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I think the twp main problems are not who Gibraltar belongs to, but 1. Gibraltar is that it is kind of a tax haven next to one of th areas of Spain with more poverty and unemployment, which is also one of the main drug entrances of the country. This combibation is explosive and really problematic for the people in the Campo de Gibraltar, especially the youth. 2. The people of Gibraltar must also be sovereign and don't want to belong to Spain, so I think we should respect that.
I think this kind of agreement make a compromise, integrating better Gibraltar with the area, making it possible for the people around to benefit from the Gibraltar's economy, bridging Gibraltar and Spain closer, while respecting the sovereignity of the people of Gibraltar.
However, I must say, a similar agreement could be done with Gibraltat belonging to Spain, which I would consider fairer, but still not the most important point.
I am telling that Gibraltar people should decide which country they want to belong to, same thing with Ceuta and Melilla.
I think in a very abstract sense I agree that exclaves like this are weird and it would be cleaner if they didn't happen (Gibraltar returned to Spain, Ceuta and Melilla returned to Morocco), but that's thinking of this as a systems design problem rather than one that cares about people. I recognise that this is not an empathetic view, and my own opinion is worthless and I hold onto it very weakly.
Is this your standard for whether or not something is colonialism? Do you apply it consistently throughout, even when its inconvenient for you?
Land borders that one doesn't like doesn't equate to colonialism. It's just a land border that you don't like. The people of Gibraltar voted almost 100% to be British on more than one occasion. Trying to make them not British is the definition of colonialism
After 10 generations, the people are every bit as local as the previous population was. 300 years is such an abyss of time that most of us would fail to name a single of our ancestors by name.
Kladsko was a Czech city from approx. 1000 to 1742. The old town still looks a bit like very small Prague [0]. Was lost in a war (to the Prussians no less), it is gone, not our anymore. Tough luck. Others live there now, it is theirs.
[0] https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kladsko_(město)#/media/Soubor:...
The distance from London to Gibraltar is closer than the distance from London to Bermuda, but nobody finds that weird. France has French Polynesia on the opposite side of the world. Russia has Kaliningrad. Norway has Svalbard. South Africa has another country, Lesotho, right in the middle of it. India wraps around Bangladesh like a tentacle. Azerbaijan has a random piece of land and makes a sandwich out of Armenia. Spain has islands directly west of Morocco. France has land on South America.
The whole world has freaky borders. The only clean borders are places like Wyoming and Colorado.
So no, as a general rule I can't agree. I can certainly agree that there are some rather silly cases, but it's just not practical for all islands to be self-governing, so I can't agree with the general rule you propose.
> Questions about ceding the territory to the United Kingdom and later to Canada have been raised since its creation; however, its status has remained unchanged.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington
Meaning: the people who live in a place get to decide who governs them and their society.
People in Gibraltar, The Falklands, the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland all have different wants, needs and asks of the UK, and the UK honours all of them. There are other overseas territories with different relationships, plus the Commonwealth too.
If that ask changes (and in Northern Ireland it likely will in our lifetimes, the others less so), the governance will change.
Sometimes there is an ask for a closer relationship through the British Commonwealth (such as South Africa). Sometimes there is an ask for the UK to go away, thanks but no thanks (such as Malta). Each relationship is handled individually, but through a lens of self-determination. That's the priority in the FCO, in Parliament, in UK media. If a tiny nation wants to be British, the UK will go to war over it despite it making little sense (Falklands). If a tiny nation wants independence despite tactical advantage for UK to keep it, independence will be fought for (Malta happened, Diego Garcia is a WIP - watch this space). Where there is division (Northern Ireland), the majority view is observed, but with democratic and cultural structures created to try and make sure minority views have a voice in that governance.
That said, there is a caveat: observance of treaties tend to over-ride local preference in some cases, so if there is a legal argument to ignore the wishes of the locals, those wishes may be ignored: Hong Kong is the most prominent example of this in recent times (locals seemed to want to stay British, China said the 100-year agreement was up and there'd be no renewal, end of, so China it became).
Diego Garcia is another example, which has got messy because of the Whitehouse not understanding the UK's perverse inclination towards local democracy and the right to self-determination (see also non-UK entities the Whitehouse has not understood well: Greenland, absurd noises about Canada, and so on).
When able, the UK has consistently been committed to restoring governance to a local population's preferred model peacefully since ~1950 (India being the last real mess), and if the people of Gibraltar want to be governed by the Spanish, they'd be governed by the Spanish within ~2-3 years.
The idea that local people should have no say in this because "it's obvious" who "they belong to", is the colonialist notion here. A land isn't about geography. It's about people. It took a long time for the UK to understand this. Eventually they did. Most European colonial powers did. Others are still trying to catch up, it seems.
That's the same, whether it's Gibraltar, Scotland, Cornwall, the Canary Islands, Ceuta, Taiwan, Falklands, Cyprus, Texas, Point Roberts, Crimea, Canada, Greenland, etc etc.
We can argue about the thresholds needed, the length of time of residence ("squatters rights" etc), the minimum size of a given area, but the principal remains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Gibraltar_sovereignty_ref...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gibraltar_sovereignty_ref...
It gets all complicated and messy when war is involved, of course. I'm talking about peaceful transfers of ownership here.
After 500 years? Yes
Somewhere between is reasonable to debate, but many people won't even agree on the principal of self determination, at least not consistently. Personally I wouldn't put the threshold longer than a human lifetime
entering: Spanish side: passport scan, UK side: 5 second look
exiting: waving through
> Travellers arriving from countries outside Schengen, such as the UK, will have to show their passports to Gibraltarian and Spanish officials at the territory's airport and port.
So an L for the UK as Gibraltar has again freedom of movement to the EU (that edit: half the British hated so much), and lack thereof to the UK...
Looks like NI voted ~55% remain and Gibraltar ~95% remain, but too bad, England voted ~53% leave, so screw all you little overseas territories with actual land borders who are most directly impacted.
The impression I got was leave voters either thought it would all work out somehow, or that they cared so little about the non GB territories to the point that they felt they didn't need to address to question.
What should have happened was the ability for any person to retain their European citizenship, or if under 18 choose on their 18th birthday. Then the remainers would not have had their rights stripped away.
The catch being if more than 50% of adults took this up, then the UK would not leave.
Northern Ireland got the best deal of the three. Thanks to the Good Friday Agreement, people there can get Irish (and therefore EU) passports.
This is a perennial issue in Scottish politics, but Scotland, unlike Northern Ireland, and maybe Kent, does not have a land border with the EU.
My personal hope was that the UK would remain in the EU, but both the EU and UK would take a look at themselves. Instead both are heading more and more towards censorship and heavy control of their citizens.
A generalisation that only applied to, at most, 52% of the voting British public
Indeed. And, At a point in time ten years ago. In voters who skewed older.
See the Voter Flow diagram: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1pj8kzd/voters_and_...
EDIT: not Schengen, sorry, although I'm pretty sure I just used my national (European) ID to go to London many many years ago and not my passport.
Gibraltar isn't going into the Schengen, it's just going to follow all of the rules of the Schengen area. It's always(?) required a passport check anyway. It's definitely semantics, though!
> EDIT: not Schengen, sorry, although I'm pretty sure I just used my national (European) ID to go to London many many years ago and not my passport.
You could travel with ID cards pre-brexit. The Schengen area has _no_ checks on the borders, so you don't even need an ID card. (However, the place you're travelling to/from may require you to carry one).
As an aside, I have always found it ironic how Spain continuously whines about Gibraltar while doing the exact same thing to Morocco. At the very least, Spain was smart/lucky enough to lobby the UN early on to not include Ceuta and Melilla in the decolonization list.
Gibraltar, on the other hand, was just lost in the War of Spanish succession to the British Empire, and has had a British connection to them since then, but never before
But applying this logic universally would change the world map, not to mention that this justification ignores the fact that the concept of a nation state is relatively new as a norm.
Regardless, I and many others will continue to ridicule Spain’s paradoxical position on Gibraltar. Hopefully a just resolution is realized for all parties at some point in the future.
The UN argument boils down to Spain lobbying the UN early on (post-WW2) at a time when Morocco and other North African and West Asian states either did not exist yet or did not have the ability to represent themselves well at the UN.
Must give props to English honesty though, most people would be savvy enough to come up with some sophism to cover this reprehensible chain of thought. But it's so ingrained in your minds that you have some divine right to your unlawful colonial holdings you just won't even bother.
PD: get the fuck out of Ireland and allow their Scots their referendum.
No. The reason was not economic, the reason was that the government polled the people living there and found that support for remaining British is ~100%.
Oil was found later, the fisheries were never worth maintaining the island for.
The Falklands were never Argentinian. The "native" inhabitants are the ones currently living there.
Or do you think Spain has a legal right based on geographic proximity to enforce a culture on those people despite existing treaties, laws, culture and democracy?
Britain has been doing this to Ireland for the last 800 years. You still continue to hold their land, oppress its people and do your best to exterminate what shred is left of their language.
If Chinggis himself rose from the grave, I'd care a lot more about his thoughts on these matters than a Brit's.