Spain dissolved in Europe?

In 1962, Franco's government requested the initiation of the European integration process through a letter from Minister Castiella, offering, as the first Spanish contributions, 'territorial continuity' and 'geographical position', with the addition of the well-known 'links with the American countries'. It is shocking to see how little the imaginary of the Spanish State regarding its own value has changed since Franco's regime, basically that of a large plot of land for sale around Madrid, converted into a kind of Euro-American hub. The hub thing is an almost greater nonsense in the globalized and multi-connected present, but in any case it reveals the continuity of the post-imperial complex of the elites of the capital of the State.

In any case, the Spanish State has never opened a serious and adult public debate on the process of European integration. Now, when in view of the political shift in the USA many voices are calling for a deeper integration, in Spain there is still an unspoken but sustained fiction that appears to be that the Union is completely compatible with the maintenance of the State and that both realities do not and will not enter into contradiction. However, the truth is that the conflicts between the Union and the member states are not limited to the more or less extreme and notorious cases of Brexit or the confrontation between the Commission and Hungary over visas for Russian and Belarusian citizens with the war in Ukraine in the background, but rather they appear recurrently for all kinds of jurisdictional, economic or political reasons. Thus, whatever the horizon, there is no possibility of dealing with European construction without dealing with the dismantling of the states, there is no possibility of speaking seriously about integration without speaking about the dissolution of Spain.

Since the lack of an open, serious and adult public debate is not limited specifically to European integration, and rather responds to a general democratic deficit, this particular debate has the added difficulty that the process lacks precise, general or long-term objectives. The history of integration has been made on the fly, often taking advantage of crises. There is therefore no final horizon on which to debate. The existing models of the nation-state are not useful. Certainly not the unitary nation to which the fiction of a province-Spain with Madrid as a subsidiary and intermediary capital of Europe would fit. This Union reformed as a large territorially hierarchical, federal or confederal State could not have been built except in war, and today, not even in war against Russia could it be; no state has the economic, cultural, etc. capacity to give unity and lead the process. The reality is that the Union is being configured in multiple geographies, at different speeds, as a network of powers and management systems that do not always converge. The EU's foreign diplomacy is directed by NATO; monetary power by the ECB; popular representation is maintained, for better or worse, in parliaments; executive power is shared between councils of ministers and boards of directors; the media belong to global conglomerates; other economic and political powers intersect with the above and all are in continuous reconfiguration.

Europe is not and will not be a superpower or a fortress. The temptation to project upwards, on a continental scale, the nostalgia for lost national empires is a dangerous policy of exceptionalism and confrontation. Quite the contrary, the EU has been and is a refuge for defeated states, devastated by world and civil wars, for exhausted, small nations with no future and for societies in reconstruction. For all of them, integration was a way out, a means of escape. And that is why the EU has been strengthened in crises and remains attractive to states inside and outside the Union, despite everything. This is the generative contradiction of the EU.

Integration offers a more or less orderly and institutionalised way of dealing with the globalisation of the economy, communications, societies, etc., articulating a permanent negotiation and management of the transformations through agreement. The process of accommodation is slow and complex, delayed by the temptation of states to return to expressing external and internal hegemony. States renounce imposing their hegemony on other states to the extent that they also renounce imposing it in their old jurisdictions. There is no other way. It is in this sense that discussion and agreement, as mechanisms of agreed European integration, require public debates within the member states, with real public participation, of the political organisations and parliaments of the State. There can be no democratic Europe if the integration process is not constructed democratically. The democratic deficit of the EU is generated by this lack of participation. The monopoly of representation and the negotiations with the EU by successive Spanish governments is an obstacle to the democratisation of Europe.