Gibraltar - Small Place, Big Message

Anachronistic Imperial Outpost - Gibraltar

I like history and I like quirkiness.  So I really like the quirky historical status of Gibraltar.  In my ideal world it would stay just as it is.  It came under British control as a result of the Treaty of Utrecht  - a few years after the UK was formed from the union of England and Scotland - at which point in time it was a highly valuable military asset.  It must have been something of a coup for the negotiators.  Eighteenth century Britain was not the power it was to become in the nineteenth. so securing this plum was good work.

It somehow stayed under British control for the following 300 years because it continued to make sense for the British to control it throughout the period when Britain had an worldwide empire, and during the Cold War as well for quite different reasons.   In the meantime the tiny enclave worked out some neat ways to make a living.  The exact sequence of how the EU grew happened to work to maintaining the status quo and effectively froze its anachronistic position.  Spain and the UK might disagree over who ought to run it,  but nobody else in the EU cared very much so things were as good as settled.  As I say, I love this kind of thing but you are free to adopt any or no emotional position towards it that fits your character and temperament. 

But with Brexit everything is suddenly thrown up in the air.  With Spain in the EU and the UK outside it, it can quite reasonably expect the support of the rest of the block in its dispute with Britain.  I suspect that there are some limits to just how far other European countries will be prepared to go on this.  It is hardly something that any other country is going to even notice let alone get excited about.  But even limited and grudging support from the rest of the EU is still well worth having.

So Spain can now start planning just how it goes about getting back control of this tiny but symbolic little tract of its historic territory.  It has a lot of new cards to play and will no doubt play them.  Interestingly, one option would simply be to send in its army to occupy it the day after the UK leaves.  I don't think that would happen, and I don't think it would be the best tactic to adopt from thei point of view if I were Spain.  But thinking it through, what could Britain do?  It could hardly fight a war over it.  

Much more likely, indeed almost inevitable is simply a set of modest demands backed up with steadily increasing economic sanctions against Gibraltar itself.  A couple of decades of that and the Rock will be back.  I know that the economic cost to Spain itself won't be negligible - but if you think that people's primary motivation is economics I suggest reading some history.

So that will bring another bit of Britain's imperial history to a close.  I'll be sorry to see it go.  It lasted a lot longer than anyone back in 1713 would have predicted.  But the bigger picture is an illustration of just how much weaker it now is on the world stage.  I am old enough to remember when Gibraltar was an enclave not in the EU but in Franco's Spain.  Back then, the very thought of handing the Gibraltans over to a fascist country would have been unthinkable.  And the idea that the relative strength of Britain and Spain would be such that we might be compelled to would have been equally outside the realms of possibility.  We don't know just how much Brexit is going to diminish Britain yet.  The big message from Gibraltar is that it is quite likely to be a lot.  Looking at Scotland, lets hope that Gibraltar isn't the only eighteenth century deal that is finally reversed.