Oh, to be in Europe

...if only Spain's interests didn't also pull it west

UNPREPARED the Socialists may have been, but that has not stopped them announcing a stream of policies on everything from abortion to water. The more difficult domestic issues, however, can wait. Foreign affairs are different: Iraq was from day one too big to ignore, and the EU has a calendar of summits and budgets that demands attention. Spain must very soon decide whether its interests lie primarily in continental Europe, as the Socialists say, or across the Atlantic to the west, whither Mr Aznar yanked his country's foreign policy.

In fact Morocco, to Spain's south, is the first country that Mr Zapatero has visited as prime minister, taking the sensible view that Spain should be on good terms with a neighbour just 13km (eight miles) away. Similar thoughts have occurred to Spanish leaders before, but relations between the ex-colonial master and its part-protege - most of the country used to be French - have been strained for years. The Moroccans resent the continued existence of two Spanish enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla, on their northern coast. They also bridle at the periodic support given by Spaniards to the Polisario Front that seeks independence for Western (formerly Spanish) Sahara.

For their part, the Spaniards resent Morocco's claims not just on the two enclaves but on various islets, one of which, Parsley island, it invaded two years ago in a comic incident that had to be defused by Colin Powell, America's secretary of state. In addition, Spain would like to see Morocco reduce the numbers of migrants who cross the Strait of Gibraltar - a desire reinforced by the belief that most of the bombers on March 11th were Moroccan.

Unfortunately, it is hard to see how any of these problems can be easily settled. If Morocco is not quite an absolute monarchy, it is certainly not a democracy and, despite some recent reforms, it is not about to give independence to Western Sahara. For its part, Spain will not yield up Ceuta and Melilla. There is scope for better co-operation on terrorism and perhaps on migration, but Morocco has no magic answers: suicide bombers killed 33 bystanders in Casablanca in May 2003, and the flow of migrants will not cease until Morocco's living standards approach Spain's.

That will not happen for years, even though Spain could do more to hasten the day. It could, for example, give Morocco more aid. Much more useful, though, would be a decision to abandon the practice of growing (with Moroccan labour) expensively irrigated vegetables and cotton in the arid south of Spain, and instead to import these crops from Morocco. Mr Zapatero has had the good sense to cancel a controversial plan to take water from the River Ebro in northern Spain down to the vegetable farms and golf courses of the parched south. But Spain's uneconomic farming practices will not end without a thorough reform of the EU's common agricultural policy, which Spanish farmers, and their governments (including the new one), stoutly resist.

In fact, most solutions to Spain's Moroccan problems, if solutions exist, have an EU component. The EU would not condemn the invasion of Parsley island because France, which sees itself as a rival to Spain in their former colony, vetoed it. Terror, migration, farming and fishing (another source of tension) all demand joint European as much as bilateral action.

Mr Zapatero would be the first to admit this, but will he also come to see that Mr Aznar's attitude, flinty as it certainly was, also had some merit to it? Mr Aznar's success in getting Spain a disproportionate number of votes in EU decision-making was, for instance, some compensation for the fact that Spain stands to lose in several ways from the expansion of the EU.

First, Spain almost certainly moves from being the biggest net beneficiary of the EU's regional funds - to the tune of €8.4 billion in 2002 - to being a net contributor. Second, now that a clutch of much poorer countries have joined the club, Spain is no longer the low-wage economy of choice for foreign investors wanting to set up in the EU. That partly reflects Spain's economic success - income per person is now 87% of the average for the EU-15, compared with 74% when it joined in 1986 - but the general drift of manufacturing jobs to eastern Europe that has taken place in recent months is likely to continue. Third, the EU's centre of political gravity has moved eastwards and away from the Mediterranean south. Even though several of the new members are Atlanticist in outlook, Spain has become more peripheral.

The Spaniards like the EU. They associate it no doubt with their new prosperity and with Spain's return to the family of nations after nearly 40 years of semi-isolation. All opinion polls confirm its popularity. But Spanish business is also drawn west, to Latin America (where Spain has $87 billion invested, and which contributes 7% of its listed companies' earnings), and Mr Aznar was not alone in seeing a great role for Spain as the leader of an increasingly influential Spanish-speaking community abroad. There was some wishful thinking in this, but it is true that 350m people speak Spanish in Latin America, as do 30m in the United States. Indeed, Spanish has become much the most popular second language in the United States.

Mr Aznar saw more than this. He saw the merits of aligning Spain with an economically liberal Britain, which also had strong transatlantic links. And he wanted to tie his war on ETA, which was to some extent obsessive, almost personal, into Mr Bush's global war on terror.

Lastly, there was an unspoken recognition that Spain, even more than some other European countries, needed America's security umbrella. In many respects the Spaniards are deeply pacifist: though they backed membership of NATO in a referendum in 1986 and opinion polls showed they supported the war in Kosovo, similar polls suggest they would not want to see Spain fight even to defend Ceuta and Melilla. Much has been made of Spain's contingent in Iraq, but in truth it was purely symbolic. Spain spent just 1.2% of its GDP on defence in 2002, compared with an average of 1.9% for NATO's European members and of 2.6% for NATO as a whole. If Spain were threatened, it would turn not to the EU's would-be security system but to the United States.

All this suggests there could be pitfalls for Mr Zapatero if he were thought to be too accommodating in negotiations with the EU over, for instance, the budget; or if his clear dislike of Mr Bush's Middle East policies poisoned transatlantic relations (perhaps only for a while - he has already “aligned” himself with John Kerry).

Fortunately, his foreign minister, Miguel ngel Moratinos, is a former diplomat with wide experience, albeit chiefly of the Arab world, not the United States. And the defence minister, José Bono Martnez, is no left-wing ideologue. Rather, he is the most conservative member of the government, if not always the most tactful. In any event these two may help to smooth relations with the Americans, particularly if they can keep the new government's promise to strengthen the diplomatic service, which has long been underfinanced and overpoliticised.

Going ape over a rock

Therein lies another opportunity for Mr Zapatero, if he wants to take it. One problem above all others occupies an utterly disproportionate amount of time in Spain's small and often overstretched foreign ministry. It is Gibraltar, the rocky promontory ceded to Britain under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Spain considers it outrageous that Britain should still have a “colony” in Europe, and wages an intermittent guerrilla war of some pettiness against Gibraltar, recently banning liners that call there from then calling at Spanish ports.

Britain has made it clear that it would be ready to share sovereignty with Spain if the Gibraltarians agreed (they have made it equally clear they would not). Spain dislikes the principle of self-determination, perhaps because of the example it might set for its own regions. And it is adamant that it will make no deal over Ceuta and Melilla: after all, Morocco did not exist when it nabbed them in the 15th century. It sees no equivalence to Gibraltar. Others see hyprocrisy, and a prickly nationalism unbecoming to a modern democracy.

Article forms part of a survey of Spain in this issue of The Economist. It looks at Spain's foreign policy.