Iberosphere: why it is a mirage and Spain’s future can only be European

By Antonio Tejeda Encinas , PhD in European Union Law. President of the Euro-American Committee of Digital Law - CEA Digital Law

The next government will need state Europeanism, not nostalgia. Spain does not deserve to have to choose between populism and erraticism

December 2025 is no ordinary month for Spanish foreign policy. With the Pro Tempore Secretariat of the Ibero-American Conference in our hands until 2026, the Madrid Summit in sight and the shadow of a second Trump term redefining the Atlantic, the Sánchez Government is flirting dangerously with Iberosphere rhetoric – talent mobility, the promotion of Spanish as a common heritage and cooperation on digital rights, according to the External Action Strategy 2025-2028 presented by Albares in April – without daring to break with Brussels. It is a half-hearted gesture that, unintentionally, hands Vox and the Fundación Disenso the emotional monopoly on Hispanic identity.

In the shadows of this official line beats the most ambitious and dangerous narrative: the ‘Iberosphere’, sold as a transatlantic bloc of 700 million souls against ‘globalism’. Celebrated at Madrid summits with Milei and Kast, and fuelled by the symbolic ties within the transatlantic far right following Argentina’s legislative elections in October, this idea is no nostalgic pastime. It is a geopolitical proposal that equates the EU with a yoke and dreams of a ‘great Spain’ leading a fragmented mosaic on the other side of the ocean. This drift is not the exclusive preserve of the opposition. The PP, in its legitimate pursuit of majorities, is flirting dangerously with programmatic concessions to Vox that would compromise the responsible Europeanism that an alternative government needs. Spain does not deserve to have to choose between an erratic Government and an opposition that sacrifices Brussels on the altar of Bambú.

Europe, in its most uncomfortable hour – less Europeanist, less dynamic, less ambitious – opens the door to these mirages. But Spain cannot afford them. Not because the link with Ibero-America is negligible – on the contrary, it is a natural extension of our influence – but because mistaking it for a strategic alternative is ahistorical, unviable and toxic. From a critical, demanding Europeanism of adult responsibility – that of Adenauer, Schuman and De Gasperi, a project for a Christian and Western civilian power, not the wishy-washy multiculturalism of certain current Commissioners – I affirm: Spain is only viable in European terms. Outside Europe, we do not lead Ibero-America; we dissolve into it.

This is not sentimentalism; it is pure structure. Europe gives Spain what no other framework can: an integrated market that absorbs 60% of our exports, a shield of rights, macroeconomic stability, the euro as an anchor, multiplied external projection and global regulatory capacity in AI and data, where we carry weight as a collective power. Without this ecosystem we become a peripheral actor with no critical mass, no autonomous military muscle and no technological independence. Abandoning it for an ‘Atlantic turn’ would be, as the Elcano Royal Institute warns in its analysis of January 2025, a leap into the void.

Proposing a ‘strategic Iberosphere’ ignores the reality of Latin America: a mosaic polarised by populist cycles, institutional instability and weaknesses in governance. ECLAC data for 2024 reveal the danger: the United States is consolidating its position as the largest investor with 38% of FDI, while the European Union’s share has plummeted to 15%, the lowest figure since 2012. This loss of European influence is precisely what a Spain dissolved in Iberospheric fantasies – without collective European muscle – would irreversibly accelerate. Vox makes exactly the same mistake as the indigenist left: both live off the same resentful nostalgia, one with the Cross of Burgundy and the other with Che. Both dream of dead empires and forget that today greatness is measured by influence over global rules, not by the reach of the language.

Any Spanish attempt at primacy would reactivate the anti-colonial narrative – masterfully exploited by China, Russia and Iran – and would be read as right-wing neo-colonialism, just as toxic as the left-wing kind. We are not ‘primus inter pares’: we are the ghost the region uses to unite against us.

Abandoning Europe would mean losing influence in Brussels, high-value continental markets and essential legal, technological and military protection. In exchange we would take on systemic risks and crises that we do not control: post-election polarisation in Chile and Argentina, migration flows that Trump II could redirect towards our shores.

Spain does not need to return to empire or to dissolve into the woke global village; it needs to be a great European nation, as it was when it led the Counter-Reformation and the defence of the West. That can only be achieved by occupying the European institutions until it hurts, not by fleeing towards an ocean where we will be, at best, silent onlookers.

What Spain needs is not managers of nostalgia but institutional architects: European law jurists, regulatory strategists and career diplomats who understand Brussels as a chessboard, not as an enemy. The next government – whatever its colour – will only be viable if it unapologetically embraces the state Europeanism that made Germany and France great in the 1950s.

In geopolitics, nostalgia is not strategy; it is slow suicide.

Spain has one possible destiny and only one: to be an upper-middle power within the only civilian power the West has left. Any political project that aspires to govern must accept this reality or it will condemn the country to irrelevance. Everything else – be it Vox’s Iberosphere, the lukewarm multilateralism of the current Government, or a PP that trades its European soul for votes from Ferraz – is noise, badly digested nostalgia and cheap literature disguised as patriotism.

Spain needs a School of Hispanic European Realism: Europeanism without hang-ups or nostalgia, a Western civilian power with a Spanish accent, raison d’état in Brussels and in Madrid. Neither a resentful Iberosphere nor a woke global village.

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