Decoder: Spain as the leader of an anti-imperialist movement

The Spanish government has been a vocal critic of the U.S. war on Iran. But it has yet to reckon with its own imperialistic past and present.

Spain is leading a global movement against imperialism even as it holds two autonomous cities, five minor territories and an Atlantic archipelago on the African continent. It still administers a seventh territory on paper per the United Nations principles, and has yet to offer any apology or reparation for gassing a seventh.

In April, its prime minister, Pedro Sánchez delivered a speech in Barcelona calling for a global progressive movement against imperialism and the assault on international law.

Spain’s fences, garrisons and unresolved files are still in Africa. This may look hypocritical, but it is the system working as designed.

On 17 and 18 April 2026, Pedro Sánchez stood before thousands of delegates and leaders from more than a hundred parties and launched the Global Progressive Mobilization. The initiative would mount the progressive response to “the repeated attempts to undermine international law.”

A week earlier, in Beijing, Sánchez had told the cameras that the United States–Israel war on Iran was a unilaterally-initiated illegality. This is not new in Spain. The Spanish socialists have a tradition of criticizing imperialism whenever tight elections are approaching.

Anti-war politics

Domestically, the anti-war stance pays. A recent Politico Pulse poll found 51% of Spaniards now see the United States as a threat to Europe, the highest of any European country surveyed.

Analysts cite the efecto bandera, the rally-round-the-flag bounce a leader gets from public confrontation with a foreign adversary, in this case Sánchez against Trump. The publication Foreign Policy has already promoted Sánchez to the principled NATO ally Washington needs to extricate itself from the Middle East quagmire.

The promotion is precisely what the Spanish electoral cycle requires. But moral clarity at the lectern is not moral clarity in the ledger. Spain’s ledger carries entries Sánchez would rather we not read.

Spain remains a colonial power in Africa. Ceuta and Melilla, on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco, are Spanish autonomous cities governed from Madrid, voting in Spanish elections, inside the European Union.

The Spanish kingdom of Castile seized Melilla in 1497; Spain inherited Ceuta from Portugal in the 17th century. Add the Canary Islands, conquered between 1402 and 1496 in a campaign against the indigenous African Amazigh Guanches that the historian Mohamed Adhikari has called Europe’s first overseas settler-colonial genocide, a template for what Spain would later do in the Americas.

Spanish Africa

Along the Moroccan coast sit the lesser-known plazas de soberanía: Vélez de la Gomera, Alhucemas, Alborán, Perejil and the Chafarinas Islands, Spanish garrisons on territory Morocco still claims.

These are not decorative vestiges. Ceuta and Melilla are the only overland crossings between the EU and continental Africa, fortified with 10-meter fences, razor wire, thermal cameras and drones. Those routes, with the Atlantic crossing to the Canaries, rank among the deadliest migration corridors in the world: the Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras counted 10,457 deaths in 2024 attempting to reach Spain, the highest figure since records began.

In the Rif mountains of northern Morocco, Spain waged a chemical war between 1921 and 1927 against Abd el-Krim El Khattabi’s Republic of the Rif, dropping phosgene and mustard gas on villages, markets and water sources, in open violation of the Treaty of Versailles.

Sebastian Balfour, in his book “Deadly Embrace”, cites a 1921 cable from the Spanish High Commissioner: “I have been obstinately resistant to the use of suffocating gases against these indigenous peoples but after what they have done … I have to use them with true joy.”

A century later, Spain has offered no apology and no reparations. Two parliamentary motions to recognize what happened, in 2007 and 2022, were defeated by the combined votes of PSOE and the Partido Popular.

An undressed wound

Letters from Amazigh civil society to King Felipe VI in 2015 and 2018 received no substantive reply. In March this year, the king told the Mexican ambassador that Spain’s conquest of the Americas contained episodes that “cannot make us feel proud.”

He reduced them to mere ‘episodes’ and their consequences to something less than pride, rather than naming them for what they were: deeply dehumanizing, disfiguring and structurally undermining. Even this limited acknowledgment has not been extended to Morocco.

The largest open file is Western Sahara. In 1975, the International Court of Justice confirmed legal ties of allegiance between Saharan tribes and the Sultan of Morocco in the territory known at that time as the Spanish Sahara. Hearing the ICJ findings, King Hassan II announced the Green March, and 350,000 Moroccans crossed into the territory.

Eight days later, Spain signed the Madrid Accords, handing administration to Morocco and Mauritania. The UN General Assembly never endorsed the transfer and confirmed the Accords “did not transfer sovereignty over the Territory,” and could not, because Spain alone held no authority to hand it away.

What made the case complicated was Spain’s calculated malice in the decolonization process. Six weeks before signing those accords with Morocco and Mauritania, Madrid had been secretly and directly negotiating with the Polisario Front and Algeria for a phased transfer of sovereignty to the territory’s population.

It abandoned that track under pressure from then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who feared a pro-Soviet Sahrawi state. The Madrid Accords gave Spain phosphates, fisheries and security guarantees along the Saharan-Atlantic coast.

An instrument, not a standard

Returning the territory to the Kingdom of Morocco could have produced a unified regional power capable of countering European neocolonial interests. Spain could not allow that to happen. The geopolitical mess that followed was a colonial exit engineered to keep North Africa divided, and the conflict is now in its fifth decade.

None of this is Spanish exceptionalism. The historian Perry Anderson has shown that international law was not a neutral framework that European powers later corrupted; it was assembled, brick by brick, to legitimize European expansion as it happened.

Its first major theorist, Francisco de Vitoria, was a 16th-century Spanish theologian whose central concern was the legality of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. The conquest was lawful, he argued, because indigenous peoples had violated a universal ius communicandi, a “right of communication” that meant, in practice, the right of Spaniards to trade, preach and seize land where they pleased.

Anderson’s verdict is unequivocal: “The first real building-block of what would, for another 200 years, still be called the law of nations was thus constructed as a justification of Spanish imperialism.”

Dutch diplomat Hugo Grotius then supplied a brief for Dutch maritime plunder; British philosopher Thomas Hobbes added a demographic argument for settler reservations; his contemporary John Locke added the productivity argument for taking land from those who failed to cultivate it correctly.

A pentarchy of powers

By 1700 the architecture of justifications was complete. The 1815 Congress of Vienna codified a “Pentarchy” of great powers; the 1884 Berlin Conference partitioned Africa among them; the League of Nations formerly, and the United Nations later, preserved the hierarchy.

What emerged is what the historian Anderson calls a fundamentally discriminatory order:

“Wars waged by the liberal powers dominating the system were selfless police actions upholding international law,” Anderson said. “Wars waged by anyone else were criminal enterprises violating international law.”

The pen decides which is which. Hobbes had seen the underlying mechanism four centuries earlier: “Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words.” An agreement only has force if there is some authority that can enforce it.

International law has no such authority. There is no global police, no world court that can summon a great power and make it appear, no army that can punish the United States for invading countless countries or Israel for ignoring the Non-Proliferation Treaty for half a century.

Law and power

The law has no sword of its own; it borrows one, and it borrows it from the same powers whose conduct it is supposed to constrain. This is why, as Anderson puts it, “international law is neither truthfully international nor genuinely law.”

It is, in his phrase, “a formidable instrument of power” in the service of the hegemon, its allies and of any junior partner who can pick it up and swing it at the right moment. When Sánchez denounces Israel from the Barcelona lectern, he is not appealing to a neutral rulebook. He is wielding a weapon that has, for five centuries, been wielded only by certain hands, choosing when to swing it and at whom.

The anti-war stance costs Spain almost nothing and pays at home. Trade runs through the EU customs union, shielded from Trump’s tariff threats. Security runs through NATO, whose 5% spending target Sánchez publicly rejected in June 2025, securing an exemption no other ally received, while Spain’s defense budget rose 43% in a single year, the steepest rise of the post-Franco era.

The slogan Sánchez keeps invoking, “No a la guerra”, dates to 2003, when the party of former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, Partido Popular, joined the invasion of Iraq.

Months later, the deadliest terrorist attack in Spanish history struck Madrid commuter trains in retaliation. Aznar lost the next election; the Socialists came to power on No a la guerra, withdrew from Iraq, then deployed troops to Afghanistan and joined the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon.

“No a la guerra”

In Barcelona last month, Sánchez called for shame upon those who “support war and violence in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Ukraine, in Lebanon, in the Middle East.” His own government runs the highest number of simultaneous overseas military missions in Spanish history.

In March, the Spanish navy deployed its most advanced frigate, the Cristóbal Colón — named for the inaugural figure of European colonialism — to Cyprus, where it operates alongside Spain’s Patriot battery in Turkey, both directed against the same Iran whose bombing Sánchez denounces from the lectern.

In September 2025 Spain passed an arms embargo on Israel, partial because the law carves out an exception for “general national interests,” a clause invoked to authorize Airbus to keep importing Israeli defense and dual-use technology.

The claims from Barcelona are noble. They can also be read as what they are: a political electoral strategy. The Spanish government still holds eight African territories it has never been authorized to keep, gassed a Moroccan population it has never apologized to, engineered a regional conflict it has never resolved, and runs 16 simultaneous overseas military missions: performing the language of anti-imperialism to win the next election.

The professed virtue is the disguise. No a la guerra, in 2026 as in 2004, is what the Spanish Socialists say on the way to the polls.

Questions to consider:

1. What justification does Spain give for maintaining its hold over its territories?

2. What did the author mean when he referred to “Spanish exceptionalism”?

3. In what way might it be hypocritical of Spain to celebrate its decades-long democratic system of government?