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Will the U.S. Military Remain in Spain?
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12637 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1987 |
3,456 Words |
| Author
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Alberto Miguez
Alberto Miguez is a diplomatic correspondent for the newspapers
ABC in Madrid and La Vanguardia in Barcelona. He is the author
of a number of books on international affairs |
On March 12, 1986, a referendum was held in Spain to decide whether the country would continue to belong to NATO. Four years before, Spain had joined that defense organization when an unusual and heterogeneous party was in power (the UCD, the Democratic Centrist Union) which included the Christian Democrats, the Liberals, the ex-Francoites, the Conservatives, and the Social Democrats.
In its program the UCD - which already had the merit of having directed a nonviolent and nontraumatic transition from the dictatorship of General Franco to a parliamentary democracy - had proposed Spain's integration into the Western world, which included the Atlantic alliance and, of course, the Common Market. With very weak support the 1981 Parliament approved Spain's entrance into NATO. Opposition came from all the political parties of the Left, especially the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE). The main opposition party in Parliament which for many years had been opposed to a military commitment with the alliance, PSOE considered NATO "the arm of the United States in Europe there to impede the formation of Socialist governments on the continent." This formulation was made by Felipe Gonzalez himself, who was then a young revolutionary leader, influenced by the Marxist statements of some of his companions.
When Parliament approved the entrance of Spain into NATO, Gonzalez - who was then leader of the Socialist opposition, the strongest of all - gave this warning: "We can join NATO by a parliamentary majority but we can also leave NATO by a parliamentary majority." He was intimating that if one day his party came into power, something quite probable in 1981, he would raise before parliament the issue of having Spain leave the Atlantic organization.
The government of the UCD didn't have sufficient time to complete the integration of Spain into NATO. Officially the country joined the organization in the spring of 1982 and negotiations began then to define its status in it. But at that time, the UCD was already severely compromised by divisions, dismissals, defections, and mutual attacks among the various ideological sectors that made up this strange coalition. Finally, then President Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo - a taciturn and somewhat inflexible technocrat - had no other recourse than to invoke elections for November of that year. Without difficulty, the Socialists obtained an absolute majority by carrying the fortuitous slogan "For a Change."
The electoral campaign of the Spanish Socialists in 1982 was intelligently planned and their victory
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