The Most Threatened Spain

November 20 2018 (10:56 WET)

In 1898 we lost Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam, and in 1899 the islands of Palau, the Mariana Islands and the Caroline Islands. Between 1956 and 1958 we lost Sidi Ifni, the Rif, Yebala and Villa Bens. In 1968 we lost Equatorial Guinea and in 1975 the Sahara. The common denominator of all these losses of Spanish territory was the political weakness of Spain in each of those moments and the consequent degradation of its territorial sovereignty in exchange for absolutely nothing. It is true that empires and their colonies were not sustainable from the beginning of the 19th century and that they all languished, but it is no less true that, for example, Great Britain knew how to take advantage of its past greatness through strategic patriotism by creating the Commonwealth, which served and serves to prolong the British imperial spirit and, without a doubt, also as a privileged commercial platform. And I continue to highlight the strength and belligerent role of London, as a defender of British interests, also giving as a clear example the South Atlantic conflict, in which the Falkland, South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands were successfully defended militarily in 1982.

Therefore, contexts of political weakness lead to loss of territorial sovereignty and patriotic identity. Where is Spain in 2018? Current Spanish national sovereignty is negatively conditioned by exogenous and endogenous factors. The external factors involve the partial cession of sovereignty to the EU, a cession to which all member countries are subject and from which Great Britain is fleeing with Brexit. And the internal ones are those derived from the brutal territorial tensions that the autonomous state has generated, tensions that divide Spaniards given that the autonomies have made us unfairly unequal in economic matters, in health, in security, in education, in language and even, although it sounds ridiculous, in history. In short, Spain is more divided and weaker than ever.

In this worrying Spanish sociological context of 2018, in which the extreme weakness of the State prevails, the most exposed territories of Spain are the non-peninsular ones, that is, the Balearic Islands, Ceuta, Melilla and the Canary Islands, as in the past the Spain furthest from the Iberian Peninsula always was.

If we consider the union of the Catholic Monarchs in 1469 as the beginning of Spain and we know that the Balearic Islands had already been incorporated into the Crown of Aragon since 1349, we have to accept that said Mediterranean archipelago is Spanish from the very moment Spain is born. In the case of the Canary Islands, the Catholic Monarchs definitively and completely incorporated the Atlantic archipelago into Spain in 1496, 27 years after the beginning of Spain. Melilla has been Spain 18 years before Navarre was and 460 years before Morocco was constituted. And Ceuta has been Spain for 350 years, 288 years before Morocco was the current Morocco. For all of the above, we conclude that when we talk about non-peninsular Spain in 2018 we are talking exactly about the same Spain as peninsular Spain, from a historical, sociological and cultural perspective, as well as from any other perspective that both the reader and I could think of.

So, do the external and internal conditions of the current weakened Spain that I defined in the second paragraph really threaten the non-peninsular Spanish territories so seriously? There is no doubt that they do. If to the weak position that Spain has in the EU and to the discord existing among Spaniards in 2018 we add a self-conscious pseudo-right that applies social democratic economics and betrays all its promises when it governs and we add a socialism that surrenders to those who intend to liquidate Spain, we come to the conclusion that on the path we are on there is no future and that those of us who are furthest away are the first to take the blows: the non-peninsulars.

Going to a greater level of specificity, I identify as the main threat, coming from the EU and from the governments of Spain themselves, for Ceuta, Melilla and the Canary Islands, the silent migratory invasion, the worst by far is the Muslim one, derived from the well-meaning and clumsy immigration policies. And for the Balearic Islands, the great threat is the unusual management of some EU powers and the governments of Spain, both the PP and the Popular Front, of Catalan separatism and of the fugitives from the Justice of Spain. In fact, the great problem in the Balearic Islands is independentism and its bastard linguistic, supremacist and xenophobic tools, fueled and reinforced by the approach of Germany and Belgium to the coup d'état by the independence movement in Catalonia and finished off by the inaction of the cowardly and tolerant governments of Spain. Regarding immigration, the goodwill of the EU and the governments of Spain in the face of the permanent attack on their borders, with true invasions and avalanches of boats and violent mobs, subjects the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla to an unsustainable aggression, even more so if we consider that they are the territories of Spain and the EU where there is the most unemployment.

Therefore, those of us who believe that patriotism is not only a feeling, but that it is also the only way to preserve the territorial unity and real progress of Spain, propose eradicating the irrelevance of our country before the EU and before the Spaniards themselves, and we demand an end to both the separatist drift and the attitude of universal and unlimited reception of illegal immigrants. The SIVE must function perfectly, without the current clumsy excuses, and the services of the FRONTEX Agency must be oversized in the Canary Islands, as well as seriously deepening and as a priority state policy in the ultraperipheral European condition of the Atlantic archipelago. Ceuta and Melilla must be as safe as any city in the peninsular interior and for this we must change the paradigm from a permeable border to an impassable border, as is the case with Gibraltar, where there are not even attempts at illegal immigration because it is inconceivable even for those who traffic in human beings, which is explained from a clear sovereign position.

We are millions of Spaniards, the vast majority, who consider non-peninsular Spain exactly as the deepest Spain. Let us take advantage of this circumstance to turn the existing weakness into strength and thus be able to avoid past events and look to the future with hope.

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