Is Spain a disloyal partner of the EU?

Is Spain a pro-European state? What does this term mean these days? Proclaiming the virtues of Europe at face value (as the main Spanish parties now do)? Or do European principles also have to be defended on a daily basis? Can a party like the Partido Popular (PP) be considered pro-European if, through the Ministry of the Interior, it promotes political persecutions, turning a blind eye on any European conception of the rule of law? And how about parties like the PSOE (socialists) and Ciutadans, who protect the minister so that he does not have to answer to the Spanish parliament? What would we think of all of this, were it to happen in Orbán’s Hungary?

About a year ago, Araceli Mangas-Martín, full professor of public international law at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, described in El Mundo how Spain had been moving towards becoming one of the least-compliant EU members, accompanied in this dubious leadership only by Italy and Greece. Mangas, infuriated, affirmed: ‘I do not believe that Spain is a European democratic State.’

And she did not say it only because Spain ties with Tanzania at the bottom end of the international rankings assessing judicial independence. For the list of warnings, reports and sanctions Spain has received from Brussels is one of the longest. Spain enjoys unenviable honour of being the state that generated most citizens’ complaints in 2014 for the way it ‘applies’ European directives. From the interior market to services, from the courts to the environment, there is not on single field not covered by Madrid’s malpractice.

For example, the crisis with Russia highlighted once again the vital importance of building a more sustainable and effective energy union, to reduce the energy dependency on certain countries. However, Spain will not meet the objectives endorsed in 2007 at the European Council for 2020 in renewable energy, energy efficiency and CO₂ emission reduction. The aids for renewable energy and energy efficiency were virtually removed (ruining thousands of families and small investors) and the issue of CO₂ emissions has disappeared from the political agenda. All this makes it very doubtful that Spain will meet its commitments on climate change signed at the 2015 Paris summit.

Nor does Spain comply with its treatment of refugees. In the first place, it has yet to transpose the European guidelines on asylum, years after it ought to have done, as denounced by Francisco Solans, of the Foreigners sub-committee of the General Lawyers’ Council. Due to this, there is ‘an accumulation of unnecessary suffering of human beings in (extreme) situations’. And it hasn’t met the agreement of the European Council that committed Spain to accommodate (between 2016 and 2017), 15,888 refugees from camps in Italy and Greece, for up to now little over a hundred refugees have arrived. This is a hard knock for States like Germany who are bearing the brunt of the refugee crisis.

Spain in the EU: null leadership and blindly following the leader

About three years ago, Ignacio Molina, of the Elcano Foundation, wrote a demolishing article: ‘After bottoming out: a new European policy for Spain’. In it he explained without mincing his words why Warsaw pulled more weight in Brussels than Madrid. Since then, people like Josep Borrell or ex-PM Felipe González have timidly recognized that Spain’s influence in the EU is insignificant. Nevertheless, this should not surprise us unduly: Spain has not led a single well thought-out proposal in the last ten or fifteen years.

The image of Zapatero or Rajoy on their own, with no-one to chat with during breaks at summit meetings, visualizes this isolation. But the true isolation of Spain as regards Europe is ideological: there is no Spanish idea on how Europe should advance, beyond the periodic calls to strengthen European solidarity. Several voices in Brussels are starting to wonder whether Spanish parties don’t see Europe just as a huge cash dispenser.

Rajoy strolling along with Merkel in a failed attempt to achieve the chair of the Eurogroup for De Guindos is a perfect metaphor of the European policy that the last Spanish government followed: no leadership and blindly following whoever is in charge.

European mentality of the Spanish State?

In the field of European values, Spain also stands out: once more, negatively. For example, since the Partido Popular took power, the right to pursue in the courts crimes against humanity committed outside Spain, as judge Baltasar Garzón did with general Pinochet, has been shredded. Both Human Rights Watch, in 2015, and the United Nations have criticized in two independent reports amendments to the law that stipulates the ability of Spanish courts to persecute crimes against humanity committed outside Spain.

Both reports also recommended that the Franco regime’s crimes be taken to court so as to convert forced disappearances into ‘domestic crimes’, and the fact is that Span holds the dubious honour of being second only to Cambodia in the world, as regards mass graves. The Franco regime has not yet been condemned by Congress, court martials such as that of president Lluis Companys have not been quashed and the government is allowed to pay tribute to the Hitler’s army División Azul. The way Spain copes with its past, in contrast to Germany, for example, is shameful. It is no surprise that Spain did not reinstate the negation of the Holocaust as an offence until 2015.

Another example is the infrastructure model. As can be seen with the issue of the Mediterranean goods railway corridor, in contrast to the European Commission’s rational approach, even the newcomer lefties party Podemos defends a Pyrenees crossing, which had previously been discarded by Brussels. Recentralization instead of decentralization is the Spanish answer to the construction of Europe. This has been severely criticized by the more pro-European international experts, as they consider that decentralization is one of the bases for achieving the objective of a more federal Europe, and at the same time for carrying out policies closer to the citizen.

Instead, the Spanish state holds to the idea that the unity of the nation can be attained in a physical way –with high-speed rail connections. Every year hundreds of thousands of Spanish citizens, especially youngsters, emigrate to Germany and the Nordic countries, lacking prospects for the future, while the State continues to pour European funds into the least-used highway in the country or into more kilometres of high-speed tracks.

Are Spanish parties de facto Eurosceptical?

During the TV debate of the four leaders of the main political national parties and during the whole election campaign for the 26 June, the telling silence of Ciutadans, PP, PSOE and Podemos about what Europe they want, about what sacrifices they are willing to pay in order to build it, and especially about the sincere diagnosis they present as regards the things that do not work, was clarifying. Unlike many other European countries, in the whole debate there was not a single intelligent criticism of the EU, or any discourse worth mentioning on its importance on how to help to promote the project. Listening to them it became clear that the Spanish parties are interested in Europe only to blame it or to gain the privilege of more time to stretch out the deficit, or funding for their projects.

For example, we still do not know what the Spanish parties think about the refugee crisis, apart from learning that they all deeply regret it. And other than the PP and Podemos (who are against and in favour, respectively, of it), we have not heard yet if PSOE and Ciutadans would allow the regional authorities to take refugees in without having to get permission from Madrid. None of the four parties have stated what role they want the EU’s foreign policy to play in Syria, or what price they are willing to pay to fortify the Euro zone and avoid future crises. Indifference towards Europe is almost total and in just a year even Pablo Iglesias, leader of Podemos, has stopped referring to the ‘troika’ as the enemy, while nobody seems to remember Tsipras.

Not even the Brexit referendum stirred up much excitement, and having seen the result, the PSOE and Rajoy’s PP, as well as Ciutadans, seem to summon up their energy only to disparage the Britons’ democratic decision. Knowing full well that for them some things (the unity of Spain) take precedence over democracy, it is no surprise that the socialist leader Pedro Sánchez wrote a tweet saying: ‘Now we have seen what happens with referendums.’ The fact that Rajoy is the only head of State who has threatened to veto Scotland if it wants to stay in the EU after separating from the United Kingdom is the icing on the cake. More than a few in Brussels are beginning to wonder whether the real pro-Europeans aren’t the Scots and the Catalans.

From whatever perspective, it becomes clearer by the day that it is more appealing for Spanish parties to talk about Latin America than about Europe. To discuss the future of Venezuela makes them relive the imperial past, whereas to think about the EU forces them to admit Spain’s current insignificance. In actual fact, the pro-European stance of Spanish parties is just a rhetorical exercise.