Gibraltar: A Dagger in the Spine of Spain?

ISBN-13: 9781845196134 / Angielski / Miękka / 2013 / 320 str.

Gareth Stockey

Opis

The "problem" of Gibraltar has been a constant source of diplomatic tension between Britain and Spain for more than 300 years. Franco himself described the Rock as a "dagger in the spine of Spain," and it was during his dictatorship that Spain's diplomatic campaign to recover Gibraltar reached its height with the closing of the frontier in 1969. Given this background, it has long been assumed by historians and commentators that relations between Gibraltar and its Spanish neighbor have also been strained. Gareth Stockey rejects this assumption, and demonstrates that relations across the frontier had in fact been cordial for most of the period of British occupation of the Rock. Rather than seeing the frontier as a physical entity - separating Gibraltar from its Spanish neighbor--the frontier is viewed as a process, through which the communities on either side of it fostered intimate social, cultural, political, and economic links. This book, the first in any language to provide an in-depth local study of Gibraltar-Spanish relations, constitutes a major critique of accepted wisdom on the so-called Gibraltar problem. It also sheds light on a tempestuous period of Spanish history and the early foreign policy of the Franco regime.