Albares inaugurates the course ‘Spain in the world’ at the Menéndez Pelayo International University

Eduardo González The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, will inaugurate today in Santander, together with the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates of Jordan, Ayman Al Safadi, the second edition of the 'Spain in the World' course, within the framework of the summer courses at the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP). The course, organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the direction of Federico Torres Muro, permanent representative ambassador of Spain to NATO, will take place over five days, until August 2, and will have fourteen sessions in which Spanish and international experts will participate together with representatives of the Ministry (including the four State Secretaries), other countries and international organizations such as ECOWAS, the SEAE, SEGIB, UNCTAD or NATO. The sessions will take place in the Magdalena Palace and will be dedicated to topics such as Russian aggression against Ukraine and the future of European security, the 75th Anniversary of NATO and the roadmap after the Washington Summit, geopolitical disorder ( with the intervention of Diego Martínez Belío, State Secretary for Foreign and Global Affairs), the change in the international architecture, the global consequences of the Gaza conflict and the EU agenda in the next political cycle (by Fernando Sampedro, State Secretary for the European Union, and Marcos Alonso, ambassador, permanent representative of Spain to the EU). There will also be talks about Spain, Latin America and the EU (with Andrés Allamand, secretary general of the Ibero-American General Secretariat, SEGIB, and Susana Sumelzo State Secretary for Ibero-America), West Africa and the Sahel (Ximena Bartolomé, general director for Africa) and the 2030 Agenda and the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (with Eva Granados, State Secretary for International Cooperation, and Antón Leis, director of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, AECID). "If 2023 was Spain's year in Europe, with our Presidency of the Council of the EU, 2024 is the year in which Spain once again puts its focus on the world, beginning the development of a new Foreign Action Strategy for the period 2025-2028”, indicate the organizers. "Faced with an increasingly turbulent international scenario, marked by instability and the growing questioning of the norms that guarantee international coexistence, Spain faces in the coming years the challenge of adapting to the new geopolitical context to continue defending the values and interests of the Spanish”, they continue. “It does so in an environment of growing assertiveness of great powers and regional actors, increase in conflict and impunity, rise of the Plural South, erosion of multilateralism and the United Nations Charter, technological competition and instrumentalization of the interdependencies of a global economy. increasingly fragmented,” they add. All of this, in addition, “will go through elections in more than sixty countries in 2024, covering half of the world's population and 60% of global GDP,” they recall. For Spain, according to Foreign Ministry, adapting to this new geopolitical and geoeconomic context "goes, today more than ever, through the major axes that structure and give continuity to our foreign policy as authentic State policy", taking into account, on the one hand, Spain's commitment to the Euro-Atlantic space through the European Union and NATO and, on the other, the Ibero-American and Mediterranean identity and vocation of our country.

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