Rock On: The strange and telling struggle over Gibraltar.

Gibraltar is one of the last outposts of the British Empire, and the Tony Blair government is proposing to decolonize it. Not by handing independence to the natives, though, as has been the practice everywhere else in the modern age, but by ceding all or some sovereignty to Spain, itself a colonial power with residual outposts in the Canary Islands and Morocco. If they were allowed self- determination, the people of Gibraltar would choose virtually unanimously to stay British. But Britain would like the support of Spain against the Franco-German bloc driving the new and mightily busy European Union in Brussels, and Gibraltar has therefore become a handy bargaining chip in other peoples' political poker. What is happening today to the Gibraltarians is small stuff in the black annals of betrayal. No trials or deportations, no shooting. But the cynicism could hardly be plainer or more ominous for the European future. Justice and democracy are of no account.

Gibraltar consists of a few square miles at the end of a peninsula on the Bay of Algeciras, joined to Spain proper at the frontier town of La Linea. Its most striking feature is a magnificent rock, proud in its setting, with sheer white cliffs and intermittent levels of wild green scrub. The Rock of Gibraltar -- that's a phrase which releases the emotions and signifies something specially British, something solid and permanent. The British captured it in 1704, and Spain formally signed it away nine years later in the Treaty of Utrecht, though attempting twice to recapture it afterwards. In one cemetery are buried sailors from Nelson's fleet killed in 1805 at the battle of Trafalgar. The Rock and its harbor command the Western approaches to the Mediterranean. In 1940 Hitler hoped to send the Wehrmacht through Spain to occupy it and so close British communications to the Middle East and India. Had General Franco agreed, Britain might well have lost the war. The Germans regularly bombed Gibraltar's naval base, an asset then as it is now.

The 30,000 Gibraltarians are mostly descendants of immigrants from all over the Mediterranean. Many have Spanish names and are at their ease speaking either Spanish or English. The rich among them own villas in Spain. Diverse though they may be in origin, one and all are British in sentiment and culture, passionately so. They stood by Britain during the war, they feel, and Britain should stand by them now. In the usual British manner, the colony is self-governing, with a parliament, political parties, and an elected chief minister, Peter Caruana, a highly capable lawyer in his forties. They have adapted well to the postwar world. About 150 cruise liners put in every year, and tourists pour into the duty-free shops of Main Street and Irish Town. Gibraltar is also a center of financial services.

Down the years, most Spanish people would willingly have accepted the odd status of Gibraltar. But towards the end of his life, and by then an out-of-touch dictator uncertain of his successor, Franco sought popularity by turning Gibraltar into a nationalist cause. In 1969 he closed the frontier at La Linea, and Gibraltarians had to live under blockade. After his death, supposedly democratic Spain continued the harassment. Today Spain haggles over control of air traffic to Gibraltar's airport, and over Gibraltar's international telephone code; and holds up for hours on end vehicles crossing at La Linea. The Spanish government accuses the cruise liners of smuggling, and the financial services of money-laundering. All this petty spite has fired in Gibraltarians patriotism and contempt for Spain.

Spain has brilliantly exploited membership in the EU to obtain more than its fair share of subsidies and the slush money known euphemistically as "structural funds." One of the EU's most extraordinary arrangements is the Common Fishing Policy, whereby Spain, with four-fifths of the total fishing fleet, has unrestricted access to British territorial waters. This has created massive ill-will, ...