What is left of the British empire refuses to go away

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "It's difficult to explain how it occurs in Hong Kong and not in Gibraltar," mused Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar recently. "Spain maintains its claim of sovereignty over Gibraltar. We have ample reason for it and we expect time and common sense to establish a solution."

Nonsense, retorted Gibraltar's Chief Minister Peter Caruana. "Unlike Hong Kong, Britain is under no legal obligation to hand Gibraltar back. Britain made a solemn assurance never to transfer Gibraltar to Spain and that promise has been repeated to us by every British government since 1969."

In truth, the British Foreign Office would gladly give Gibraltar back to Spain if it could get the 30,000 Gibraltarians to agree. With Hong Kong gone, the remaining bits of an empire that once included a quarter of the world's population amount to 13 widely scattered territories with a total of just 180,000 people, and Britain wouldn't mind if they all left. But they won't go.

Britain's overseas empire began in 1583 on the shore of St. John's harbor in Newfoundland, when Sir Humphrey Gilbert took possession of the island for Queen Elizabeth I. (I know this fact because I grew up in a house five minutes' walk from there.) But that was what historians now call the "first British empire".

That empire was based on settling colonists on various coasts and islands, mostly in North America. Where sugar could be grown, it also involved buying slaves in Africa and transporting them to the New World. But that first empire lost 90 percent of its population when the American colonies won their independence in 1783, and for some time afterwards the whole idea of empire was quite unpopular in Britain.

The "second British empire", the one shown on old maps where much of the world is colored pink, was mostly acquired in the 19th century, after Britain was already the world's greatest industrial power. It covered huge chunks of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but it didn't really last very long. By 1975 it was almost all gone, except for Hong Kong -- and now that's gone too.

What remains is the "permanent empire": the bits and pieces too small to want independence, and where the people often think of themselves as "British" even though they live many thousands of miles away. They are almost all remnants of the "first" empire.

It's hardly surprising, as these are places that have had lots of time to get into the habit of being British. Bermuda was settled in 1612, St. Helena became a Crown colony in 1659, and Gibraltar was captured from Spain in 1704. Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific was settled by the 'Bounty' mutineers in 1790.

The Falkland Islands, which only formally became a British colony in 1833 (though there was a British base there as early as 1765), are a relative newcomer in this company. But it was the Falklands that forcibly reminded Britain of its remaining empire in 1982, when Argentina invaded. The British Foreign Office had been trying to unload the islands on Argentina for years, as they were economically unrewarding and had lost all strategic importance. The 2,000-odd Falklanders didn't like the idea, but that sort of thing has never much troubled the mandarins at the Foreign Office.

As a face-saving measure, Britain was proposing a sale-and- leaseback deal that would let Argentina claim sovereignty over the Falklands (an issue that utterly obsesses Argentine nationalists), while leaving the English-speaking Falklanders under British administration until a new generation got used to the idea of being Argentine. The Falklands would be in Argentine hands today if Buenos Aires hadn't jumped the gun and invaded.

It was done by a beleaguered Argentine military junta desperate for a military success to restore its fortunes. Instead, it gave British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a chance to revive her failing popularity by driving the Argentine troops out.

It was the slimmest of chances, for the campaign to recover the Falklands was an ultra-long-distance war fought on a shoestring. The islands are 12,000 kms from Britain and only 300 miles (450 km.) from Argentina, and many of the ships Britain used would have been scrapped in another year or two. One Argentine torpedo in the right place at the right moment could have ended the whole campaign, and with it Thatcher's career.

Britain won its last colonial war, and the Falklands are now undergoing an economic renaissance. The British troops there call the place "Death Star" because it is such an alien environment and so far from home, but Darth Vader is nowhere in evidence.

The population is growing again after decades of slow decline, the economy is booming thanks to expanding fisheries and oil exploration, and the modern world has arrived. The Falklands got television in 1994, and in Port Stanley there is even a barmaid with a pierced nose.

None of the rest of the "permanent empire" is likely to cost Britain any blood -- not even Gibraltar, though Spain does have a permanent claim against it. Most of the 30,000 Gibraltarians crammed onto the rocky peninsula speak Spanish at home, but they are virtually unanimous in wanting to keep their British citizenship -- and the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 ceded Gibraltar to Britain "in perpetuity and absolutely".

Spain will never use force, and it hasn't a moral leg to stand on so long as it maintains its own sovereignty over two comparable enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla, on the Moroccan coast opposite Gibraltar. In these post-imperial times, it is no longer seen as an intolerable insult to the national honor if a peninsula or island along your coastline belongs to another country.

Sweden doesn't fuss about the Aland islands being ruled by Finland, even though most people there speak Swedish. Canada never complains about the French-ruled islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland, though there is a good deal of haggling over fishing rights. And the French are positively saintly about the British-ruled Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy.

So Gibraltar is safe, and Argentina is unlikely to mount another attack on the Falklands -- and the rest of Britain's imperial detritus isn't even near anybody else's coast.

The jewel in the crown is Bermuda, a mid-Atlantic island whose 40,000 people enjoy a higher per capita income than the British themselves by serving up a heritage-Britain-in-the-sun to American tourists: cars on the left, tea at four, and policemen dressed as bobbies. It's a good life for most people, and the Bermudians are simply not interested in independence: in a 1995 referendum, they voted overwhelmingly to keep the British link.

That same determination is evident in the Turks and Caicos Islands, Montserrat, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Anguilla, Britain's remaining island possessions in the Caribbean. It is certainly evident in the South Atlantic island of St. Helena. But they also have a common complaint: the callous decision in London that took away their British citizenship.

The resentment is most acute in St. Helena, once described as "a lost county of England". The 6,000 "Saints" who live there are strongly loyal to Britain, but their resentment at perceived injustices at the hands of the British government is so acute that last year the governor, David Smallman, was attacked in his office.

The crux of the problem is the 1981 Nationality Act, a cynical piece of legislation designed to deprive the six million residents of Hong Kong of their existing right, as British subjects, to go and live in Britain. It created a different passport for residents of "Dependent Territories" that conferred no right of abode in Britain -- and to avoid accusations of racism, Britain applied it to all the little island territories as well.

For the "Saints", who have a 1673 royal charter declaring that "natives of St. Helena and future generations should be given full citizenship rights as if they had been abiding and borne within the realm of England," it was rank betrayal. It was also one of the misleading signals from London that triggered the Argentine invasion of the Falklands in 1982.

After the Falklands war, Britain restored the citizenship rights of Falklanders and Gibraltarians, the two groups facing foreign claims on their territory. All the others hope that they will also recover their rights now that Hong Kong is gone, but they may be disappointed.

"It really would be seen as highly cynical if we waited until sovereignty over Hong Kong had passed to China and then granted British citizenship to the remaining dependent territories," said Baroness Symons, under-secretary at the Foreign Office, early this month. That is a remark of staggering cynicism itself, given the roots of the Foreign Office's present policy, but it's quite typical of Britain's attitude towards its imperial remnants. All the other European states that once ruled globe-spanning maritime empires -- France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands -- have also ended up with orphaned bits that have nowhere else to go. In every case, they have tried to include these far-flung remnants of empire in the systems of the mother-country. France has even granted full citizenship and voting rights to several million people living in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific.

Britain's approach is colder and meaner, even though its "permanent empire" has only one-tenth the population of France's. The 19th-century British historian Sir John Seeley once wrote that "we seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind." The remnants of the empire will receive the same tender care and attention.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist and historian whose columns appear in 35 countries.