Global Europe

Unsurprisingly, President Obama’s decision not to attend the EU-US summit has engendered much debate in Spain. Commentators and politicians have been quick to chalk up this decision as another black mark for what seems to be an increasingly hapless and accident-prone Spanish presidency. Add this to the government’s badly prepared pontifications on ‘corrective measures’ being introduced into the EU’s putative 2020 economic strategy, the shameful in-fighting over who should lead the response to Haiti’s earthquake and foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos’ apparently unilateral suggestion that the arms embargo on China should be removed, and a sense of baleful drift now permeates a seemingly ill-starred presidency. 

The significance of Obama’s withdrawal is greater within the panorama of current Spanish domestic politics than it is for the substance of transatlantic relations. American analysts have pointed out to Europeans that Obama marks a fundamental change: he seeks pragmatic cooperation from the EU on a modular basis, rather than the kind of feel-good, all-encompassing strategic framework that many European politicians desire, often largely for symbolic reasons. This may be no bad thing. And one can hardly blame the president for a degree of ambivalence after the EU’s lamentable performance when Obama met European leaders during the Swedish and Czech presidencies – and the US president was subject to 27 disparate and competitive national efforts at ingratiation. The downgrading of the summit may even serve to spur the Union to sharper planning and coherence in the future. Moreover, Spain’s own relations with the US have in fact improved during the last year – something crystallised in prime-minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s recent welcome in Washington.

But in terms of domestic politics, the blow has been hard for Zapatero. His government labours in an increasingly fractious political environment. The EU presidency was presented as the prime minister’s big opportunity to restore his fortunes – and Obama’s visit was conceived and played up as the centre-piece of that six month tenure. Instead, the presidency has become a millstone around the government’s neck. It has got caught up in endless post-Lisbon institutional battles. It has suffered the humiliation of often having its ambitions slapped down by other member states insistent on ensuring (rightly) that the presidency is henceforth a much diminished affair.  

Placing so many bets on Obama’s visit, the government made a rod for its own back. The claim of a senior Socialist party politician that the encounter between Zapatero and Obama would be an ‘event of planetary importance’ was ridiculously over-blown at the time; now it just seems like extremely amateurish political strategising. The Zapatero government has been too low profile in foreign policy; yet it suddenly began to claim that it was the natural leader for a reinvigorated strategic partnership with the United States. It overplayed its hand.

The government’s hope was that the presidency would provide a morale boost and impulse for Spain to pull itself out of a recession whose depth exceeds that in any other member state. An unemployment rate of 20 per cent and fast expanding public deficit increasingly manifest themselves in political crisis. For the first time since 2004, there is talk within the ruling Socialist party of leadership succession. The opposition Partido Popular (PP) has called, albeit timidly, for early elections, but is itself mired in a bitter internal factionalism and utterly lacks any clear or enlightened international vision. The PP may have been using Obama’s cancellation as a stick with which to beat the Zapatero government, but its own pronouncements hardly lead one to think that it would fare better in managing key strategic relationships around the world. 

Spain has lost the glamour of its years of galloping economic growth. It is on the defensive. Economy minister, Elena Salgado has toured London specifically to convince the Financial Times and key investors that things are not so bad in Spain. The constantly replayed message has become: ‘We are not Greece’. A new adjustment plan has promised to cut public spending by 50 billion euros and finally see through modest labour market reforms. On the economic front, at least, favourable international reactions – Moody’s has ultimately maintained Spain’s Triple A rating – has given the government some respite.     

The Zapatero government can still turn its EU presidency around. Its role in the vital, forthcoming discussions over Europe’s new strategy for economic competitiveness could be pivotal. And it is not without admirable, reformist ideas in this domain. But, for the moment at least it is clear that Obama’s decision not to come to Europe has damaged Zapatero more than it has hurt transatlantic relations. Perhaps the lesson of this episode should be: you can strive to take national idiosyncracies out of European foreign policy, but you will never take the impact of European foreign policy out of national political debates.