P O I N T O F V I E W NATO CELEBRATES ITS 70TH ANNIVERSARY in full adaptation to a new strategic environment 2019, which is now drawing to a close, marked the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Washington Treaty. 2019 thus saw NATO celebrate its 70th anniversary. Seventy years of success stories in the defence of freedom and democracy. Seventy years in which together —as Allies— we have learned to define the idea that unites us: collective defence. Because we cannot forget that without cohesion there is no solidarity, without solidarity there is no collective defence, and without collective defence there is no NATO at all. But what have we been defending collectively for the past seventy years? And what do we intend to defend in the future? Over the past seventy years we have been defending our national borders. Obviously; that is what we have done. But we have also defended other borders that are just as important: alongside territorial borders, we have defended borders of freedom. The fact is that in the past seventy years the Alliance has defended the values and principles that define us as free societies, and that is no mean feat. The values and principles that the Alliance has defended and continues to defend —freedom, democracy, respect for human rights and the rule of law— are the same values and principles, as recalled by his Majesty the King of Spain at the North Atlantic Council on November 21st 2018, that inspired the 1776 Declaration of Independence of the United States, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and the 1812 Spanish Constitution. Although these values may go back a long way, they are still every bit as valid, and inspire the Charter of the United Nations, the Treaties of the European Union and also the current Spanish Constitution. They are the values that define our present and project us into the future as societies of free citizens; citizens who wish to live in peace, because only in a framework of peace and stability can we fully exercise our rights and freedoms in order to achieve prosperous societies. That is precisely why, in an increasingly unpredictable and insecure environment, NATO is an extremely important tool to stand united in defence of our values. United to defend a peace that has allowed us to build an international society in the past seventy years in which world wars have been confined to history books. There was only a 21-year time span between the end of the First World War in 1918 and the beginning of the Second World War in 1939. That in the past seventy Miguel Fernández- Palacios Martínez, Ambassador Permanent Representative of Spain in the North Atlantic Council years the world has not been plunged into a global nuclear conflict with unimaginable consequences has a lot to do with the signing of the Washington Treaty on April 4th 1949 and the founding of the North Atlantic Alliance. To deny this would be to deny reality. Today, seventy years later, the Alliance continues to be the primary political and military tool for the security and defence of the Western world in general and Europe in particular. But what role has Spain played in the Alliance since its accession in 1982? Spain’s first words at the North Atlantic Council were spoken by the then Spanish Minister for Foreign Affairs, José Pedro Pérez-Llorca. Minister Pérez-Llorca said on that occasion 46 Revista Española de Defensa December 2019
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