A superficial survey of Spain's foreign policy from Franco to the present, with particular attention to Spanish policies toward Latin America and the Middle East.
Many reasons may be advanced to explain the differences between Spanish and Portuguese policies in Africa. The most obvious may be that while Portugal's African provinces are together 22 times the size of the mother country, Spanish Africa, totaling 115,000 square miles but with only 472,000 inhabitants, is of very little importance to present-day Spain. It nevertheless is striking that at a time when the whole of Africa has either freed itself from colonial control or is in turbulence, the Spanish flag continues to fly quietly over a series of outposts from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Guinea. While other European possessions disappear one after the other, Ceuta, Melilla, Ifni, Sahara, Fernando Poo and Rio Muni remain outwardly oblivious to the "wind of change."
The national election turned over Spain's government, but the remedy on the way -- fiscal austerity as pushed by Berlin and the European Central Bank -- will only make Madrid's problems worse. Cutting will not save the euro.
The importance of southern Europe to the balance of power in world affairs has been underlined by the continuing crisis in the Middle East, the growth of Russian power in the Mediterranean and President Nixon's diplomatic journey in the autumn of 1970. The earlier renewal of the Spanish-American military pact, followed by Nixon's visit to Madrid, once more called attention to the role played by the Spanish government. At the same time, the future of the Franco régime has raised more questions than at any time in the past two decades, if only because of the fact that Franco himself entered his seventy-ninth year at the close of 1970 and in the preceding year took the unprecedented step of officially designating a successor, Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón, as heir to the Spanish throne.
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