The State Secretary for Global Spain, Manuel Muñiz, met yesterday in Paris with the recently appointed Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Mathias Cormann.
During the meeting, Manuel Muñiz and Mathias Cormann analysed the different initiatives to reactivate safe international mobility and strengthen multilateralism, and monitored the actions subsequent to the OECD recommendation, including a blueprint, approved at the end of May, which Spain promoted to this organisation.
The secretary-general and the State secretary also exchanged perspectives on the opportunity that the approval of the Recovery and Resilience Plan could represent for Spain and its influence on the initiatives that will be developed through economic diplomacy.
Within this framework, Manuel Muñiz reported that Spain is drawing up a National Technology and Global Order Strategy, which will address the challenges that the introduction of technology in international relations will entail. Few countries have initiated such an exercise, which will include adopting a position on the major issues involved, both in substance and in form, in the expansion of technology and its introduction around the world.
This issue was also the subject of analysis at the meeting between the State secretary and the Assistant Director-General for the Social and Human Sciences of UNESCO, Gabriela Ramos and the Spanish Ambassador to UNESCO, Andrés Perelló. They positively assessed the new recommendation by UNESCO on the ethics of artificial intelligence, which will definitively be approved at its next General Assembly. This recommendation will be referred to in the Technology and Global Order Strategy in its approaches on youth and inclusion.
Gabriela Ramos, Manuel Muñiz and Andrés Perelló
Meeting with think tanks and representatives of the Parliament
During the day, Manuel Muñiz held a meeting with the directors of such French think tanks as IRIS, the Jean Jaurès Foundation, IFRI, the Robert Schuman Foundation, the Jacques Delors Institute and Terra Nova, with which he shared the broad strokes of the new Foreign Action Strategy.
This meeting was followed by another with the Analysis, Planning and Strategy Centre of the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs of France, where they discussed ideas and projects related to strategic positioning, a mission that Global Spain is commissioned with through its Directorate-General of Strategy, Foresight and Coherence.
Muñiz with representatives of different French think tanks
In his round of contacts with political representatives, Manuel Muñiz had the chance to meet with the two France-Spain Groups of Friends of the French Upper and Lower Houses of Parliament, and completed his agenda for the day by a meeting with Spanish residents, framed within the Spanish Global Citizenship initiative, which seeks to strengthen the network of talent that Spaniards abroad represent.
The official trip will culminate today following a meeting with French business association MEDEF and the participation of the State secretary in a seminar of the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), run by the expert Gustav Lindstrom. He will also visit the headquarters of the Cervantes Institute in Paris and the Picasso Museum – the art gallery that Spain is working with to prepare the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of the Spanish painter in 2023.