Spain Report

In Spain, management of external crises has traditionally been a competence of the executive branch. The legislative branch only became involved in the decision-making process after Spain’s controversial participation in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Two years later, the National Defence Act introduced the requirement that the Congress of Deputies provide its authorisation before Spanish troops are deployed abroad. At present, lawmakers are more active in terms of launching CSDP missions than in monitoring or evaluating them. Their contribution is limited to periodically receiving information from the ministers of defence and foreign affairs, and they play no active role in the crisis-management system.

The daily management of external conflicts and crises is mainly handled by the ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs. There are not any formalised coordination structures or procedures with other ministries or agencies, although the presidency of the government may have a hand in management efforts. When the National Security System was created in 2013, the Council of National Security (DSN) was formed to be a new stakeholder with the appropriate WGA design to conduct crisis management. However, the DSN has focused its priorities to date on managing domestic crises rather than on external crises and conflicts, which has put any strategic management for CSDP missions into a kind of political-administrative limbo. As a result, responsibility for WGA coordination at the strategic level remains with Brussels-based governmental representatives of the ministries of Defence, Foreign Affairs and Interior who are involved in crisis management.

The president of the government delegates the management of external crises to the defence and foreign ministers without any structured or binding system of coordination. Thus, the model of WGA- like coordination for crises is the same as for the rest of the bilateral affairs between both ministries, and there is no specific bilateral mechanism other than the quarterly meetings with or without representatives of the presidency. Within the Ministry of Defence, the Armed Forces, the Guardia Civil and the National Intelligence Center may contribute to a WGA effort. Their members have experience with EU missions and operations, and they receive training to become familiar with implementing the WGA concept. Their potential contribution to national WGA management became clear in the Canary Islands in 2006, when the Ministry of Interior led the multidimensional response of the Armed Forces, Frontex, the search and rescue agencies, local authorities and NGOs to a migration crisis.

The Armed Forces and the Guardia Civil, in particular, have expanded their basic responsibilities (i.e. defence and security, respectively) to include new dimensions related to the WGA. These include, among others, maritime security, border control, search and rescue, surveillance and technical assistance. Both forces also contribute to the ministerial programmes for international cooperation, which enhances their expertise for WGA contributions. For example, the ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs jointly organise a ‘defence diplomacy’ programme.

For its part, the MAUC also contributes to developing the WGA concept. The diplomats and officials of the Foreign Service contribute to EU crisis management from national or common positions, while the MAUC’s secretary of state for the European Union works as the point of contact between national and EU affairs. They contribute with traditional diplomatic instruments, except in the case of humanitarian and development aid, which is handled by Spain’s Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID). Although the AECID has ties to the MAUC, the fact that it enjoys full autonomy makes it very difficult to incorporate these dimensions into the national WGA. The organisation’s autonomy can be attributed to humanitarian agents’ traditional suspicion that the government will try to use development aid as a leveraging tool in their foreign policies, or that humanitarian aid will potentially be politicised if it overlaps with other development, peace and security agendas (MAUC 2019a: 16).

However, this distrust might be diminishing as a result of two factors: first, the AECID’s participation in programmes to reform the EU security sector; and, second, Spain’s contribution to the financing of the EU’s African Peace Facility via the European Development Fund (EDF), which supports peace operations led by African partners themselves (MAUC 2019b: 34). This change of mind is also due to the prominence that security is given as a goal in the UN’s 2030 Agenda for sustainable development as well as to the linking of development and security in the EU’s Global Strategy on Foreign and Security Policy, as Spain’s most recent master plan for cooperation acknowledges (AECID 2018: 10). In both the MAUC’s plan for Africa and the AECID’s master plan for cooperation (the two documents cited above), Spain acknowledges the need to support the so-called ‘security-development nexus’ in order to improve the security of people and to reinforce the resilience of countries.

The ministries of Interior and Justice also support the development of the WGA in the EU, especially when it comes to the police, justice and penitentiary components of the CSDP’s civilian missions. They contribute by providing experts from the National Police Corps, the Guardia Civil, or the justice and penitentiary institutions to carry out tasks related to security-sector reform, crime prevention and training local security forces, judges, prosecutors and the like. Their individual contributions are limited by the difficulties they face in recruiting civil servants to participate in such efforts for the reasons mentioned above. To help mitigate these limitations, civil servants have developed their own International and Ibero-American Foundation for Administration and Public Policies (FIIAPP), which has full autonomy to decide where, how and when to collaborate in the fields of development and governance. The FIIAPP acts as mediator between EU-funded programmes and the leading organisations, primarily as an agency for recruiting national experts. As an authorised executive agency of the European Commission since 2011, the FIIAPP manages community funds (delegated cooperation) to finance one third of its projects, and it is a key player in EU projects related to technical cooperation both within Europe and between the EU and Latin America (FIIAPP 2017: 1).

Since the role of the ministries of Interior and Justice is limited to authorising the mediation of the FIIAPP, they cannot take advantage of individual contributions to develop their own WGA experiences, structures and doctrines. Their limitation is higher in the field of external security because the contribution is limited to members of the Guardia Civil, who are the only individuals with the military education and authorisation to take part in gendarmerie-type missions within the CSDP. This handicap prevents many agencies from taking part in wider WGA actions despite their potential to add value. Another difficulty comes from the lack of funding to externalise the recruitment of national experts. Individual citizens are not eligible for CSDP missions because they cannot be contracted either as international seconded members for the EU or as ‘freelancers’ for the Spanish government. For these reasons, there are neither clusters of experts nor civil servants available for manning CSDP missions, which in turn affects Spain’s contribution to WGA efforts.