Manuel Mostaza, director of Public Affairs at ATREVIA, has written an article for the online newspaper, Top Comunicación, in which he explains the fundamentals to understanding public affairs areas of action and its current situation.
«Paraphrasing Ortega, who wrote that “date and birthplace alone explain two–thirds of a biography,” we can point out that the context in which any professional activity takes place explains a lot about the manner and fundamentals with which this activity is carried out in the field.
That is why, when we analyze a professional practice such as public affairs from the beginning, it is essential to understand what kind of factors determine the development of this activity. Without taking these variables into account, it is not easy to understand where the trends we must pay attention to are heading.
In this sense, perhaps the most important variable is understanding the political-administrative situation of the territory in which one works. It is impossible to operate thoroughly in an ecosystem as complex as the public ecosystem without understanding –first hand– the rationality used by the actors and without knowing the playing fields well in which these rationalities are developed. Another fundamental element to understanding how an activity is developed is knowing the changes in that ecosystem in recent times. Human realities are dynamic, and in this liquid modernity that we live in, the speed of change has brought to life Marx and Engel’s prophecy left written in their Manifesto published in 1848, pointing out that modernity was the world in which “everything solid vanishes into thin air.
The state of public affairs in Spain today
With just these elements, we can get a complete picture of where we have to look to understand how public affairs activities are developing in our country and what the key elements are to understanding the current public affairs situation in Spain, which could be summarized as the end of the nation-state and power, as we will see below.
The first of these elements is related to the progressive loss of sovereignty of the -so new and now so old- Nation-States. Although they continue to be powerful in our collective imagination, the European States -with the realities that make them up, such as the local entities and, in our case, the Autonomous Communities- had already lost the main attributes that marked sovereignty when the modern State emerged in a long process that began to consolidate in the 16th century. This nation-state, endowed with flags, pompous anthems, and colorful traditions, not only no longer decides on the life and death of its citizens (the maximum penalty is abolished throughout Western Europe), but a country like Spain cannot send armed forces abroad, on its own initiative, if there is no coverage by a supranational organization such as the UN, for example (in accordance with the provisions of Article 19 of the Organic Law 5/2005, of November 17, 2005, on National Defense). States that were once the flagship and paradigm of the nation-state, such as France, have decided not to issue their own currency and no state in continental Western Europe has a sovereign trade policy to decide with whom to trade, under what conditions, and with whom not. Of course, more factors demonstrates that the old nation-states are no longer what they used to be (the difficulty of controlling their own borders is another example), but only mentioning those is enough to understand that to speak today of sovereignty on the part of a state such as Spain or Belgium is to apply old and simple categories to extremely complex (post)modern realities.
This situation does not arise out of anywhere. As Moisés Naím pointed out years ago, power is – literally – unraveling, and it is increasingly difficult to find it is exercised, especially in open, complex, and plural societies such as those in the West. The response to this challenge that has been attempted in Europe involves implementing an erratic process that has been going on for decades. We could safely define it as an Unidentified Political Object, a UPO halfway between a Confederation with a federalizing tendency and a Federation with its parking brakes on. All of this combined with the resounding absence of a European demos due to the subsistence of national identities and cultural narratives that do not allow us to speak of a closed and finished project. There is a reason that the European Parliament elections are no more than the sum of twenty-seven state elections.
Halfway through the European journey -or not, who knows- the result is that, despite the changes outlined above, we are still trapped in the symbolic world of the nation-state, because the dynamics of politics go one way, but the socio-cultural another: you know, soccer leagues, sub-state nationalism, the history of kindergarten within schools, while in reality, our day-to-day life, goes the other way. Here is a piece of information to more clearly visualize it: as the European Parliament reminded us a few days ago, 65% of the laws passed in Spain in 2020 derived directly from European directives and decisions. Meaning, of the 43 laws passed by the Spanish Parliament, seven laws include European directives into the Spanish legal system, and another twenty-one contain references to recommendations, programs, or initiatives of the Union.
Presence in Brussels: fundamental
The answer could not be clearer: working in the public affairs field and solely paying attention to Madrid or Barcelona is misunderstanding the world we are entering. Without our own presence in Brussels, many of our client’s interests will be neglected because the true bridge, in regulatory terms, that exists today in Spain is the one that goes from Madrid to Brussels. Working in Brussels requires working with our own profile – it is not common for alliances to work – and doing so with a coordinated team that uses the same logic as the professionals working in Spain. Not understanding this means not having understood, as Radio Futura sang when we were all younger, that “the future is already here.“»
Written by Manuel Mostaza | ATREVIA Public Affairs global manager
