Bismarck – who said that laws are like sausages and that it is better not to know how they are made – wrote that there are times when the strong are weak because of their scruples and the weak are strong because of their audacity. I don't think that the problem of recent weeks in Ceuta is that Spain is being too scrupulous. I fear it is something less noble. Scruples, at least, are born from a moral conviction and what happened in Spain seems more prosaic: mere absence of strategy.
It is difficult to find a more eloquent example than Morocco. A country whose economy barely reaches a tenth of that of Spain, with limited resources and a modest, although growing, military capacity, has managed to maintain a privileged relationship with the United States, normalize its ties with Israel, convert its proposal for the Sahara into the position assumed by a good part of the Western powers and little by little introduce into the international debate the idea that Ceuta and Melilla are the last European colonial enclaves in Africa. Not bad for a country that we continue to view with that very Spanish mix of condescension and concern.
Spain responds to these undeniable achievements with arguments of a different nature. How to remember that Ceuta and Melilla have been Spanish since before the current Moroccan State existed. It is an idea as true as it is reassuring, but intellectually poor. Before 1956, a perfectly recognizable political, dynastic, religious and cultural continuity existed where Morocco is now for centuries, and any Moroccan can identify with it without consulting an international treaty or believing that in 1956 the Moroccans landed from Mars. Furthermore, this argument leads to a labyrinth from which it is difficult to escape. Mexico City was Spanish for three centuries, longer than it has been Mexican. Bosnia was under Ottoman rule for centuries. If we begin to distribute sovereignty according to who arrived first, history will become a rural estate with too many owners.
The important question is not who can make the best chronological argument, but who has a state policy. And there the difference is abysmal.
Morocco knows what it wants. The Sahara is a national policy that survives governments and generations. The approach to Washington, the relationship with Israel, the control of migratory routes, economic expansion towards Africa and pressure on Ceuta and Melilla are part of a recognizable strategy. Its legitimacy can be debated. The difficult thing is to discuss its coherence.
Spain, on the other hand, practices a less known form of diplomacy: pompous improvisation. One day he talks about firmness, another about strategic friendship, and the next he discovers some new reason not to bother Rabat. Morocco moves its pieces thinking about the next decade; Spain usually moves its own to solve the problem of the week.
The difference between both policies is not ideological. It is structural. There is also a reason, much more uncomfortable, to understand the Spanish – and European, caution – must not be forgotten. It is not necessary to admire the Alawite monarchy to recognize that its disappearance does not guarantee a liberal democracy on the other side of the Strait. Just look at Iraq, Syria, Libya or the Algerian experience. Kissinger already warned of the danger of these states disintegrating into tribal, sectarian or confessional units and where the State disappears, Switzerland rarely appears. That is why Morocco has an argument that Spain cannot afford to ignore: it is, with all its defects, a State. And a solid State in that part of the world has a geopolitical value that Europe cannot renounce.
What is reasonable, then, is not a policy of hostility towards Rabat, which would also be unrealistic, nor that permanent appeasement that ends up confusing prudence with fear. Spain needs something much more difficult: to know what it wants from Morocco and what it is willing to pay to get it. Morocco has been playing its game for decades while Spain continues discussing the rules of the previous one. In foreign policy, he who has fewer pieces does not necessarily lose. He who doesn't know what the hell he's playing at loses.
