Spain, Morocco and the Difficult Art of Cooperation Without Dependence.
There are borders that are defended by raising one’s voice. Others demand something rather more difficult: knowing when to lower it.
Between Spain and Morocco there are barely fourteen kilometres of sea. A distance a strong swimmer might see as a challenge, and yet one that two states have spent centuries trying to manage. Within that narrow space coexist sovereignty, migration, trade, security, memory, interests, and a rather considerable collection of misunderstandings.
That is why Ceuta is never just Ceuta.
Ceuta, Sovereignty and Strategy
When a border crisis erupts, sensitive information surfaces, or suspicion falls on the neighbour’s conduct, the instinctive reaction is to demand toughness. That is understandable. In domestic politics, raising one’s voice tends to produce headlines. In foreign policy, it can produce consequences.
The interesting question is not whether Madrid should be friendly or firm with Rabat. Nor who happens to govern Spain today. The truly strategic question is another one: which relationship with Morocco best protects Spanish interests over the next twenty years?
Raymond Aron understood this apparent contradiction well. Diplomacy and strategy are not alternatives: they are part of the same foreign policy. States negotiate precisely because disagreements exist, and because the possibility of conflict always lingers behind them.
Spain can therefore defend its sovereignty over Ceuta unequivocally while keeping its channels with Rabat open. It can investigate misconduct without turning the inquiry into a rupture. It can demand explanations without turning every disagreement into a full-blown crisis of state.
Cooperation Without Dependence
Spain and Morocco share a deeply interdependent relationship. Security, police cooperation, migration, trade, ports, investment, energy and the stability of the western Mediterranean have woven a network in which each needs something from the other.
Morocco controls essential geography linking Europe, the Atlantic, the Maghreb and the Sahel. Spain holds something equally important: market access, investment, European influence, infrastructure, and privileged entry to the EU’s economic space.
The challenge lies in preventing interdependence from hardening into dependence.
More than two millennia ago, Sun Tzu understood that the best victory does not always mean defeating the adversary, but achieving one’s aim without having to fight at all.
Translated into the twenty-first century: states no longer need to mobilise armies to exert pressure. A border, a customs post, a port, an investment, a piece of intelligence, or a migratory flow can weigh more heavily than a division of soldiers.
The intelligent response is not necessarily to respond in kind.
It consists of reducing the vulnerability that allows that currency to be used against you.
Spain needs cooperation with Morocco, but it also needs greater border autonomy, a deep understanding of the Maghreb and the Sahel, economic and energy diversification, and a far more ambitious European policy toward the western Mediterranean.
Cooperate, yes. Depend, no.
The Limits of Diplomatic Silence
There is, moreover, a line that no Realpolitik should cross. Diplomatic silence can be useful; institutional silence cannot. Judges must investigate, the organs of the state must clarify, and institutions must exercise oversight.
Diplomacy may need silence. The rule of law needs truth.
Perhaps we have spent too long asking whether Morocco is Spain’s friend or its adversary. That is a sentimental question applied to a strategic problem.
States do not need to love one another. They need to understand one another.
Spain and Morocco will keep arguing. Geography has the inconvenient habit of not letting us choose our neighbours. Perhaps that is exactly why the relationship needs fewer declarations of eternal love and fewer threats of divorce. It needs something harder: cooperating without submitting, investigating without rupture, and disagreeing without turning every dispute into a historic crisis.
After all, Spain and Morocco resemble two British neighbours who have spent years arguing over the garden fence. Yet neither one moves out. And both know exactly where the other keeps the key.
