Bart De Wever said on Tuesday, before a European meeting on the matter, that he intends to get to the bottom of what happened in Ceuta last Thursday, when thousands of people attempted to reach the Spanish exclave from Morocco by sea. He described the episode as evidence that migration is being used as a lever of pressure, and said EU leaders need to meet to establish what actually occurred.
He went further than the call for facts. He said he understood the demands from several countries to suspend Spain from the Schengen area, and that Europe has to close its borders. He also said that Pedro Sanchez, whose position on migration is more open than his own, has the right to pursue the policy he was democratically elected to pursue.
Those two positions do not sit comfortably together, and the discomfort is the interesting part. Suspending a member state from Schengen is a sanction aimed at a government's choices. Defending that government's mandate is an argument that those choices are legitimately its own. Holding both at once is either a careful distinction between what a state may do and what its neighbours must then absorb, or an unresolved position stated twice.
For Belgium the Schengen line is not rhetorical. This is a transit country whose economy runs on freight crossing borders without stopping, with the busiest stretch of motorway in Europe and a port whose value depends on onward road and rail. Any Belgian prime minister who endorses suspending free movement is endorsing a tool that costs Belgium more per day than it costs most of the states likely to use it.
What happens next is a meeting, and meetings on migration have a long record of producing communiques rather than mechanisms. The narrower request is the more achievable one: establishing what took place at Ceuta, and whether it was organised, is a question with an answer. Whether Europe closes its borders is not.