Like other territories that I have visited like the Virgin Islands and Guam, Gibraltar and many other British imperial possessions sits on the list of non-self governing territories. One of the stark paradoxes of the place of the British lands on this list is that when they have been allowed to vote on what status they want to have, these largely small and scattered territories have overwhelmingly voted to remain with the British Empire rather than submit themselves and their small cultures to domination by less friendly strangers ranging from Spain (Gibraltar), to Argentina (the Falkland Islands), or even the tyranny of St. Kitts (Anguilla). Any workable solution to the status of these non-self governing states needs to recognize the will of the people itself being consulted as to the nature and worth of its own freedom, and what sorts of freedom it views as the most essential. Consistently, when one looks at the contemporary British Empire, British imperial rule is being maintained by the will of the people themselves being ruled, and not being imposed from above by a British government that is unresponsive to the well-being of the people they govern in their small empire on which the sun still never sets.

What sort of structure can be provided for the remnants of the British Empire who want to remain under British protection but whom the United Nations sees as not being self-governed. There is no appetite in places like Gibraltar or the Falkland Islands, at least it may be viewed or read, for a self-government that would separate these areas from the military protection of the United Kingdom that serves as the most effective deterrent against the oppression of these small peoples by their much larger and hostile neighbors. Most of these areas, though by no means all of them, are too small at present or likely ever to be granted their independence, and many of them are economically peripheral and would struggle badly to support their standard of living without support from the mainland UK or some other power willing and able to undertake that imperial burden. Yet the places are of such continued decisive strategic importance that despite their marginal economic positions, they remain worth ruling over because of their status as gates for naval influence and control.

The crux of the matter is this, how are Britain’s imperial possessions to be given a status that allows for them to have local self-government through responsible elected leadership that works in conjunction with British government that is aimed at overall British security needs as well as the easily understood security needs of the local inhabitants themselves? In the United States, commonwealth status allows for considerable local self-government and a constitution that has been written by local inhabitants and which has gone into force with the ratification of Congress. Is something like that possible in the British empire, such that institutions of local self-government could repeatedly continue to demonstrate the essential popularity of British rule on the ground that can provide a buttress for British claims as to why it is worth continuing to rule over such territories and settle their diplomatic and military affairs vis-a-vis threatening neighbors with their own imperial ambitions? I am not aware of any plans for this happening, but something along these lines that would allow British settler colonists the consistent forum to express their own needs and their own loyalty to the British Empire while also preserving the economic and security needs of those isolated and vulnerable territories would be essential to serving the well-being of those territories and the legitimacy of the contemporary British Empire as a whole.

This paradox does not admit to an easy solution. It is easy for bureaucrats at the UN to fume at the continued existence of the British Empire as a seeming anachronism in contemporary times, and to think that any imperial territory that the British control is, ab initio, illegitimate and unworthy of continuance of the respect of its claims. Yet when the local people of Gibraltar and other places have been given the ability to voice their opinions, the tallying of their legitimate voices and expressed position matches and sometimes surpasses the levels of fraudulent one-party states in propping up the legitimacy of ruling dictators who seek reelection until death and long past decrepitude. It is easy for nations which desire to devour scattered British colonial possessions to project their own imperialism onto the British and to assume that because their own rule over the settlers of Gibraltar or other places is not desired that the British imperialism must be equally coercive in nature to that which they would wish on these territories and the domination and even extermination of their culture. That this view is incorrect does not even enter into the thinking of such people. One wonders what structure could provide with the demonstration of the essential popularity of the British Empire while making the basis of consensual rule on which it now rests more obvious and plain, and that is a task that should be of great interest on both imperial and international levels.