Literature & History
by Ina Habermann
Writers and Intellectuals on Britain and Europe, 1918 – 2018
3 June 2020, Open Library of the Humanities, 6(1): 19, pp. 1-23
Excerpt
1. British-European Entanglements
As debates around Brexit suggest, the British are at least partly in denial about the extent and the strength of their ties with Continental Europe. One reason for the success of the ‘Leave Campaign’ before the referendum in June 2016 was that campaigners such as UKIP leader Nigel Farage mobilized powerful narratives and myths pertaining to the discourse of British exceptionalism and Euroscepticism (Spiering 2015; Habermann 2020). The most prominent among these myths is that of Britain’s ‘island story’, which casts British aloofness as a geographical fact – the English Channel, cutting off Britain from mainland Europe, with the White Cliffs of Dover serving as a bulwark against invasion (Christinidis 2015). Yet, to this day, the Crown holds the Channel Islands, geographically much closer to France (see Kamm and Sedlmayr 2008; Habermann 2018a) while Gibraltar, on the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula, is a British Overseas Territory, captured by an Anglo-Dutch force in 1704, and ceded to Britain ‘in perpetuity’ in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. In terms of the ‘island story’ myth, Gibraltar is off the map; it is such an anomaly that when the British government triggered Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, it forgot to make any provisions for ‘the Rock’, which promptly became a bone of contention (Boffey 2017; Boffey and Rankin 2018), if only briefly, before other concerns drowned out Gibraltarian voices again.
In this essay, I will attend to (British) Gibraltar as a hybrid place that epitomizes Britain’s entanglement with Continental Europe and is thus deeply affected by Brexit. Focussing on recent fiction, I will discuss the work of novelist M. G. Sanchez, whose texts offer the most perspicacious literary exploration of the Gibraltarian predicament. Adding his most recent novels, Jonathan Gallardo (2015) and Solitude House (2015) to the growing BrexLit canon, I argue that Sanchez’s literary otherworlds, copiously populated by ghosts, offer an incisive critique of border consciousness and residual colonialism in Gibraltar. The more members of the Gibraltarian establishment seek to deny the colonial legacy of domination, exploitation and violence, the more it will come back to haunt the community. Finally, Gibraltar itself emerges as a spectre of colonialism, reminding Europe of its history of colonial exploitation that is returning to haunt the continent in the shape of the victims of globalisation.
2. Attending to Gibraltar
Gibraltar is definitely a geopolitical ‘hotspot’, situated at the mouth of the Strait of Gibraltar which links the Mediterranean with the Atlantic and divides, as well as connects, the continents of Europe and Africa. Gibraltar is a peninsula with great natural defensive advantages whose strategic importance historically lay in the fact that it is possible from there to control entrance into the Mediterranean Sea. Even though this strategic importance is much diminished today, Gibraltar is still Britain’s ‘gateway to the Mediterranean’. Both in 1967 and in 2002, the Gibraltarian people voted to remain part of the United Kingdom. Seeking to punish the loyalty of Gibraltarians to Britain in the 1960s, the Spanish dictator Franco closed the border in 1969, cutting off all connections and creating a siege-like situation that isolated ‘the Rock’. The border was partially re-opened in 1982, and fully in 1985 as part of the European integration process. In the 1990s, the British Labour government’s support of the process of devolution and self-determination led to a reform of the Gibraltarian constitution which took effect in 2007.
Though Britain maintains control over Gibraltar, Spain is still interested in the strategically placed city located at the Southern tip of its nation, regarding it as disputed territory. The Gibraltar issue thus continues to rankle between Spain and Britain: the conflict has unsurprisingly flared up again after the Brexit referendum (Sánchez 2019; Boffey 2019), and Spanish claims to Gibraltar have been renewed after Brexit. In terms of population and language, Gibraltar is a truly hybrid place. In addition to English and Spanish, a local vernacular is spoken, llanito, which is a mixture of Andalusian Spanish and English. The economy revolves around tourism, online gambling and financial services. Faced with Spanish hostility and forced into the binary logic of nation states, the Gibraltarian population identifies overwhelmingly with Britain, although in mainland Britain, in general, people are at best mildly interested in Gibraltar. Given its history and geographical location, however, the Gibraltarian loyalty to Europe is also strong, since the cultural concept of Europe and the political commitment to EU integration are designed to ease the tensions between contending nation states. In the racist language of ethnic and national purity, according to a binary, exclusionary logic that disregards three hundred years of cultural mingling and exchange, Gibraltar becomes an anomaly and a paradox. Once cultural hybridity is embraced, however, acknowledging the existence, and the rights of a culture and society which have evolved over such a long time, there is a place for Gibraltar, preferably as part of a united Europe. It is still an open question as to what will happen as Britain is disentangling itself from the union, effectively turning the border between Spain and Gibraltar into an external border of the EU.
Long or short sentences?
Academic English has a style of its own, and it is often complex. However it may have some major downfalls for students:
It leads to long-winded phrases which native speaking referees flag as needing changing.
It will quickly bores the readers, and they will simply stop reading due to ther mental effort involved.
It opens up a minefield of potential mistakes.
It is often used by students to hide their insecurity because they do not have a clear idea of what they want to say.
Solution: Write shorter sentences.
Based on Wallwork (2016)
Improve your writing and write short sentences
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