The latest Global Peace Index, dated June 2024, produced a shocking statistic. The planet now has 56 active violent conflicts, the highest number since the end of World War II. But there is more: between 1949 and 2018, global military spending tripled from $500 billion to $1.7 trillion. It means that the exponential increase in armaments did not guarantee the security of the planet. Quite the contrary: it tripled the number of wars.
On March 4, the President of the European Commission, Ursula Von Der Leyen, called journalists in Brussels. And in a brief address, she announced that the EU was ready to spend no less than 800 billion euros on military rearmament. The invasion of Ukraine and Donald Trump’s Copernican turn in foreign policy opened up, in the eyes of the EU’s top official, a new and disturbing global horizon. “We are in an era of rearmament,” she declared bluntly.
Today, the theory of military deterrence is sweeping the planet from end to end. And it is in this warmongering context that Miguel Ángel Moratinos, former Spanish minister and high representative of the Alliance of Civilizations, has launched his Cry for Peace to stir the planetary conscience. The first station of his initiative took place on April 25 and 26 in an enclave loaded with historical symbolism: Guernica. The Basque town suffered in 1937 a bloody Italian-German bombing of the civilian population, immortalized years later by Picasso in a painting that today is the universal icon of the horror of war.
Under the generic title of A cry for peace, an end to war and respect for international law, representatives of civil organizations, religious leaders and international personalities reflected for two days on the urgency of halting the escalation of war and returning to the path of peaceful and dialogued conflict resolution.
“We have to recover the spirit of Cordoba,” Moratinos told the Las Fuentes Foundation in a brief online interview from his office at the UN headquarters in New York. “I hope that the men and women of Cordoba continue to enjoy that philosophy of mutual respect, like those three religions that lived together and dedicated themselves to science and the welfare of their people,” he said, referring to the civilization of Al Andalus, which centuries later became a universal paradigm of dialogue and peaceful coexistence.
Isabel Romero, on the left, at the women’s table of the Gernika forum.
“The time has come to start a new path of international collective mobilization in favor of the end of wars,” said Moratinos, high representative of the Alliance of Civilizations since 2019, replacing Jorge Sampaio, who headed the international organization associated with the UN since its founding in 2007. It was former Spanish President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero who proposed the creation of the Alliance of Civilizations as a diplomatic instrument to seek channels of dialogue between the West and the Islamic world, whose relations were severely shaken after the terrorist attacks against the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
Moratinos assures that he observes with great concern “a very dangerous drift towards militarism” and the abandonment of diplomatic channels to channel territorial conflicts that disturb world stability. The senior UN official regrets that the “so-called civilized countries” have decided in recent months to opt for the “military option” and to increase defense spending, in open contradiction to the pacifist policy on which post-war Europe was founded.
“I am not against the EU pursuing its own defense and security capabilities,” argues the former Spanish foreign minister. “But the essential question is what for.” In Moratinos‘ opinion, the first thing is to define the European Union’s foreign policy. And, in his opinion, that is the continent’s main deficit. “We have a cart full of weapons and military capabilities, but we don’t know what for,” he asks. “The EU in recent years has been absent from the diplomatic chessboard and we are in tow of what others do”, he assures in an unequivocal reference to the US.
The international initiative was co-sponsored by Religions For Peace, whose secretary general, Francis Kuria, also attended the Gernika forum. In fact, one of the discussion tables focused on interreligious dialogue, which included representatives of the Catholic, Muslim and Jewish communities. The Las Fuentes Foundation also participated in the conference through its president, Isabel Romero, who took part in a colloquium on the role of women in the promotion of peace.
The event in Gernika was opened by the mayor of the Basque city, José Mari Garroño. Throughout the day Ibone Bengoetxea, vice-president of the Basque Government; María Jesús San José, Minister of Justice of the Basque Government; Ahmed Gurbanov, Deputy Foreign Minister of Turkmenistan; the Grand Mufti of the Caucasus, Sheikh Ul Islam Allahshukur; the Chargé d’Affaires of the Apostolic Nunciature in Spain and Andorra, Roman Walczak; and several experts and cultural personalities took the floor.
Moratinos is openly critical of the equation more disarmament=more security, accepted today by the majority of European and US leaders. “It has been the great trap of the 21st century,” he says. The attack on the Twin Towers and Islamist terrorism triggered panic in the world’s chancelleries at the beginning of the millennium and “they opted for a security agenda,” reflects the high representative of the Alliance of Civilizations. “And there we have entered a drift that has been infiltrating all the analyses and strategies of the Western world, where what prevails is security. Everything is done to guarantee security. And security is something that cannot be achieved,” proclaims Moratinos. That is the spiral that is triggering, in his view, the militaristic escalation with unforeseeable consequences in the coming years. His analysis is just the opposite: “There will never be security if there is no peace. It is peace that will bring security”.
The diplomat is in favor of reaching agreements with Putin’s Russia and seeking a “common agenda” through dialogue. And he is particularly critical of the policy of double standards, which is the “cancer of diplomacy”, in relation to European passivity in the face of the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli army, a staunch ally of Brussels. “We cannot continue with our eyes closed watching the suffering, death and barbarism that is taking place in Gaza. We have been injected in homeopathic doses with the horror of absolute and total dehumanization. We cannot accept that this should continue,” Moratinos protested from his office in New York.
The former deputy for Córdoba did not want to comment on the Rabanales rocket launcher factory, which is being developed by Escribano based on Israeli military technology tested in combat in Gaza. Some experts consider that the factory violates the ethical clauses of the EU. “I don’t have the data,” he says. However, he did recall, as a general consideration, that when he headed the Foreign Ministry a “code of conduct” was established with the Trade portfolio regulating the purchase and sale of armaments. And he is in favor of forcing the military industry to contribute a small fee to be used in the fight against poverty and climate change. “We are living in a crucial moment and the initiative we have launched makes perfect sense,” he proclaims.