19
Private Partnerships: Beyond Technology Transfer
As a small nation attempting to survive in international technology markets, Spain
can achieve the traditional virtue of bureaucratic transparency in ways that would not
work as well for the giant United States. Spanish companies have practiced a kind of
progressive institutionalism to complement that of their government. They have often
contented themselves with smaller, subsystem contracts and have built partnerships with
firms on both sides of the transatlantic gap. An ever expanding community of managers
and engineers from diverse national perspectives has the opportunity to observe Spain’s
military-industrial complex. Because the contracts involve public procurement, this
community extends to an international group of government officials. Together, business
partners and international customers constitute an informal network of judges. They
often communicate with one another, but since many of them also compete with each
other on terms for Spanish participation, as a group, they are difficult to manipulate.
Spain’s institutional arrangements for defense acquisition have fewer formal checks and
balances than those in the United States, but Spain’s smaller-scale effort is more
accountable to a competent and surprisingly efficient international constituency.
Corruption is notoriously difficult to measure, but given the dependence of Spanish
companies on American and European firms for technology transfer as well as system
integration, if illicit diversion of resources reached a large monetary value, members of
the extended community of partner producers, looking to their own interest, could punish
Spain. They could impose penalties by collectively reducing the number or quality of
industrial alliances.
32
32
On background the author was told by an American that the above mechanism has worked in at least one
case. A middle-level Spanish official was seeking to divert business for his personal interest, but in doing
Convention