In Spain there is a patron saint for everything and everyone: St. Christopher for travellers, St. Thomas More for politicians and Judas Thaddeus for the hopeless. In this respect, it is only logical that the NATO summit in Madrid also has a patron saint: Spain’s Interior Ministry named its police operation, one of the largest in Spanish history, after Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace. More than 10,000 police officers are to ensure the security of the heads of state and government in the capital in the coming days.
It is of course no coincidence that the goddess who brings peace is the patron of the NATO summit that is supposed to define the strategy of the alliance for the next ten years. The war in Ukraine is the dominant topic of the next two days in Madrid. In view of this conflict, there is “nothing more normal” than strengthening NATO’s eastern flank, said Spain’s Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares in an interview with the newspaper El País. Albares expresses what is already a consensus. However, he emphasized that NATO’s southern flank was also on the agenda.
And here the host of the summit puts an accent. The south is of particular concern to the Spaniards – if only because of its geographical location. Just a few days ago, it became clear again how explosive the topic is from a Spanish perspective: According to human rights organizations, 37 people died trying to cross the border fence between the Moroccan Nador and the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Video footage shows Moroccan border guards beating men lying on the ground. According to the human rights activists, the majority of these people came from South Sudan, 4,000 kilometers away, where 7.7 million people are currently at risk of starvation due to the consequences of the corona pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
Melilla has just shown how explosive the southern flank is from the Spaniards’ point of view
Like Italy or Greece, Spain is directly affected by the consequences of migratory movements in Africa, and it would be in these countries’ interests if a concept for the Maghreb were drawn up at the summit. From the Spanish point of view, the topic, which has not been given priority by NATO up to now, is definitely one: It is no coincidence that Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called the incidents in Melilla at the weekend an “attack on his country’s territorial integrity”, which Spanish and Moroccan security forces successfully repelled had. The socialist initially found no words of regret in view of the 37 deaths. Only when asked in an interview on Monday did the prime minister manage to say that he regretted “the loss of life”.
The Spanish judiciary has now opened an investigation into the death of the migrants. This was reported by the Spanish state TV broadcaster RTVE and other Spanish media on Tuesday evening. Attorney General Dolores Delgado justified the decision with the scope of what happened last Friday at the border fence on the Moroccan side, it said. Delgado emphasized that human and fundamental rights of migrants could have been violated in the process.
The left-wing coalition partner Podemos, the conservative opposition and now also the German government had called for the incidents to be clarified. But Sánchez can count on the support of Brussels and NATO with his crackdown on the border. After all, Sánchez’s choice of words about the “territorial integrity” that was at stake in Melilla was no coincidence. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg recently said that NATO would defend “every centimeter of its territory” – which many Spaniards now interpret to mean that NATO protection should also apply to the Spanish exclaves in North Africa, Ceuta and Melilla.
Migrants who have crossed the border fence of the Spanish exclave of Melilla: 37 people died here over the weekend, Moroccan border guards tried to stop them by force.
(Photo: Javier Bernardo/AP)
The debate over whether NATO will protect Ceuta and Melilla is occupying all of the country’s major newspapers. NATO itself is likely to leave the Spanish exclaves cold in view of the other, much more serious threats, especially from the east. The clinch that Spain is fighting with either Morocco or Algeria is also turning into a skirmish compared to the new threat from Russia.
There is still room for improvement in Spain’s NATO participation
The Alliance plans to increase the membership of its Rapid Reaction Force from 40,000 to 300,000, of which a corps headquarters is based in Bétera, in the Valencia region, Spain. Spain would also have to provide significantly more staff for this. Prime Minister Sánchez had already increased the number of Spanish soldiers on a NATO mission from 800 to around 1,600 in the past few months. But overall there is still room for improvement in Spain’s participation in NATO: the country is traditionally one of the members that invest the least money in armaments in relation to their gross domestic product. It was 1.02 percent of GDP last year, only Luxembourg put less money into the defense budget.
Compared to previous years, the socialist Sánchez has raised the budget by more than one percent of gross domestic product for the first time, but the two percent that NATO is demanding is a long way off. Just like the almost 65 billion euros that Germany recently invested. In Spain, the defense budget last year was almost 15 billion euros. And in the eyes of Jens Stoltenberg, the two percent is more the lower than the upper limit for future investments.
When asked on Monday whether NATO would defend the two Spanish cities in the event of a military attack on Ceuta and Melilla, however unlikely that may be, the Norwegian had an answer that was as bureaucratic as it was disappointing for Spain: the North Atlantic Treaty only referred to territories in Europe and North America as well as islands belonging to the respective member states and lying geographically north of the Tropic of Cancer.