I. Introduction: The current situation of Spain and its geopolitical potential
Currently, Spain is going through a phase of political and economic decline, which has been especially accentuated since the attack on Admiral Carrero Blanco in 1973. This event marked a turning point that reduced the country to a third-rate state, with waning international influence and weakened sovereignty, comparable to that of the former colonies.
The crime committed against the person of Carrero and his three companions, formally attributable to the Basque separatist terrorist group ETA, has always aroused all kinds of doubts and suspicions.
The more moderate ones tend to emphasize how incredible it is that the CIA did not have knowledge about the preparation of the attack and the surprise that the Admiral did not enjoy greater protection, given the high degree of infiltration and control enjoyed by the Americans – the CIA – in Spain at that time. as in the current one. The fact is that the Spanish sovereigntist reluctance that the figure of Carrero could represent, was neutralized with this assassination.
However, Spain’s geographical position – located in a critical region of the world – gives it a unique and unique position. an intrinsic geopological potential that has not been exploited, due to this same decline. This article argues that, despite its almost chronic decline since the time of the Habsburgs, Spain possesses the objective conditions to regain its status as a middle power, provided it has a strong leadership and an independent foreign policy.
II. Historical factors of the Spanish decline: external interference and internal weaknesses
The loss of the universal empire that Spain held between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries marked the beginning of a process of decadence that even led it to become a failed nation-state during the twentieth century.
At this point it should be clarified that Spain “did not have an Empire”: the correct thing would be to say “Spain was an Empire“. The synthesis of the Hispanic medieval kingdoms, catalyzed from the Asturian Kingdom and germinally occurring in the Gesta de Covadonga (722) was a transformation of an agglutinative nature, not absorbing. The imperial result formally given with the Union achieved by the Catholic Monarchs (1479) was of a binding type and this was also the case with regard to the American incorporations. In various writings we have explained the difference between Absorbing Empire and Binding Empire. Look at it now in a tight way.
Absorbing, in the Anglo-Saxon way, for example, implies that in an empire there is the reproduction and copying of an initial template or paradigm imposed – usually violently, by extermination but also by unequal acculturation, on other ethnic realities. Going back to antiquity, Rome’s behavior seems absorbing with respect to ethnicities that the Romans perceived – rightly or wrongly – as inferior (Celts, Iberians, Germans) in their European conquests, but the Romans themselves were more agglutinating in the “civilized” provinces of the East.
The distinction between empires that my professor, the Spanish philosopher Gustavo Bueno, used is very different, and it contains a moral assessment, which is inappropriate for the (geo)political realism that we want to maintain.
The author from La Rioja referred to “generating” empires (morally superior) to describe structures that “generated civilization” from a previous matrix, such as Rome or Spain, depriving the defeated cultures of value or integrating them as mere material parts.
The Romans, thus, would have put an end (positively, ontological and morally) to Celtic “barbarism” (which included little urban development and writing, eventual human sacrifices), in an analogous way to how the Spaniards eliminated (positively as well) the cannibalism and agraphia of the pre-Columbian civilizations of America, which did know cities and state organization but lived with Neolithic technology and completely outside the “area of Hellenic civilization” [1].
Spain was a glue on the peninsula for centuries, until the imposition of liberal ideology in the nineteenth century, with respect to its own territories and with respect to its various ethnic, foral, and linguistic peculiarities. Unifying means that the Empire is created by assimilating very diverse ethnic and legal-political realities, integrating them without destroying them and assuming valuable portions of them to forge a superior unity. This is how Spain became in the Reconquista, and this is how its imperial development continued after 1492, although with nuances.
Castilian hegemonism is circumscribed to the interval between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, and is not an eternal requirement (although it is essential) for Hispanidad and Españolidad. It could not function as a single template to create superior, “supra-Castilian” realities, although it had that golden moment between the end of the Middle Ages and the arrival of the Bourbons. As for American Spain, the ethnic and cultural distance with respect to pre-Columbian cultures and civilizations was much greater and, analogous to Rome, the official or formal behavior of the Empire -or Hispanic Monarchy- was of a more absorbing type with respect to Indian cultures: the administrative, judicial, educational, military, ecclesial, etc. were “copied” from agreement with the same template as in the European part, and more specifically, Castilian.
This was not the case in the cultural, informal order, in the plane of miscegenation and the formation of families, communities, etc., where there was much more indigenous component, and the existence of a Spanish America was assimilative, rather than absorbing.
These lines are enough to indicate that Spain was an Empire, and it should not be said that it “had an Empire”, in the sense of the Anglo, French, Dutch “empire”, that is, a colonial State, officially asymmetrical, where the overseas domains did not enjoy the same legal, administrative and economic status as the metropolis. That said, in defense of Spain as a historical entity and in honor of the truth, has no relation to the “Pink Legend” that some writers (many of them disciples of the aforementioned Professor Bueno) want to build against the – on the other hand – very inaccurate and very unfair Black Legend. All other European powers with colonial dominions are more deserving of a Black Legend, if Spain is credited with bearing the blame.
The unifying characteristics of the Spanish Monarchy, already present from its origins in the Reconquista, at least until the advent of the Bourbons in Spain, with the rupture in their traditions that this event entailed, make this Empire a completely different entity from the others.
The defeat of the fearsome Spanish Tercios at Rocroi (1643), the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and already, officially, with the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), from which there was no longer a declining empire fighting to preserve some of its hegemony, but a cadaverous empire, in dispossession, on whose parts the other powers could throw themselves, they marked a national decline from which it was never going to emerge. Spain or Spanish America (which was to become independent from the Crown throughout the nineteenth century). Spain and its area of Hispanidad were the bait of Anglos and French.
The decline of the Spanish Habsburgs was attenuated by certain reforms of the Bourbons, placing Spain in a secondary, but still notable, place in eighteenth-century world geopolitics. As is well known, the Napoleonic invasion and the effort to recover national sovereignty were a definitive blow.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are those of great obscurity, plagued by civil wars, of which the last and bloodiest (1936-1939) was also the clearest historical expression of how a Homeland, having lost its sovereignty, and with it, faith in its own being and tradition, becomes the plaything of foreign powers. The manipulation of the masses, carried out by means of abstract ideologies, was not a factor alien to our collective tragedy.
This leads us to situate ourselves in the last stage of the Franco Regime, just at the time (the 60s and early 70s) in which Spain had managed to be a great industrial power, not without contradictions and deficiencies, but all achieved with state and popular effort, after the terrible underdevelopment of the post-war period and after the bloodbath in the conflict and a hypocritical and cruel international isolation. Given that the same Western powers that isolated Franco after 1945, either did not help the Second Spanish Republic, or surreptitiously helped the Uprising. The same Western powers that had no qualms about helping various dictatorships before, during and after the Spanish war and World War II.
This decline of Spain was accentuated again in the so-called “Transition”, and was not only due to internal factors, such as the ineptitude of its elites (ineptitude that increases with each passing year), but also to the constant interference of foreign powers. After the death of Franco and especially after the assassination of Carrero Blanco, Spain was exposed to operations of destabilization and loss of sovereignty promoted by external actors, mainly Anglo-Americans.
While the current Spanish left strives to theorize about the rights of animals or trans people, speaks of toy strikes or guarantees for “squatters” and “saltavallas”, a few years ago there were good researchers (see the books of Grimaldos or Garcés) who were concerned with other things, and documented these interferences, especially Yankees, in our political, economic and military sovereignty. Pointing this out seems important to us.
The Franco regime and, in particular, under Carrero Blanco, was cherishing a plan to turn Spain into an autonomous industrial and military power (which it already was in part), similar to Gaullist France, a plan that was largely carried out even though the uniformed officers and the rest of the state structures were infested by the Americans. They had lackeys and ears everywhere, in the Regime and in the “Opposition”.
This neo-sovereigntist project included a significant increase in the middle class, a very high nominal GDP (the tenth in the world in 1974), nuclear development, the modernization of the Navy and an independent foreign policy within the Western bloc (which was never questioned for its determined anti-communism), but without subordination to the United States or NATO.
The elimination of Carrero truncated this path and opened the way to the so-called “Regime of 78” (R78), a partisan and decentralized system that has undoubtedly accelerated national disintegration and the loss of sovereignty.
III. Spain’s Atlantic vocation: an alternative geopolitical vision
In contrast to the Mediterranean or “Africanist” narrative of Spain, here he proposes to recover its Atlantic vocation, in accordance with the Long Duration (Braudel) of the historical cycle of Hispanidad. Historically, Spain’s maritime power was forged in the Cantabrian and Atlantic Seas, thanks to peoples such as Galicians, Asturians, Cantabrians, and Basques, who not only repopulated Castile during the Reconquista, but also provided the human and technical basis (seamanship) for the conquest of America. Without this northern substratum, Spain would not have been able to project its overseas influence.
Atlantic Spain should not be confused with contemporary (Anglo-Saxon) “Atlanticism”, which amounts to subordination to NATO and US interests. On the contrary, it is a question of rebuilding a strong military and merchant navy, capable of operating autonomously in the ocean and serving as a bridge with Latin America.
In this sense, the union with Portugal – the so-called Iberianism – is not just a sentimental matter (the fact that we feel like brothers above historical clashes) or a cultural enterprise, but a geopolitical necessity. Together, Spain and Portugal would form a maritime power with Atlantic projection, a “wedge” between Europe and America that could challenge Anglo-American hegemony.
IV. Spain’s role in a multipolar world
This article argues for the reality of an emergence of a multipolar order, in which blocs such as the BRICS challenge American unipolarity. This reality is imposed, and it is time to celebrate it and take advantage of the occasion. In this context, Spain must redefine its foreign policy: move away from Atlanticism and NATO, strengthen its ties with Latin America and establish cooperative relations with Eurasian powers such as Russia and China. Multipolarity is not only a political option, but a historical necessity, and opposing it would be tantamount to “going against destiny”.
All the powers of the world that emerge or are reborn taking advantage of the decline of the Anglosphere appeal to History to remember who they are, to what past and to which deaths they are due. Progressivism – precisely promoted from the Anglosphere so that no foreign power confronts them – insists that there are no duties towards the dead. This is a great mendacity. A Homeland is made by compatriots and contemporaries (Adam Müller). Whether a nation is free, sovereign, enjoys certain levels of well-being or recognizes itself as a continuous community, is not only a matter of how many men walk on the same ground, sometimes temporarily or by means of a stamped paper that guarantees a “citizenship”. It is something else. That this nation is free and is as it itself is, is due to an endless series of struggles that took place in the past, rivers of blood that are amply reminiscent of the fact that History has long-lasting waves (F. Braudel), which no one in their right mind – no matter how illiterate they may be – can forget.
Muslims, with or without the paper of Spanish citizenship, economic emigrants or mere tourists, legally established or not in Spain, possess a collective memory and an internal tact that Spaniards no longer possess, a tact towards that long-term Braudelian History. If they inhabit or visit Cordoba or Granada, in them beats the idea of al-Andalus and the potentiality of “its” reconquest, always feasible. Those who once came as masters can come back again as masters. A strong people has memory.
On the contrary, in every Spaniard or Spanish speaker who escapes from his mouth the pronunciation “Maiami” or “Tecsas” to refer to Miami or Texas, there is bleeding evidence of an oblivion, an unconscious collective submission, a failure of Spanishness and Hispanity. When in their sweatshirts and other fashionable clothes, the Spaniards wear British and Yankee flags, leaving aside (even ignoring) the deaths and evils that such foreign powers caused to their Homeland (and to the homelands of Hispanic America), the will and boot of the victor is reaffirmed, strengthened and eternalized. The geopolitical vision of the structural incompatibility between the Anglosphere and Hispanidad must fully touch on these subconscious, educational and “long-lasting” Braudelian strata.
Spain, including Portugal, is an entity that is located on the map where it is, there is no choice. Its geographical position is not changed. It would be desirable for the arm of the sea between Europe and Africa to widen, but even so the invasions and influences of that Islamic and African Otherness would not cease, Spain must assume its destiny.
In the same way, it would be desirable for the United Kingdom to cease to be united, so that the peoples – partly Celts – that compose it would see and live their ethnic proximity to a large part of Spain in all aspects, or it would be ideal for the Yankees to be cured of their arrogance in the face of the great territorial mass they occupy in North America, of Hispanic lineage and substratum, and the intolerable supremacy before the great Hispanic human mass that they dominate and to which they remain blind. But Geopolitics has little to do with the realm of desire: little to do with it, in the short term, because in the “long term” pendulum movements are observed. The vanquished is victorious again, sometimes, and after centuries-
Arrighi stressed that China was “the first world” until the nineteenth century, just until that Asian Empire proved ineffective and naïve in the face of Western and Japanese interference. Now the pendulum, after a long century of infamy, is once again benefiting the Empire-Nation-Civilization that is China.
Spain could once again play a key role in the new global connectivity, which includes navigable Arctic routes due to climate change, and the strengthening of maritime routes between Europe and America. The geographical position of the Iberian Peninsula makes it a strategic node for these new communication routes, provided that it recovers its naval capacity and political independence. This would be, for example, a first step, always taken with the certainty that it is inseparable to speak of “Spain” and “Hispanidad”. As the philosopher Dugin says about his homeland, Russia: it is not only a nation (as big as you want) but a Civilization; and as the Chinese Communist Party itself (and not only Xi) maintains: that China is more than a State: it is Empire and it is Civilization… we must maintain the same with respect to Hispanidad. The long-term wave forces our country to be seen more than a country (second-rate and largely failed), but a civilizational and geopolitical pole, whose largest human and territorial mass is, by the way, in America, not in the Peninsula.
V. Critique of the Western Left and Liberalism
A profound critique must be made of the contemporary left for having abandoned the struggle against neoliberal capitalism to embrace identity and progressive agendas that, in reality, reinforce the liberal system. Today’s capitalism is inherently atheistic, anti-traditional, and destructive of community bonds, such as family, homeland, and religion. The left, by combating these pillars, would be doing the “dirty work” of capitalism.
In the face of this, a national left is proposed that prioritizes sovereignty, social justice and the defense of Spanish identity. This left should ally itself with patriotic forces of various stripes to regain control of the state and oppose the globalist oligarchy. Authors such as Costanzo Preve, Diego Fusaro, Manuel Monereo and Alexandr Dugin should be cited as referents of an anti-liberal and communitarian thought that could inspire this renewal.
There are many thinkers who have detected how neoliberal capitalism has bought into the “leftist” discourse, but not at all revolutionary, coming from the French May 68. The “identity” agenda of feminism, environmentalism, animalism, LGTBIQ+ “rights”, etc. is only serving to fragment the struggle of sovereign peoples in favor of social justice. Through numerous foreign foundations and NGOs, among other instruments of soft power, Anglo-American and Zionist Big Capital has managed to divert potentially revolutionary discourses that, being anti-imperialist, could, for that very reason, sovereignist. In Spain, the left has been abandoning any national approach.
It is totally bent to the way of speaking of the separatists and other “identity” groups (in terms of sexual identity, above all) whom they do not want to offend, thereby losing the affection of a large mass of the people. A mass that no longer sees in these parties and unions instruments that are close to and that defend them. The peasant, the self-employed, the downward middle-class professional, the small shopkeeper, the partner in an SME, etc. may have common interests with the “classical” working class (“proletariat” in retreat in the face of an increasingly less industrial and productive economy).
All these sectors, as the losers that they are in the neoliberal and globalizing process, could unite with a national perspective, seeing in the State not an enemy but precisely an instrument to be conquered and used as a defensive and offensive weapon against supranational institutions (such as the European Union, in the first place) that are increasingly arrogant and sucking sovereignty.
But this new “identity” left stands guard and acts as a faithful sleuth of Big Capital, seeking the disunity of the People, granting sambenitos (“populism”, “fascism”, “Spanish nationalism”) to any person or movement that speaks in terms of Sovereignty.
The sinister deception consists in continuing to present as “Internationalism” what is in reality Globalism. The Spanish People are not interested in an International of millionaire LGBTIS, or an International of neoliberal and privileged Vegans and Animalists when they see that the shopping basket of the average citizen is becoming more expensive every day and social cuts are increasing. A national and sovereign vision is what must unite the discontented. Small sects and chapels benefit Big Global Capital, which is mainly Anglo-American and Zionist. The masks must fall.
VI. The migration issue and the relationship with the Arab world
Sovereignty and the defense of the nation state addresses mass immigration as a geopolitical instrument used by the United States and some Arab monarchies to weaken Europe. In the face of this, a policy of firm defence of the borders, the closure of radical mosques and the prohibition of Islamic proselytism in Spanish territory is proposed.
Relations with the Arab world must be based on mutual respect and non-interference: Islam in Islamic countries, Christianity in Christian countries. Spain must recover its diplomatic tradition with the Arab countries, today almost lost and caricatured, without falling under the influence of Israel or the United States.
VII. The Moroccan Threat and the Defence of the South
Morocco must be singled out as a constant threat to Spanish territorial integrity, especially after the Green March of 1975 and the incursions into Ceuta and Melilla. It is absolutely foolish for a sovereign country to send troops to far-flung NATO missions in the Baltic or Eastern Europe while neglecting its southern flank. Spain’s true vocation is not in the Mediterranean – which only requires containment work – but in the Atlantic.
This Atlantic geopolitics must be linked to that “long-lasting” wave that began in the Late Middle Ages through which the Cantabrian ports became the best defence of the Peninsula in the northern sector (once the danger of the “Lordomans”, Vikings and Normans had disappeared) and an opportunity to subdue the Perfidious Albion.
From there, from the Asturias of Santillana and Vizcaya, the best sailors and the best ships of the time left. Spain would have gained strength as an Atlantic power if it had not created in Seville and Cadiz some nefarious trading houses and emporiums merely sucking up American riches, already in the Modern Age.
VIII. Conclusion: Towards a Sovereign and Atlantic Spain
This essay concludes with a call to recover Spain’s national sovereignty and maritime power. This involves:
- Break with NATO and Atlanticism.
- Strengthen the navy and the merchant navy.
- Promote union with Portugal (Iberianism).
- Establish alliances with multipolar blocs (BRICS, Eurasia).
- Defend borders and Spanish cultural identity.
- To promote a Hispanist, geopolitical and not only cultural pole, which can find its center of gravity in the southern part of America.
The slogan “Plus Ultra” – “beyond” – symbolises this vocation to project itself towards the ocean and the world, recovering the spirit that made Spain an empire, now understood as a confederation of sovereign nations that speak the same language or sister languages, and share traditions, including that of Social Justice (impossible in a neoliberal regime of Anglo-Saxon and Protestant origin).
What we are looking for is no longer a reborn Spanish empire but something more humble (for the peninsulars) and at the same time more ambitious (for the entire Iberophone world): the creation of a Hispanic pole that, contrary to the stupidity of our liberal right and left, must be an anti-American pole.
Only in this way will Spain be able to escape its current status as a colony and once again be a relevant player on the global chessboard. We have to synthesize all the elements of geopolitics, history, ideological criticism and political proposals, all articulated around a regenerationist and sovereigntist vision of Spain.
[1] This is an issue in which the comparison with the Celts fails, since the Celts (and also the Iberians) were affected in part by Hellenism before the Roman conquest.
