From Naivity to Pragmatism: 10 Years of Spanish Participation in the European Diplomatic Machinery

Abstract

In the ten years spanning 1986-1995, Spain, headed by the pro-european activist President Felipe Gonzalez, sought to pursue its historical and geographical interests in the Arab world, Latin America and the Mediterranean by pragmatically reorienting its self-defined peripheral status in the European Union as a middle-size power within the post cold-war international structures of defense and security. Today, the European Union is no longer seen by Spanish leaders as the solution to the country’s internal problems (source of a certain naivity in 1986). Instead, this article analyzes how the EU’s political and defense structures have come to be regarded as a mechanisms which must be tempered, pragmatically, by Spanish diplomacy. Top priorities have been Spain’s efforts to reform the common foreign and security policy (CFSP) within the framework of theIntergovernmental Conference and to “europeanize” the Mediterranean reality at the moment of both EU enlargement (from twelve members to fifteen) and debate about the EU’s interests towards the East. With more discretion since the arrival of the Popular Party in government in 1996, Spain’s policy of prudent realism has continued. ReformingEU institutions and the CFSP, and developing an European Defense Identity (EDI) organized by the Western European Union and the EU as a complementary force to NATO constitute Spain’s leading diplomatic objectives in the coming years.