Brexit: Spain and the United Kingdom agree in extremis to eliminate the Gibraltar Gate
From "Spanish Gibraltar" which, for decades, in dictatorship and democracy, synthesized the wishes of the rulers and ruled in Spain, we have passed to "European Gibraltar".
This is how Ambassador
Carlos Miranda
anticipated in the last letter of 2020 on his blog - "From my chancellery" - on Christmas Day
the result of the negotiations culminating in the early hours of Friday between London-Gibraltar and Madrid.
The reactions of relief and satisfaction on Friday from the heads of Foreign Affairs of Spain and the United Kingdom, and of the leaders of Gibraltar and the Spanish surrounding region to the agreement in principle to avoid a hard Brexit on the Rock for six months, while London and Brussels negotiate a new treaty on Gibraltar, they agree with him.
If the profound differences that still exist for the application, for the first time within the
Schengen system
, of the entry and exit regime through the port and airport of Gibraltar
are overcome
, Gibraltar will be more European than it has been in the 47 years that the Kingdom United has been part of the Communities, Community and, finally, the European Union.
Gibraltar ceased to be Spanish in 1704 (in fact) and in 1713 (de jure) and the more pressure Spain has exerted to regain lost sovereignty, the less Spaniards Gibraltarians have felt, as demonstrated by the
plebiscites of 1967 and 2002
.
After dozens of failed attempts to recover the territory by peaceful and violent, legal and illegal means (in her doctoral thesis Concepción Anguita studied them better than anyone), the positions ran aground in the
Castiella plan
of May 1966, which proposed to forget about Utrecht, replace the British base with a joint use base and grant Gibraltarians a status of broad autonomy under the protection of the UN.
Flatly rejected by London and Gibraltar, the Spanish positions, as we moved away from the Franco dictatorship, were softened, putting the principles aside in favor of pragmatism and the solution of everyday problems.
Felipe González opened the gate six weeks after entering Moncloa, in December 82, Aznar, applying some ideas of Abel Matutes from 97 (substituting the term of one hundred years for an indefinite duration), went further than anyone in 2002 in the negotiation of the co-sovereignty agreement dreamed of by Fernando Morán -disciple, like Marcelino Oreja, from Castiella- and Rodríguez Zapatero / Miguel Angel Moratinos abandoned the "double bis a bis" in the negotiation -Madrid-London on the one hand, Gibraltar-Campo on the other - for diplomacy to three, with the Gibraltarians in the British delegation.
For the Popular Party it was an unforgivable betrayal and a gratuitous concession of the principle that Spain had defended for three centuries in a literal interpretation of the Utrecht accords partially admitted by the UN, but
considered obsolete by London and 99 percent of Gibraltarians ( 34,000 today)
.
Despite the enormous efforts of the Rajoy / José Manuel García-Margallo team to reverse that decision, the Pedro Sánchez governments endorsed the format and have achieved the two main agreements achieved since 2016: that, in the Brexit negotiations, Brussels should give in to Spain the last word on the future status of Gibraltar, and the agreement in principle of December 31st.
Will that diplomatic success in the negotiation of the new treaty now being opened between London and Brussels be maintained or lost?
When will the UK return Gibraltar to Spain, as it has returned Hong Kong to China?
, asked the friend and teacher of diplomatic correspondents Pepe Colchero to Douglas Hurd, secretary of the Foreign Office, in an informal meeting with journalists in Madrid at the end of 97. "When Spain is China", he replied.
In practice, his position has been shared by all his successors for 30 years with other words: "when the Gibraltarians want it."
Hong Kong has nothing to do with Gibraltar or China with the opinion of Gibraltarians, but in the interdependent world of 2021 and in the democratic Europe of the 21st century, with the United Kingdom inside or outside the EU, in Spain only two options are heard for Gibraltar: the ambiguity that clouds all the progress made by the last PSOE governments, including the draft on Friday, or the return to the order that García-Margallo defended again last Thursday in EM: "demand that the United Kingdom comply with once with the doctrine of the United Nations ... taking into account, yes, the interests of Gibraltarians. "
That is precisely, but without unnecessary provocation, what, in the opinion of the leaders of Spain, the United Kingdom and Gibraltar, the four-year grace period that now opens to move from British Gibraltar to a Gibraltar that, being more European, can also end, God knows when, being more Spanish.
While still being British?
In a hundred years, anything is possible.
For now, unless the negotiators do very badly between now and summer, the gate will disappear, Gibraltar will not be the EU's external border and the European border agency (Frontex) will monitor controls at a port and an airport that Spain will never recognize as ceded territories in Utrecht.
The specific details will have to be negotiated.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
Brexit
Gibraltar
EditorialGibraltar: a historic occasion to negotiate
TribunaGibraltar, a missed opportunity
Editorial Insufficient agreement on Gibraltar
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