Spanish foreign policy: party alternatives or the pursuit of consensus?

Abstract

The Spanish general election of March 2004 not only produced a surprise result but also had an unusually strong foreign policy focus, representing a rarity in electoral contests both in Spain and in western and southern Europe. While Aznar’s People’s Party (PP) ultimately paid a price for its Iraq policy, the early pronouncements made by the ensuing Zapatero administration indicated that the Socialist Party (PSOE) would continue to disagree with the PP over a range of international issues: most ostentatiously over Iraq, but also over Spain’s location on the Euro-Atlantic landscape, in relation to Latin America, towards the Mediterranean and over the Western Sahara dispute. While the Socialists blamed their rivals for having broken with a ‘Polı́tica de Estado’ in foreign policy and called for a return to bipartisan (and indeed broader) consensus, neither party has consistently pursued a foreign policy rapprochement since that time. These developments represent something of a sea-change in Spanish politics, with foreign policy contested just as fiercely now as domestic policy has been since the end of the democratic transition—the latter having been a ‘transition through transaction’. Even during the first Aznar government (1996–2000), most observers continued to believe that a substantial foreign policy consensus among the ‘electable’ parties, which had emerged under González, was sufficiently well established to have survived the 13 years of Socialist government. By the 1990s foreign policy was commonly referred to by PSOE and PP alike as a ‘Polı́tica de Estado’—a domain of politics in which state interests, which could be commonly defined, should prevail in so far as the broad framework of foreign policy orientations was concerned. In contrast with the early post-Franco years, when pragmatism had led the major parties to compromise on domestic political arrangements while ideological divisions still found reflection in foreign policy preferences, external relations appeared to have become the more obvious domain for bipartisanship by the late 1980s and to have remained so in spite of the new international challenges that appeared after