Gibraltarians’ attitudes towards Brexit and the Gibraltar-Spain frontier

Abstract

The current border regime on the Spain-Gibraltar frontier has been underpinned since 1985 by the EU's freedom of movement. With Brexit, this has been called into question. This paper theorises the border as imbricated in everyday life, especially in a small territory such as Gibraltar. Therefore, the potential disruption to the border regime has potential social consequences for Gibraltarians. This article documents the results of a 2018 survey of Gibraltarians' attitudes and feelings toward the frontier in the interim between the 2016 Brexit referendum and the planned departure of the UK (and Gibraltar) from the EU in 2019. In it, we first argue that virtually all respondents felt that a change in the border regime would lead to shifts in community cohesion and identity. Second, we argue that generational differences within Gibraltar are productive of variegated attitudes towards Brexit and the frontier, but not in a straightforward fashion. Rather, generational differences are complicated by the dynamism of Gibraltar's population composition.

Bottom-up Geopolitics and Everyday Brexits at the Gibraltar-Spain Border

“…The younger generations in Gibraltar increasingly speak exclusively English (Canessa 2019;Carbajosa 2015). Research among almost 300 residents of Gibraltar shows that the Spanish government is still considered 'the enemy' and Gibraltarians closely follow the Spanish government's crackdown on Catalan independentist movements as a measure of how the government would approach Gibraltar (Dittmer et al 2019). Or, according to one respondent, they use the term 'fascias' (fascists) to talk about the Spanish, distinguishing them from a Gibraltarian identity which has been built around democratic ideals (Interview with Gibraltar resident, July 2018) (see also Martínez Del Campo, Canessa, and Orsini 2019).…”