruments against people smuggling, strengthened comprehensive partnerships, an effective return system — remains, in Brunner’s formulation, built on partnership, only standing on several legs.

On the digital side the instructive comparison runs not between countries but between types of instrument. The EU regulation offers two separate instruments: the binding crisis response mechanism, which is however tied to a decision of the Commission, and the voluntary, pre-elaborated crisis protocols, which may include the prominent display of information from the authorities and a designated crisis contact point at the platforms. The latter type is the more important lesson for Hungarian preparedness: since it is voluntary and elaborated in advance, in a live situation it does not depend on legislative time but on whether the preparation has been done. This is the step that can be taken within domestic competence, without EU legislation.

Foreign policy

  • KP4 — Principled pragmatism doctrine
  • KP7 — Foreign policy crisis management protocol
  • KP17 — Issue-based coalition building in the EU

Digitalisation and AI regulation

  • D8 — Disinformation detection AI system

Transparency and anti-corruption policy

  • A13 — Disinformation resilience

Proposed new programme point: A domestic triggering regime for EU crisis instruments — at the intersection of the Digitalisation and AI regulation and Public safety and law enforcement areas, with the statutory designation of initiating responsibility and a public procedure.

6.7 List of sources

Press sources (MIAK foreign press monitor, 7 August 2026 — topic 2):

Knowledge-base references (books and sources of law):

  • 📖 Henry Kissinger: World Order
  • 📖 EU Global Strategy: Shared Vision, Common Action — A Stronger Europe (2016)
  • 📖 Kristian L. Nielsen: EU Soft Power and the Capability-Expectations Gap
  • 📖 Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council on a single market for digital services — Articles 36 and 48

Note: the local file path of the books does NOT appear in the visible text of the blog — only the author and the title. The file path is an internal matter of the generation process, not the reader’s.

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Foreign policy (programme points; programme point ID: KP17)
  • MIAK policy area: Digitalisation and AI regulation (programme points; programme point ID: D8)
  • MIAK policy area: Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points; programme point ID: A13)
  • MIAK policy area: Public safety and law enforcement (background material)
  • MIAK foreign press monitor, 7 August 2026 — topic 2, score: 90/100

Additional public data sources (where used):

  • Frontex monthly migration data; the implementation timetable of the EU Migration and Asylum Pact; DSA Transparency Database; EEAS EUvsDisinfo database

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