Closed loop in Morocco

The recent events in the Western Sahara territory still mark relations between Spain and Morocco. Last week the Moroccan parliament considered it necessary to review the whole of these relations, calling on the Rabat government to claim the Spanish coastal enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. A march on the first of these enclaves was implicitly authorized, and later suspended.

At this point it might, indeed, be better to take a thorough look at our relations. Not because the Moroccan parliament demands it, but because further prolongation of their present undefined state is counterproductive for Spanish interests. Spain's diplomacy has been unable to achieve the room for maneuver indispensable for a smooth handling of relations with our neighbor. Hence its recent attempts not to irritate Rabat, on account of errors committed solely by the latter, have received repeated unfriendly gestures in response, generating a closed loop of talking at cross purposes.

Morocco cannot make a feint of breaking off relations with Spain every time it needs to find a foreign scapegoat for its problems. But even if it does break them, this would only be one further factor to be considered in an approach to the underlying problem that Spain faces, which is to define a model for relations with the entire Maghreb region, and not only with Morocco. Either it maintains them on the same lines as it has so far, seeking alternatively an approach to Algiers or to Rabat, depending on who is in power in Madrid, or it should establish a set position of its own in regard to the risks and conflicts existing in the region.

As far as the risks are concerned, Morocco plays a decisive role with respect to Spain and the European Union, particularly in the matters of terrorism and immigration; but this role is no less decisive than that which Spain and the European Union play with respect to Morocco and, more concretely, to its political regime, whose shortcomings and weak points are well known.

A readiness to deal with Morocco does not reflect a desire to endorse its practices ? some of which have lately come to light in the Wikileaks revelations ? but rather a desire to facilitate a smooth political evolution, without shocks either for the region or for the Moroccans themselves.

Spain cannot settle for a merely provisional solution to this crisis, and then wait for the next one. On the contrary, it is necessary to reconsider our pattern of action in the Maghreb since more than a decade ago when, with its blustering postures, the Aznar government threw overboard the diplomatic work carried on since the transition to democracy after the death of Franco. Now it is Morocco that has given way to the temptation of blustering postures, profiting from the weakness of the model of relations that Zapatero's diplomacy had opted for, with the sole purpose of distancing itself from that of Aznar.

Instead of speeding up the cycle of this closed loop, the moment seems to have come for Spanish diplomacy to widen the scope of its concerns, and then set a new course of its own in function of its interests. All this, independently of the gestures made by Rabat.