ABSTRACT
By 1989, after fourteen years of sustained efforts and perseverance, democratic Spain had won a comfortable position in the existing European order. It was a full member of the EC, the Council of Europe, NATO and the Western European Union (WEU), and felt increasingly at home within that institutional setting. A good sign was the way it handled, during the first semester of that year, the presidency of the European Community Council, which marked the complete normalization of Spanish foreign policy. But, as Spain was ending its own international transition, a new European and world transition was beginning. The political awareness of this change predated the opening of the Berlin Wall and permeated the Spanish foreign policy apparatus during the whole of that year. It was not the end of history, ‘but the end of a certain history and the beginning of another one’, as Foreign Minister Francisco Fernández Ordóñez put it in early 1990 (Fernández Ordóñez 1990b: 31). But this time, and in contrast to the previous international mutations of this century, Spain was able to contribute to shape its environment and to be an actor in that change, naturally in proportion to its weight, disposition and newly acquired reputation. In this new setting, Spain’s national interests had to be reviewed or redefined. Whether it has managed to fulfil them is a matter still too early to be asserted.
