Checkpoint at the Rock

Gibraltar, Britain, Spain, and the EU’s search for common ground.

Custom image by FEE

Commentary

Ever since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016 in a referendum dubbed “Brexit,” Gibraltar has been in limbo. A British Overseas Territory on the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, the Rock (as it’s commonly known, after its most salient geographical feature) presented formidable problems. One major challenge was finding a solution that respected the wishes of Gibraltarians, 96 percent of whom voted to remain in the EU; another was ensuring that the 15,000 people who cross the border with Spain daily (10,000 of them Spaniards who work in Gibraltar) would not face massive queues at passport control. But the governments of the UK, Spain, and Gibraltar had drawn political red lines they insisted could not be crossed. Negotiations sometimes became hostile or stalled completely. A lasting agreement appeared impossible.

But on June 11, almost nine-and-a-half years after the Brexit vote, Gibraltar, Spain, the EU, and the UK agreed on a surprisingly practical solution. Although the arrangement has yet to be ratified, it guarantees a fluid border between the Rock and Spain, unofficially incorporating Gibraltar into the frontier-free Schengen zone. In addition to undergoing passport checks by Gibraltarian authorities upon arrival at the Rock’s airport, passengers will now also be inspected by Spanish border guards. Once out of the airport, they’ll be able to travel without further ID checks into Spain and, from there, throughout the Schengen area, which includes most EU countries, as well as Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland. The new system resembles the one used for passengers boarding Eurostar trains to Paris in the UK, where both British and French border guards conduct passport checks at London’s St. Pancras station.

The latest group of representatives deserve credit for swerving the divisive debate about sovereignty, and focusing instead on Gibraltar’s border with Spain (and now the EU). Gibraltar’s chief minister Fabian Picardo and the EU’s trade commissioner Maros Sefcovic both hailed the agreement as “historic,” while the UK’s foreign secretary David Lammy said it cleared up “the last major unresolved issue from our decision to leave the EU.” Even if that proves true (which seems unlikely), the new deal won’t end the historical dispute over Gibraltar, which has been running intermittently for more than three centuries. Spain’s Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, praised the new accord, but added that Spain had no intention of renouncing its “claims to [Gibraltar].” It was a rare moment of alignment between Sánchez and the opposition leader, Alberto Feijóo, who said that the Conservative People’s Party (PP) would also “continue to demand sovereignty over Gibraltar.”

That demand dates back to 1713, when, as part of the Treaty of Utrecht, “the city and castle of Gibraltar together with its port, defences and fortresses belonging to it” were ceded to Britain. Ever since, Spain has argued that neither the surrounding waters, nor its airspace, nor isthmus—the thin strip of land connecting it to the mainland, where both the border and airport are located—were included in the handover. Noting that Gibraltar has been on the UN’s list of “non-self-governing territories awaiting decolonization” since the 1960s, the Spanish government maintains that Britain’s “occupation of the isthmus is illegal and contrary to international law.” Given this, one might have thought that, within Spain, the presence of Spanish border guards at Gibraltar airport would have been celebrated as the first step towards total reclamation.

But instead of being praised, the Spanish government has been accused of surrender. José García-Margallo, Spain’s Conservative minister of foreign affairs between 2011 and 2016, called the new deal an “absolute renunciation” of Spanish claims to the Rock. According to Ángel Gordillo Moreno, a Vox representative in Spain’s upper house, “any agreement that doesn’t contemplate the complete reintegration under Spanish sovereignty of that territory is illegal, illegitimate and unjust” (again, Gibraltar is probably the only issue on which the Socialists agree with a right-wing party that they routinely—and mistakenly—label as “fascist”).

Spain might yearn for the return of the Rock, but Gibraltarians have no desire to live under Spanish jurisdiction. In a 1967 referendum, 99.64 percent of the population rejected the idea. Placing Gibraltar under joint sovereignty between Spain and the UK—the second-best option, as far as the Spanish government is concerned—was also put to a popular vote in 2002; again, it was opposed by an overwhelming majority of almost 99 percent. The Gibraltarian Constitution of 1969 guarantees that sovereignty cannot be transferred from the UK—to Spain or any other nation—against the democratically-expressed wishes of Gibraltarians, which are clearly to remain a self-governing part of Britain, independent in all respects except defense and foreign policy. This is arguably the only arrangement that preserves what is most important to Gibraltarians: their political autonomy, as reflected in the territory’s distinct cultural identity, comparable to, yet different from, those of both Britain and Spain.

The new border agreement doesn’t dilute Gibraltar’s prized autonomy—unless one sees an all-British border guard, located solely within the airport, as essential to the Rock’s territorial integrity. Still, the UK’s Labour government, led by Keir Starmer, is being slammed for apparently unforgivable concessions—not by Gibraltarians, but from domestic opponents. Nigel Farage, leader of the center-right Reform UK (founded as the Brexit Party in 2018 to advocate for a “clean-break Brexit”), called it “yet another surrender.” The UK’s shadow foreign secretary Dame Priti Patel said that she would scrutinize the accord closely, given that “Gibraltar is British and [that Labour has a] record of surrendering our territory.” This was a reference to a controversial deal signed by Starmer in May, which returned the Indian Ocean’s Chagos Islands, formerly a British Overseas Territory, to Mauritius.

The British Conservatives are more pragmatic than Reform UK. When they were still in power last April (before losing to Labour in the July 2024 general election), foreign secretary Lord David Cameron was involved in talks that Picardo said brought Gibraltar, the EU, Spain, and Britain “within kissing distance” of a deal. Those talks laid the foundations for the agreement made earlier this month. But if the PP, Vox, or Reform UK had been involved in the latest round of negotiations, a sensible border arrangement would be as far away as ever. One often sees a similar focus on abstractions, the same dogged commitment to static ideals, in Scottish and Catalan secessionists. These movements have repeatedly failed to explain how they’d join the EU as independent nations, what currency they would use, or how their economies would handle hardened borders. The no-compromise rhetoric of independence, at least to their ears, is more seductive than the complex practicalities of actually achieving it.

By invoking historically loaded terms such as “surrender,” hardline factions in both Spain and the UK fail to appreciate what’s actually best for Gibraltarians, or for Spaniards who work on the Rock. Both groups would have suffered from ongoing uncertainty over Gibraltar’s post-Brexit status or, in the worst-case scenario, from a hard border; and both will benefit from the new arrangement. The only losers are adherents of the historical approach, for whom Gibraltar is either fully British or fully Spanish—politicians supposedly campaigning on behalf of a population that identifies as neither.

From the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)