When I moved to South Africa in 2017 and lived in Cape Town and Johannesburg, friends back home kept asking what it was like and whether it was safe. I used to answer, half joking, that I was seeing how Europe would look in 20 years.
I’m no longer joking.
What I saw in South Africa
A state that slowly stops doing its basic job. Institutions decay and public schools fail. People stop trusting the government to protect them, so they protect themselves. They move into gated enclaves, hire armed response and put up electric fences.
The numbers back this up. South Africa had close to 2.7 million registered security guards at the end of 2022, with 586,042 of them active, which works out to four private guards for every police officer. Police strength fell from 157,518 in 2012 to 140,048 in 2022. The latest figures put active registered guards above 650,000, against just over 153,000 police officials, so the ratio is still roughly four to one. When private security outnumbers the police several times over, the state has quietly given up its monopoly on protection. That is what failure looks like.
Nobody announces it. There is no day on which the country collapses. Everyone adapts a little at a time. You stop walking at night, then you stop stopping at red lights, and then you build a higher wall. Eventually the people who can afford it have opted out of the public system entirely, and the people who can’t are left with whatever remains.
Ceuta: a border that isn’t one
Now look at Europe’s southern edge. Ceuta, a small Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast, has become a stress test for the whole continent. NPR reported that over 70,000 migrants crossed into Ceuta in the week of July 27 this year. The government says most have since returned to Morocco of their own accord, but thousands, many of them unaccompanied minors, remain, and some locals have organized neighborhood watch groups with aggressive tactics.
Read that last part again. Citizens in a European city are organizing their own patrols because they don’t trust the authorities to manage the situation. I watched that same reflex develop in Johannesburg: when the state can’t protect people, they start protecting themselves. It is a warning sign in any society.
A government that can’t tell its own citizens who is crossing its border, how many, and what happens next has stopped governing that border. Compassion is not a border policy. Neither is hoping the problem goes away.
Paris: a state that can’t hold the line
This weekend, hundreds of thousands marched across France over living costs and failing schools. Most were peaceful. Then masked groups took over. Authorities said they set fires and attacked public buildings, including city halls, in several cities. The ministry now counts almost 2,400 arrests and about 1,000 wounded police, and hundreds of shops were looted from Paris to Marseille to Bordeaux. Macron was forced to address the nation.
Trump and Vance say immigration is behind it. The French authorities say they haven’t linked immigrants to the violence and point to far-left groups and looters. I’ll let the arrest records settle that. But look at the French record: the riots of 2005 and 2023 came from the same suburbs, and each time the state promised integration and order, and each time it fell short. Whoever is behind this weekend, the question is the same one I asked in Johannesburg: when thousands of people are smashing a capital city, and the police are outnumbered and exhausted, who is in charge?
Integration is not optional
I’ll say what many people in Europe think and few say publicly. Societies stay cohesive when newcomers share the basic norms of the place they join: the rule of law, equal rights for women, the primacy of the national legal system over any parallel one. Where integration fails, you get neighborhoods where the state’s writ runs thin and where residents of every background feel less safe. Many French and Belgian cities already have such areas. Europe’s leaders respond by calling anyone who notices a bigot.
Controlling immigration is not hatred. It is what any serious country does. Australia, Denmark and Japan do it and remain decent places. The countries that refuse to do it are the ones where a political backlash eventually arrives.
What Europe should do now
- Control the borders. Enforce them, fund the police to do it, and deport people with no right to stay.
- Make asylum rules mean something. Process claims quickly and remove people whose claims fail.
- Demand integration as the price of settlement: language, work and respect for the law.
- Rebuild the basics. Safe streets, working schools and clean cities are what a government owes taxpayers before anything else.
South Africa didn’t fall because of one decision. It fell through a thousand small refusals to say the obvious, and by the time the guards, fences and armed response arrived, it was too late to go back. I watched it happen. I would rather Europe learned from my experience than repeated it.
Sources: NPR on Ceuta; AP via CBS News on France; France 24 live coverage; BusinessTech on PSIRA and SAPS numbers (2022); BusinessTech on current guard numbers.
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