It has been a long time coming, but finally the Basque separatist group ETA has dissolved itself, ending one of the longest terrorism campaigns in modern Europe with the loss of 854 lives, thousands injured and 79 kidnappings. The move, however, is far from healing the deep wounds among the victims’ families.
Brexit opens a small window of opportunity to attempt to resolve the status of Gibraltar.
Spanish Autonomous Communities (regions) and municipalities gave some US$220 million in development assistance in 2015. This accounts for a third of total Spanish bilateral ODA, making Spain the world’s most decentralised donor.
Old age pensioners (OAPs) have been protesting across Spain at their ‘miserable’ pensions which since 2014 have stopped being automatically indexed to inflation and have risen by only 0.25% a year under reforms aimed at making the creaking system sustainable.
The companies that comprise the Ibex 35, the benchmark index of the Madrid Stock Exchange, generated a record 67.7% of their revenues abroad in 2017.
The election of Donald Trump has generated new tensions around the public use of Spanish in the US and, above all, over multiculturalism.
With its current seat on the Human Rights Council (2018-20), Spain should strive to continue and revitalise its foreign policy in respect to reinforcing both the UN and multilateralism.
Spain’s exporting prowess continued in 2017 when sales of goods abroad increased and notched up a new record of €277.1 billion.
The election clearly showed the depth of pro-independence sentiment and the profound polarisation of society.
Spain maintains its 12th position in the Elcano Global Presence Index, although it has lost some measure of global presence in all of its dimensions (as have the other countries of the region).
The Elcano Global Presence Index results show the co-dependence of the United Kingdom and Spain particularly in the economic and soft dimensions.
During the independence referendum in Catalonia, Russia used the ‘combination’ (kombinaciya), an operation can integrate instruments such as cyber warfare, cyber-intelligence, disinformation, propaganda and collaboration with players hostile to the values of liberal democracy.
9 - 15 of 25 pages