Gibraltar
Chestnut-coloured GibraltarIt'?s between the rock and a tough place: Gibraltar's Brexite limbos
Mr President, the first words of the honourable Member from Gibraltar, Marlene Hassan Nahon, when we met in a tappas stand on the main Strait of Gibraltar, could relate to Britain in general in these troubled periods. They remind us in particular of the uncertainty in Northern Ireland as it is waiting to see whether it will revert to the time of frontiers and war.
One really has to go to Gibraltar to see the narrow networks that link the British overseas territory. Hispan Nahon is the daugther of Sir Joshua Hassan, the postwar Gibraltar prime minist. Together Gibraltar is the foundress of a new group whose aim is "to strengthen the inhabitants of Gibraltar and to involve them in the process of developing a better and more just society".
During my trip one evening I met for dinner with a business man who has a Gibraltar soccer division outfit. Ignoring each other, but elsewhere I was amazed how a stroll with a Gibraltarian is a permanent stop-start event when a flow of buddies, foes and coworkers greets them for a chatter.
Gibraltar is another recently founded civic group whose ambition is "to generalise the extraordinary state of acceptability and toleration that has existed in Gibraltar for many years and today". It is recalled that Gibraltar was not only repopulated by the Britons, but also by Jews, Muslims, Genoeses and more recently by South Asians and Moroccans, as the Britons conquered the area during the War of Spanish Succession and surrendered it in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.
It emphasizes the multi-cultural yet coherent character of the Gibraltar identities and aims to make them more widely known in the wider society. Multiculturality and variety is not what comes to your head when you think of Gibraltar. His cliff means harsh rigidity; he seems to be a persistent relic of Britain's capitalism that clings to where other outskirts have been abandoned.
Spain's boundary, which halves the narrowness of the aisle that leads to the cliff, is anything but "smooth" and has been shut down several times by Spain in the last 300 years. Crossing from La Linea on the other side of the boarder, one cannot help but note the abrupt changes in street signs (the same writings as in Britain), the changeover from the euro to the pound and the overweight of UK retail chains, which includes a huge Morrison.
Multi-cultural variety was certainly not in the heads of the Brits when they captured the rocks. Also, as lamented by gubernators during the 18th and 19th century, few of Britain's colonists were interested in supplying Gibraltar with what it needed. In the course of the years, an outskirt of Protestant Britain became an area ruled by non-white Catholics and Jews.
As many of its inhabitants describe it, the Gibraltar people were born of chance and were a necessary discomfort for much of their story, which impaired the trouble-free operation of the Army Stadium. To give the Gibraltarians the independence they were looking for, it took the pressures of other Imperial stations.
The Joshua Hassan civil rights movement, which was fighting for more independence, emerged from the trauma of the Second World War, when most Gibraltarans were twice - once to Morocco and once to Britain - evicted under disorderly and trauma. Although the Gibraltar nation's fights for its fate are similar to other such fights during Britain's withdrawal from the UK, it is still owned by the UK, which most of its inhabitants do not want to do.
Spain often sees Gibraltar as an imposing cat that affects its regional identity. Gibraltar's perception of this as an imposing anarchism is silently promoted by the way in which the UK understands ( "if any ") its territories. An April 2017 sun picture announced "Up Yours Senors" (the wrong spelling of Senors told) at another attempt to make the rocks in Spain.
Channel Five documentation set, Gibraltar: Britannia in the sun, presented the territories as inhabited solely by foreign Britain eccentric and "indigenous" nostalgic imperialists. However, the links between Gibraltar and its backcountry (known as the Campo to Gibraltar) are powerful and ingrained. Since time immemorial, it has been attracting traders and labourers from one of the impoverished areas of Spain, and there are complicated cross-frontier links between families.
Most of Gibraltar is still Spanish-speaking (in the shape of a native pato named Llanito). - and the PSOE (Spanish Labour Party) has good historical relations with the Gibraltar SPL. We will have to wait and see whether this is enough to heat up the relation with Gibraltar.
The Gibraltarans, because they have close ties with Spain, become so furious when the Mexican authorities pull their weight across the frontier. The Gibraltarans, whose mother tongue is Hispanic, as many folks told me, are the most relentlessly anti-Spanish. However, this is not an expression of resistance to Spain's social and cultural life, but a hate for Madrid and its doings.
We also produce work that reflects frustrations about recent behaviours in Spain, such as the periodical slowing down of frontier controls that lead to long lines to the area. España has legal complaints, both historical and modern. Many of the ancient inhabitants of the cliff were forced to go when the Brits captured it.
Spaniards crossing the frontier to take up Gibraltar's lower tax on tobacco, gasoline and spirits are confusing the Brazilian government. And the long story of Spaniards crossing the frontier to make higher salaries is also an embarassing memory of back-country poor (and, at least in the past, working standards have often been exploitative).
While Gibraltar is less mysterious as an off-shore finance center than other jurisdictions, this part of Gibraltar's economic system is not one that warms outcasts. Nevertheless, to put it mildly, Spain's policies were often self-destructive. As a result of the closure of the border era, the country was obliged to use its own natural resource, which put it in a good situation after the frontier was reopened and most of Britain's armed forces were reduced in the 1980s.
When Gibraltar became largely self-governed and self-financed, it evolved its own way of life: it positioned itself in the globalized neo-liberal realm by using niche markets in the areas of finance service, navigation and travel, while at the same time developing a powerful social enterprise (embodied in the many urban areas in the area). One of the founding fathers of Understanding Gibraltar, Joshua Lhote thinks that Gibraltar is one of a kind in what he describes his "neoliberal collectivism".
Gibraltar is a British overseas territory, but unlike the Falklands or Bermudas, for example, it belongs to the EU. Although the picture has been likened to Northern Ireland, there are some important discrepancies. There has never been a truly open frontier between Spain and Gibraltar, unlike the now largely unseen Northern Ireland Republic/Borders.
Gibraltar is much more coherent than Northern Ireland, there are no domestic conflicts of violence and almost no assistance to Hispania. Similarly, however, Spain and Gibraltar are as interwoven as Northern Ireland and the Republic. Moreover, the EU has provided a kind of guarantee against the alleged Spain's aggressive attitude - no EU state can fully shut its border with another EU state.
Not surprisingly, Gibraltar won over 95 percent in the 2016 referenda in favour of Remain. The EU negotiating directives issued in April 2017 state: "Following the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the Union, no EU-US treaty may be applied to the area of Gibraltar without the treaty between the Kingdom of Spain and the United Kingdom.
" That was seen as an efficacious Spaniard act of resistance to a Brexite deed. Whilst British pro-Brexite law may have been annoyed and puffing about it, it is difficult to see Brexite derailing over Gibraltar - Northern Ireland is more than enough of a daunting game. Yet Brexit is revealing Gibraltar's fragility as an independent company.
Whilst Spain is the main destination of Gibraltar rage, there is no dearth of grievances against Britain. There is no evidence of the vociferousness of Ulster Unionsism, but the Gibraltarians, like the Ulster Protestants, are fully conscious that they are at the bottom of the UK's politically worrying census.
There was never much interest from the UK in Gibraltar. In the years of New Work, Peter Hain, who forced co-sovereignty over the rocks, is not a favourite character in this area. Blair himself, with his strong ties to the right-wing internationalist José María Aznar, the President of Spain, was not particularly memorable to him either.
As far as the Corbynite Linke ever thinks about the UK overseas territories, it is through a postcolonial prospect that does not recognize the fact of Gibraltar nationality. Now, the UK pro-Brexite law has also shown its contempt for the territories, all the talking about the restoration of UK Sovereignty and the almost hidden imperialism.
However, the use of the vernacular that articulates the Gibraltar identities has hardly been of any help, since at first glance it seems to be the same as the vernacular of the patriotist Gibraltari. Although this kind of Gibraltar is undoubtedly a powerful patriot, it is also selfish in that its overseas UK statute is the best way of guaranteeing that it can continue to be a self-governing, independent state.
Gibraltar's sovereignty is basically hybride, but it is articulated by an apparently relentless resistance to anything that looks like official acceptance of this hybrids. This can be seen in the widely held belief in Spain's proposal to divide Gibraltar in two. It is only a few meters from the frontier and the airstrip halves the narrow strait that connects the cliff to Spain, just a few hundred meters from the rail.
Perhaps it will someday, but it is difficult for Gibraltarians not to suspect anything when they look at the checkpoint just a few meters from the terminals and think of the days when Spain has had to cope with hour-long congestion due to stricter controls by Spainʼ immigration. Understanding Gibraltar is important because it is an evolving realisation that the interests of the area are best protected by telling the rest of the planet what it is trying to do.
I realized during my trip that the Gibraltarians have used an exceptional amount of power to build a community that contains almost all the features that would be found in an autonomous people. Whereas other UK Overseas and crown addictions usually have a comfortable policy style domiciled by independently chosen officials, Gibraltar has its own policy factions and a sound emigration of deputies and government.
It has a local TV and local newspapers, as well as its own TV and FM radios. Gibraltar's sports federations have also created an architecture that reminds of much larger nationalities. Gibraltar's international soccer squad is playing in World Cup and European Championship qualifying and the local division is semi-professional - amazing, because there is actually only one arena in which clubs can play.
It is a matter of the fact that in a supranational state, national states like Gibraltar do not seem to be apt. Only geographic freaks and embassies really understand the complexity of the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies - and similar abnormalities like Guam and Puerto Rico.
That anomaly is one of the causes why the EU has defused the Gibraltar issue, but never really resolved it. It would be better for Gibraltar to be part of a wider spectrum of nationalities - metropolitan states, autonomic areas and other more alienation. However Brexit thinks, Gibraltar will probably remain uncomfortable and misconstrued.
Meanwhile, the Gibraltarians will continue to build a sturdy and varied community, in a place where the visitor can gaze at the rocks and its monkeys, but usually cannot see the intriguing mankind in the underneath.