Prince George’s Birth Stirs Up Anti-Monarchy Vitriol in Scottish Separatist Campaign

Some Scots nationalists are breaking ranks, vowing that no King George will ever rule Scotland again.

When the Duchess of Cambridge, the former Kate Middleton, began sporting a baby bump last year, one thing was certain: in approximately nine months’ time, the royal family would receive another bump—the bump in approval ratings that always accompanies a royal birth, wedding, or even death.  What no one predicted was the bumps the birth would create in the road to Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum.  Nothing unites Britons as much as royalty, and in the exuberance over the birth of Prince George last month Britons, at least in England, haven’t felt so united in their love of the institution of the monarchy since George’s paternal grandmother never came out of the other end of that French tunnel back in 1997.  So the royal birth was already a minefield for Scottish nationalists, whose relations with the throne have been at best ambivalent since the kingdoms of England and Scotland merged to become the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707.  So far, they have tried to appeal to Scots that they can love, and keep, the royal family while still seeking independence.  But the head of the pro-independence “Yes Scotland” referendum campaign threw that strategy under the bus this week by launching a war of words on the British Crown.

Dennis Canavan, a former independent Labour Party M.S.P. (member of Scottish Parliament), heads Yes Scotland, charged by the ruling Scottish National Party (S.N.P.) with convincing Scots to vote for independence in a referendum planned for next year.  Canavan’s ostensible boss, Alex Salmond, who is S.N.P. leader and Scotland’s First Minister (i.e. premier), had been reassuring voters that much that they cherish will remain the same: an independent Scotland would use the British pound (at least until it makes sense to adopt the euro on its own), stay in the European Union (E.U.) (though precedent is unclear on this) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and keep Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state.

Dennis Canavan says “yes!” to independence but not to the royal family.

But Canavan told a newspaper interviewer on July 29th that the monarchy was “an affront to democracy and a complete anachronism in modern 21st-century democracy,” adding, “As to the possibility of another King George, it is important to remember that true democracy is based on the sovereignty of the people rather than the sovereignty of any monarch.”  Canavan favors a second referendum, if the first is successful, to ask if Scots want to keep the monarchy.  This put a lot of daylight between him and Salmond.  But it also threatened to sow wariness among ordinary Scots who are motivated more by the desire for more home rule and prosperity than by any Irish-republican-type anti-English animosity and who would much rather become a fully independent Commonwealth realm, like Canada or New Zealand, than an ordinary, bland republic cast apart from the Commonwealth.

Her Majesty may live to see her dominions dwindle yet again.

In addition to the United Kingdom, whoever sits on the English throne is also head of state of the 15 other Commonwealth realms, which are mainly Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a host of medium to small Caribbean and South Pacific nations, the most prominent of which are Papua New Guinea and Jamaica.  The Queen is on all their stamps and money, and their sovereignty, in theory, rests with her legitimacy and that of the throne on which she sits.  Though she rarely visits these dominions, their Parliaments need to be ceremonially opened and closed each year by a viceroy (called a governor-general).  (Even Australian states and Canadian provinces and territories use, as their heads of state, viceregal governors and lieutenant governors, respectively.)  The Queen also has certain constitutional powers, such as the ability to dissolve Dominion parliaments or tinker with other workings of government.  By an unwritten agreement among these actually very de facto independent democracies, she never will.  Her role is decorative only.  But it is a decoration that men and women of Canavan’s political stripe find ugly.

The British Commonwealth today

In the Scottish political landscape, the local, Scottish branches of the U.K.’s three main parties—the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and Labour—are all pro-unionist (not counting a rogue Labour for Independence faction).  Scotland’s ruling S.N.P. has had to wrangle with its smaller uneasy pro-independence allies, the Scottish Socialist Party (S.S.P.) and Scottish Green Party, which are republican—just as he has had to wrangle with them over questions like NATO and the euro (the pacifist, decentralist Greens dislike both).  Now it seems he can’t even keep his inner circle on message.

Alex Salmond

And he needs to: support for Scottish independence hovers around 35-36%, a four-point drop from Ocober 2012.  (Ironically, Scottish independence is a more popular idea in England than in Scotland itself.)  Unless he can push those numbers up, it will make a mockery of his avowed plan to follow the strategy used in Quebec in the mid-1990s, when a separatist campaign raised poll numbers from less than a third to a near-victory in 1995, with those wanting to stay in Canada prevailing with only 50.58%.  Right now, Britons are baby-mad, and the baby they’re mad over is, inconveniently for Salmond, English.  (Well, a mix of German and Greek, actually, but never mind all that.)

In Wales, separatists face a similar problem.  The leading Welsh independentist party, Plaid Cymru, formed a coalition government there in 2007 but was turfed out by Labour in the 2011 elections.  Its attempts at a comeback have been hobbled by the accession to the party leadership the following year by Leanne Wood, an ardent pacifist, socialist, and republican who was once ejected from the Welsh Assembly chamber when she referred to Queen Elizabeth II as “Mrs. Windsor.”  And her equally republican party president, Jillian Evans, has raised eyebrows by appearing at events alongside violent radicals like Byddin Rhyddid Cymru, the Free Wales Army.

Jillian Evans speaking last September while the Free Wales Army wave their flags nearby.

Meanwhile, back north of Hadrian’s Wall, it should be noted that while the Windsors’ doings can affect politicking in Edinburgh, Scottish politics can influence royal matters as well.  In the weeks and months leading up to Prince George’s birth, and in the days of waiting afterward when his name had not yet been announced, odds-makers in London’s betting shops were—correctly, as it turned out—giving best odds to George, the name of the current monarch’s father (George VI) and grandfather (George V).  The next most likely names, according to the bookies, were James and Arthur.  Though it is one of the current Prince of Wales’s middle names, Arthur is a tricky one, since deciding whether a new monarch would be Arthur I or Arthur II would mean taking a position on whether the first King Arthur was mythical.  But James was even dicier.  Recall that James II of England, who was also James VII of Scotland, was deposed by his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange in the anti-Catholic “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.  This ushered in a long period of “Jacobite” rebellion in the Scottish Highlands to try to get James and his House of Stuart restored to the throne—if not of England, at least of Scotland.  This unrest paved the way for the merger of the two kingdoms as the (United) Kingdom of Great Britain under James II’s daughter Queen Anne, who was raised Protestant, unlike her father, and whom Scots remember as the last reigning Stuart.  Childless, Anne was succeeded upon her death by a newly installed House of Hanover in 1714 with the accession, through parliamentary fiat and palace intrigue, of—wait for it—George I.  This is surely what Dennis Canavan had in mind when he swore bitterly last week that no “King George” would ever again rule Scotland.  And the Windsors are smart enough, as a referendum on Scottish independence looms, to dwell more on the glories of the first George than the bitter fall of the last James.

Who ever said the past was past?

James II ... or was it James VII?  Well, James the Last, that’s for sure.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

[This article modified on Aug. 5, 2013, to correct misstatements regarding Canadian viceroys and the role of Queen Anne.  Thanks to Brian Cowan for alerting me to these points.  Any remaining errors are my own.]

Prince William Lands in the Middle of a New Cold War over the Falklands

Oh, dear, do we really have to have the Falklands War all over again?

Two months before the thirtieth anniversary of the brief naval conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands, the issue of conflicting territorial claims has arisen again.  The catalyst for the latest chapter in the Falklandic saga is Britain’s decision to station Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, second in line to the throne, in the South Atlantic archipelago colony as part of his military service.  Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, pointed to the fact that William has been photographed in uniform on his deployment, referred to his arrival as a deliberately provocative “militarization” of the Falklands by the British, and compared him to a conquistador.  Coming amidst growing British exploration of oil reserves in the South Atlantic, William’s deployment has become the occasion for a reassertion of Argentina’s claim to the islands they call the Islas Malvinas.

Prince William dressed like a search-and-rescue pilot or,

as Argentina sees it, as a conquistador

However, it is not clear that it was a deliberate provocation.  More likely, no one in the U.K.’s Foreign Office or at Buckingham Palace considers Argentina’s claims anything except a nuisance that can be safely ignored.  For the most part, they are right (and certainly they probably never predicted that William’s antipodean stint would be more controversial than his younger brother Prince Harry’s combat deployment to Afghanistan).  Argentina is nonetheless now planning to bring the Falklands dispute before the United Nations, though Fernández has ruled out her country seeking a military solution.

Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

What is at the root of the dispute?  The Falklands, a remote windswept territory not far from the Antarctic Circle, were uninhabited until the modern period.  The French established the first settlement, Port Louis, in 1764, and two years later the British claimed the islands, unaware that the French were already in there.  In 1767, France sold the Falklands to the Spain, which placed it under their colonial administration based in Buenos Aires, in what later became Argentina.  In 1770, Spanish forces expelled the British settlers from their Falklands settlement at Port Egmont, nearly bringing the two kingdoms to war—this near the end of a long century during which the Spanish and British empires battled each other on various fronts for global naval supremacy.  The settlers were allowed back, but the British pulled out militarily in 1774 as they concentrated their naval strength in preparing for a looming American Revolution.  However, Britain still asserted a claim on the islands—as did the Spanish, when they departed the Falklands in 1811.  In 1820, four years after Argentina’s declaration of independence, a Connecticut-born naval mercenary named David Jewett was swept off course to land on the once-again-uninhabited archipelago and raised the Argentine flag, claiming the Falklands for his employers, the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, as the young fledgling nation governed from Buenos Aires was then known.  After a United States warship destroyed a new Argentine settlement in 1831 and declared the Falklands to be a no-man’s-land, Argentine and British merchants and other settlers gradually moved back and lived side by side in the Falklands until the Argentine settlement was wiped out in an attack by “creole” and Indian underlings who had been armed by American seal-hunters.  By the time the British established the archipelago’s first permanent colony in 1840, which grew and throve, there were no Argentinians left.

Incidentally, the Falklands aren’t the only example of Argentina’s overextended borders.  In 1985, Pope John Paul II had to intervene to settle a territorial dispute between Argentina and Chile over three minuscule Tierra del Fuego islets, Picton, Nueva, and Lennox (Chile got them), and Argentina’s claims to the south do not stop at the Falklands but include also the even more remotely southern South Georgia and South Sandwich archipelagoes (parts of the Falkland Island Dependencies that were eventually made a separate overseas U.K. territory) and even all the way to the South Pole via a sizable triangular slice of the Antarctic pie—in confict with other claims and also in defiance of international agreements that the Antarctic mainland belongs to no nation.

The official Argentine version of its own land and marine territories

The issue of sovereignty over the Falklands lay dormant until Argentina initiated ultimately fruitless U.N.-moderated talks in the 1960s.  In 1982, the neo-Perónist fascist-style military junta that had taken over Argentina whipped up nationalist feeling by invading and claiming not only the Falklands but the even South Georgia and South Sandwich islands as well.  The whole affair ended as anyone could have predicted: the U.K. easily recaptured the islands after a brief war.  There were about 900 casualties, most of them Argentinian.

Interestingly, during and after the war there was some sympathy for Argentina among students and leftists in the U.S. and Europe.  There are probably two reasons for this.  First, the deeply unpopular right-wing Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of the U.K. at the time, and it was easy to assume that she must be on the wrong side of any issue—especially in South America, where she was cosy with Chile’s blood-soaked dictator, Augusto Pinochet.  Second, the U.S. was at this time escalating a series of brutal and messy anti-Communist proxy wars in Central America as part of Ronald Reagan’s Cold War version of the Monroe Doctrine.  Doubtless this contributed to the climate in which Argentina challenged the British, and for many American leftists a pro-Argentinian position fit their existing political narrative.  This despite the fact that the Argentine junta was in some ways more right-wing even than Thatcher or Reagan, and despite the fact that the vast majority, if not every man jack, of the Falklands population preferred being part of the U.K.  In the 1980s, Latin Americans had many legitimate grievances against U.S. and western European foreign policy.  But the Falklands issue was not one of them.

Flag of the Falkland Islands

An interesting parallel situation is Gibraltar, a two-and-a-half-square-mile peninsular rock attached to the Spanish mainland, with a town built atop it.  It was captured by the British in 1704 during the War of Spanish Succession and formally ceded to Britain by Spain at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.  British sovereignty over this mostly self-governing territory has over the centuries been a thorn in the Spanish side, resulting in several failed military attempts to retake it and, more recently, frequent diplomatic fusses over it as an anachronistic remnant of European internal colonialism.  Its 29,000 residents are a mix of different Mediterranean ethnicities and cultures, speaking a Spanish creole called Llanito alongside the official English.  In 2002, the Spanish and U.K. governments agreed, after long negotiations, to share sovereignty over the territory, pending a local vote on the question.  But in the ensuing referendum, with a voter turnout of 87.9%, more than 98% of Gibraltarians rejected the plan in favor of the status quo.  (Usually, one never sees such election results unless there’s some dictatorship cooking the numbers, but there wasn’t.)  So there the matter stands.  The British government also opposes integrating it more closely into the U.K. (for example, making it an English county like the Isle of Wight, as some Gibraltarians would like), since of course that would only needlessly antagonize Spain, and has also said that independence, should Gibraltarians ever desire it, would require Spain’s consent.  In any case, there is no independence movement to speak of in the colony.

Gibraltar

Spain’s (very Argentina-like) noise-making over Gibraltar puts it on pretty thin ice given its own position on Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish municipalities located on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco, which are the last European territorial possessions on the African mainland.  Along with scattered islands off the coast, they are collectively known as the Plazas de Soberanía (literally, Sovereign Territories) and used to be effectively submerged by the surrounding colony of Spanish Morocco, which included the northern tip of what is now Morocco, including Tangier.  In 1956, Spanish Morocco and French Morocco were decolonized simultaneously and merged as today’s Kingdom of Morocco.  But Morocco claims that the deal should have included Ceuta and Melilla and possibly the other islands as well.  Spain points out that the territories were never part of Spanish Morocco per se and—unlike, say, Tangier—have always been Spanish settlements, with even today no significant indigenous Arab populations (though there are small minorities of Berbers and Jews).  Polls consistently show residents of the territories overwhelmingly in favor of remaining part of Spain, and the Spanish government and public on the mainland tends to agree.   Morocco never fails to point out Spain’s hypocrisy in claiming Ceuta and Melilla while also disputing British rule in Gibraltar.

In 2002, Moroccan forces occupied Isla de Perejil, an uninhabited rocky islet between Gibraltar and Morocco which was claimed by both Spain and Morocco.  Within a week, the Spanish military had retaken the island without resistance and held some Moroccan forces prisoner.  Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State, successfully mediated the dispute, and today the Isla de Perejil remains one of the few examples of an internationally recognized no-man’s-land. After that, Morocco has had not much appetite to press the issue of the other islands or Ceuta and Melilla.

The flag of Ceuta

But back to the South Atlantic: the Falklands, like Gibraltar, have no interest in independence, since they already feel more than a little vulnerable.  The 3,000 or so Falkland Islanders are overwhelming British in descent.  (There are some Latin American immigrants, mostly Chilean, but no descendants of the original Argentine settlements.)  Falklanders were granted full U.K. citizenship just after the war, and they even enjoy membership in the European Union (though they use their own currency, the Falkland Islands pound).  The latest claims from President Fernández that the British are practicing old-style colonialism in the Falklands is a bit far-fetched.  The British have already said that they would entertain the idea of independence or return to Argentine rule if Falklanders wished it (though, honestly, why in God’s name would they?).  The British government’s generous position on Gibraltar, its relinquishment of Hong Kong to the world’s most brutal dictatorship twelve years ago, and now its grudgingly permitting Scotland—Scotland!—to hold a binding referendum on independence (see my recent post on this) indicate that, almost more than any other country in the world, the U.K., despite its often bloody colonial past, is now deeply unwilling to rule any territory against the will of its people.  The jingoists in Argentina have never come up with an answer to that one, and I doubt they ever will.