DECLARATION OF THE COUNTER-SUMMIT NO NATO, BASES OUT, MADRID 2022

The Coordination of No to NATO, Bases Out Platforms, constituted by the signatory organisations of the Call for Mobilisation Against the NATO Summit in Madrid, called on citizens to hold the No to NATO, Bases Out Counter-Summit, Madrid 2022 as a response to the NATO Summit of Heads of State and Government.

Gathered in the city of Madrid on 24 and 25 June 2022, those attending this Counter-Summit DECLARE:

This NATO Summit in Madrid must be considered as a historic event that will mark the beginning of a new world order and the beginning of a warmongering period that will involve most of the planet. It is a crucial event in the present conjuncture of imperialism, reflecting the present stage of the class struggle.

The system in which we live, capitalism, is in the throes of a crisis which has been defined by its own institutions as structural, systemic and long-term. NATO and the rest of the Western war structures, especially the US military bases, are key players in this reconfiguration of the world order.

At a time when there is an awareness of the decline of US world hegemony, the US is organising itself to dominate the world and will defend its privileges in every possible way, including all kinds of war and aggression.

There is no blueprint for the new phase towards which we are moving, but the major international economic institutions and NATO itself have already announced the lines of action to deal with the problems that have already been identified: financialization, debt, creative destruction, technological revolution, social control and warmongering expansion against everything that hinders this capitalist reorganisation. This process will take place outside and inside its own borders. It is the definitive launching of the World War, a global, arbitrary, unpunished war of aggression, by any means and on any scale, aimed at eliminating any expression of resistance to imperialist expansion.

The fronts of this war already extend to the Middle East, Central Asia, the Sahel, Taiwan, the Southern Mediterranean, Latin America and Europe, to which must be added the internal front of the empire. NATO is present in all of these except the Asia-Pacific region.

The expansive character of this organisation is not a forecast; it is a fact, the scope of which was recently announced by the UK Foreign Secretary: GLOBAL NATO.

Economic Europe has not gone beyond that scope, it has not been able to provide itself with a political structure; the attempt to provide itself with a European constitution failed, as did the initiative to create a European defence system outside NATO.

What really binds the European Union together, because of its own pro-monopoly class character, are the European Central Bank, which determines its economic functioning, and NATO, which determines its external relations. The European Union is united under the discipline of the Atlantic Alliance, and after its action following the interests of the USA in the conflict in Ukraine, it will be necessary to talk about NATO's Europe.

NATO's historical trajectory shows that there are no territorial limits for this organisation, but neither are there any limits to its alliances, methods or the consequences of its bellicose activity.

NATO has resorted to terrorism in all its forms, from the Gladio network in Europe to takfiri Islamic fundamentalism, in whatever form, throughout the Muslim world. In recent decades, its members and the organisation itself minimise their casualties by hiring companies of mercenary military professionals and by arming and training Nazi and Fascist paramilitaries. Nor are there any limits to the suffering caused by its aggressions, the dead must be counted in the hundreds of thousands and the displaced now officially number over a hundred million. We can therefore affirm that NATO is a criminal organisation.

At the moment, this organisation's priority mission is to isolate and weaken the Russian Federation in order to create the best scenario for confronting China, the ultimate goal of imperialism. In this drift, they have not hesitated to bring us to the brink of a nuclear conflict in order to disengage Europe from the Russian Federation.

Once again, there have been no limits: billions of dollars spent, thousands of tons of arms (a good part of them uncontrolled), formation of neo-Nazi paramilitary groups, censorship of the media and of Russian culture, creation of a toxic atmosphere which not only allows the manipulation of public opinion but also justifies all the measures that the new order needs: militarisation of society, social control, minimisation of the state, inflation, unemployment, precariousness and overexploitation. All this will be a consequence of the imperialist war, preventing the free self-determination of the peoples.

The huge costs of these policies are justified, but little is said about the immense corporate profits of the arms industry and the reordering of the hydrocarbon market, of which the USA is the main beneficiary.

The NATO summit will push this dynamic forward under terms that are indecipherable to the general public: Strategic Concept, Expanded Security, New Rules-Based Order, Resilience and others that, in generic terms, are accepted without question, such as Technological Development and Digitalisation and the incorporation of issues of wide media resonance such as Climate Change and Women's rights. The introduction of these new issues broadens the scope of intervention on a global scale and generates new frameworks for ideological justification of aggressions.

Once again, the real objectives of the Summit are concealed, which are none other than to promote the development of a new phase of capitalism, based on the domination of large corporations, the expansion of militarism, social control and the overthrow of the West's antagonists, Russia and China.

These objectives are proposed precisely because the hegemony of US imperialism is in a position of weakness, with the rise of regional powers with the capacity to respond and the will to cooperate, both in international institutions and in specific scenarios of interference, distributed throughout all regions of the world.

The Spanish state, its Congress (with honourable exceptions) and its government, continue with the agreement reached between Franco and the US in 1953, which meant the alignment of the Spanish oligarchy with the US under conditions of subordination. Sovereignty was surrendered and submission was accepted in exchange for being admitted by a West that uses us, ignores us and in many cases despises us. The presence of the bases and the subordination to the US conditioned the very Spanish political-economic structure after the Transition. This happened with the connivance of liberal progressivism, which had and still has the task of demobilising social resistance.

Our leaders, our elites, are always ready and willing to respond first to any order. For example, this was the case with the Azores Trio, with the European Constitution, with the modification of the Constitution, with the deployment of Colombian soldiers in Afghanistan, with going to all the fronts of conflict we are asked to go to, surrendering our territory to US bases, to NATO commands and manoeuvres, accepting their budgetary demands, declaring as enemies whoever they tell us to, spreading their propaganda and accepting their restrictions.

In short, to speak of the subordination of the Spanish State to the interests of US imperialism, through NATO and the Bases, is not to refer to a historical event, but to a present reality, especially evident in the most heavily militarised territories, such as the Canary Islands, the surroundings of the bases and military sites or the productive nuclei linked to the arms industry.

Let us put an end to this once and for all, let us organise a movement with a vocation for the masses and to constitute itself as a well-structured political and social subject with strong popular roots, capable of generating transcendental proposals for the development of the class struggle in the Spanish state, that denounces NATO as a criminal organisation and demands its abandonment, that demands the withdrawal of the bases and the foreign armies and that fights against the militarist and authoritarian plans that are announced and that we are already feeling. Let us bring to the present and give new reality to our rich history of popular resistance, especially the anti-fascist struggle.

There are peoples who teach us that the defeat of imperialism is possible. Let us follow that example.

Madrid, June 25^th, 2022