From a purely geographical point of view, it is so absurd that there is even a debate about to which land mass Gibraltar "belongs" to. As a colonialist, I would find it very difficult to justify my own behaviour nowadays.
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.
Time and time again Spain complains
Time and time again hypocrites
I don't mind if you believe that "land makes right" or if you believe that "people have rights", but be consistent
Take your colonial desires and stuff them back in the 18th century where they belong
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.
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.
Colonies are rarely ceded voluntarily, but are usually the result of an invasion or a lost conflict. The fact that this is no longer the case with Gibraltar today, because its inhabitants value the benefits of belonging to Britain, is simply a consequence of the time that has passed since then. It does not automatically undo the imperialist actions of the past.
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
The vast majority of its inhabitants were portuguese citizens with the exact same rights and duties as any other portuguese citizen in Lisbon. The majority of that territory (and certainly the parts with most of the population) was portuguese for 500+ years.
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:...
Colonialism is the historical basis of almost all of global society today. It's not at all weird to be concerned with it when it still drives so much of the relative power dynamics between states and between people(s) today.
The example you're giving of Czechia and Prussia simply isn't an example of a colonial action.
I don't really buy it. It feels to me as unnatural as if somebody decided that theft of, say, a smartphone, was a separate and much graver offence than theft of anything else.
It only makes sense to me if there is an underlying ideology, or maybe very practical demands for reparations which shouldn't be hindered by other demands for reparations, and thus the others need to be downgraded pre-emptively.
It may also come handy for distraction from domestic governance failures, such as bad security situation, rolling blackouts, subpar maintenance of infrastructure and endemic corruption. "Hey, don't look into this, you know how bad the colonialists were?"
(Fairly similar to the way the contemporary Russian propaganda tries to pin the failure of their current war of aggression on anyone and anything but their own stupid decision to go all in.)
It does, yes, and completely reasonably so. That's why it has a different name.
> .. as if somebody decided that theft of, say, a smartphone, was a separate and much graver offence...
Yes, it is like that indeed and I'm sure you'll recognise the difference between intellectual property theft and the theft of a car, or the difference between stealing food from a supermarket and stealing food from a beggar.
> I don't really buy it
> It only makes sense to me if there is an underlying ideology
Ok? Maybe read some more about it. Right now it feels like you're the one pushing an ideology without really making an argument for it.
> It may also come handy for distraction from domestic governance failures
Yes, it might. Governments have a host of ways to distract the public from issues. That doesn't change the reality of the history of, or contemporary effects of, colonialism.
> ... similar to the way the contemporary Russian propaganda ...
Boogeyman argument and an emotional appeal.
People have always tried to conquer other territories, make use of them and settle them. To make an artificial slice out of this continuous and omnipresent phenomenon and call it by another name is incoherent, but then ideologies are mostly incoherent, and colonialism as a very specific sin was a very good and efficient argument in Cold War propaganda and its struggle for influence in the Third World.
Soviets excelled in propaganda, and many of their ideas (like AIDS being an artificial disease, unilateral nuclear disarmament, or the fake contrast between colonialism and membership in the Socialist Bloc) survived the fall of the country.
That said, a very similar line was already pushed by the Japanese in order to paint their own brutal empire as some kind of Pan-Asian utopia. But their trace in global discourse is negligible to the Soviet one, which was much more sophisticated and long-lasting.
These terms are well defined and it would serve you well to simply consult a dictionary.
But in short colonialism implies the use of colonies (surprise surprise) meaning the use of settlers to control or displace populations. There from comes the name
It also differs from other forms of expansionism in a few important ways.
- The power class structure is built on trade imbalances which move resources from the colonised land to the metropole without building up local economies.
- There's no absorption, the territories tend to remain separate and the colonised people can't become citizens or equals with those colonising them.
- And it's understood when speaking about things like the "colonial era" or "historical colonialism" that there was a deal of racial justification and stratification along racial lines.
You'll quickly be able to compare this list to whatever historical event you like.
I mocked nothing. I accused you of using unfair and unfriendly rhetoric.
> AFAIK when the Soviet Union accused some Western power
So you're putting the words of "some Western power" that "as far as you know" once used a bizarre definition of colonialism in my mouth?
> in the sense that oftentimes all the money, support and political representation goes overwhelmingly to some select places
Yes, totally different thing. People use metaphors and reappropriate words all the time. Irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
You did not.
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.
It gets all complicated and messy when war is involved, of course. I'm talking about peaceful transfers of ownership here.
My opinion is that what your distant ancestors did should not be held against you — go far enough back and pretty much everyone has some ancestors who were good people, and some who did flat-out evil things — and that what happened 200 years ago is not a good argument for overturning the status quo. Some exceptions could apply, but "my ancestors took this land by force X number of years ago" is true of just about everyone, everywhere. The only sane thing to do is to hold the past lightly and consider what is the right thing for the current inhabitants today.
But Africa is such a huge continent, with such a variety of countries (each with their own complicated history) that pretty much any generality you can make about Africa is going to be wrong about large portions of the continent, and about large portions of the history of its various countries. It's perhaps not such a good example to talk about an entire complex continent for a simple point, so I should stop rambling on about it. (But I do recommend finding a book about the empire of Aksum sometime. It's fascinating).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Gibraltar_sovereignty_ref...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gibraltar_sovereignty_ref...
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
> 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.
> Meaning: the people who live in a place get to decide who governs them and their society.
Except for Scotland, of course.