Javier Jiménez-Ugarte
Ambassador of Spain (rtd)
These three terms – diplomacy, foreign policy and foreign action – would serve to summarise to the maximum the very rich content of the new book by Professor José María Beneyto, “Política Exterior Española”, which has just been published by ‘Tecnos’.
I am reminded of an intelligent reflection by the Ambassador and Academic of History, Miguel Ángel Ochoa, when he defined diplomatic activity as a mixture of “action and memory”. Perhaps today, now retired, as I begin these lines, the second aspect of my vocational profession would be more important.
I therefore go back to the distant years 1979-1982, when I had the honour of heading the Cabinet of the then sole Secretary of State, Carlos Robles Piquer, in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was headed by Marcelino Oreja. I would say that our only reality in the field of international relations was limited to what we have historically known as “diplomacy”, which came to be identified with the second term of the chosen headline, “foreign policy”.
Since that time of transition, Spain has undergone a process of enrichment of our relations with the rest of the world, characterised by elements such as democratisation and growing complexity. I believe that the book I am beginning to discuss has managed to reflect this contemporary evolution to the full.
An important novelty of the work in question are the pages devoted to the concept of foreign policy itself, which it duly extends, in theory and in practice, to that other current reality, which is foreign action. After this, he studies issues such as the limited “normative sources”, the most recent of which are the Laws “On State Action and Foreign Service”, “Treaties and other International Agreements”, and “Privileges and Immunities”, of the fruitful years 2014/2015, which will appear throughout the book under subtitles such as “transformations of foreign policy”, “plurality of actors and structures”, “interdisciplinarity”, and the very generic “human factor”.
Beneyto’s book is 382 pages long, well divided into four parts, which I will now comment on. The first part, together with the aforementioned concept, contains two chapters on its history, the first “from the disaster of ’98 to 1975” and the second on the “democratic transition and its subsequent main lines”. In all, it is a hundred pages of enjoyable reading, which could be complemented with another recent and chronologically more extensive work by Domingo de Silos Manso, “Diplomacia ayer y hoy. España en el mundo. 1939-2022”, published by ‘Silex’. Beneyto also discusses ever-present issues such as the “continuity and discontinuities” of our foreign projection, the existence or not of an authentic “state policy”, and the historical confrontation between “Europeanism and universalism”.
The second part, the longest of the book at 130 pages, responds perfectly to the most current approaches of analysts and is structured on the basis of geographical areas in which “interests, challenges and values” play their role in setting national priorities. Already in the world of geopolitics, it is easy to imagine that the author studies in depth issues that are very much alive in specific geographic areas such as the Ukraine crisis in “European politics”, Iraq and Afghanistan in “transatlantic relations”; ECLAC and other associative efforts, with different protagonists, in “Latin America”; Canary Islands, OAU, Arab world, Sahara, Morocco, Algeria, within the “Mediterranean and Middle East”, without forgetting Ceuta and Melilla, key points for Spain’s territorial unity, as I saw during my consular assignments in the neighbouring Moroccan cities of Nador, Tetuan and Larache; then, “Asia”, presented as “the new horizon of the Indo-Pacific”, with the important presence of China; and, finally, the search for a strategic relationship with “Sub-Saharan Africa”.
I very much enjoyed the third part, rigorously entitled “new forms of diplomacy”. The first, already highly developed and recognised, derived from “soft power”, continues to develop under the name of “Public Diplomacy”. And then there are other realities, which may have been discussed at the time but which, in the opinion of this veteran diplomat, should no longer be, such as “economic diplomacy”, in its two aspects of the internationalisation of Spanish companies, and in its contributions to development cooperation.
He also explains and develops “cultural diplomacy”, where our language has become a key factor in this aspect of our foreign policy, channelled primarily through the “Instituto Cervantes”.
And finally, “security diplomacy”, to which I have always felt very close, both as the son of a military attaché and in my past capacity as “Secretary General for Defence Policy”, a post created by Minister Federico Trillo-Figueroa in 2001, during Aznar’s second term in office.
The fourth part is a pleasant surprise, which can only be explained by the vocation José María Beneyto has always had for political and constitutional issues. I will recall how much I was impressed by his successful book “The Magician”, on the historical figure of one of the main ideologists of the Nazi regime, Carl Smitt.
The ambitious title “The formulation, execution and control of Spanish foreign policy” is exhaustively developed by the author, making it not only topical but also necessary for defence in any democratic regime. He develops it in five chapters that begin with the indisputable principle of “unity of action abroad”, linked to the necessary “strategic planning”. Then, of course, comes the analysis of the “central role of the Presidency of the Government” in this field, and the growing, and inevitably controversial, “foreign action of the Autonomous Communities”, which are called upon, in any case, to collaborate and coordinate with the “Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Foreign Service”.
A final chapter draws attention to the “functions of the legislative power as an element of control”, both for reasons of content and budgetary factors in matters of international relations, and this in its twofold aspect, the first directed towards the government’s own external projection, and the second, and more novel, towards its European policy and the application of European Union law.
The book concludes with some apt reflections on an indisputable reality, but certainly in crisis today for reasons of economic cost, known as “parliamentary diplomacy”, which will have to continue to struggle to overcome old, and sometimes accurate, accusations of “parliamentary tourism”.
In short, a great book, filling a gap, loaded with interest for scholars and followers of that reality, fascinating to me, which has come to be known as the “foreign policy” of individual nations, once traditional “diplomacy”, and now expansive “foreign action” because of the growing number of actors driving it.
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