Ceuta and Melilla: Territorial rights or people's rights
Principles that were previously sacrosanct may be at the expense of new considerations. A Spanish writer, Sergio del Molino, in one of his last books, illustrates the territorial exceptions, or Spanish islets and vice versa, of Spain in France, Portugal and Morocco and with a non-neighbour, the United Kingdom. And far from seeing historical failures in these exceptions, territorial frustrations because something was not complete and realised, and thus did not reach its natural culmination, he sees them as exceptions that make the world more varied, picturesque, unforeseen.
The world does not necessarily have to be geometrical, closed, homogeneous, monistic. Diversity, plurality, multiculturalism, respect for minorities are values that are now more valid and projected, and which can go so far as to contradict the importance of the centrality and protagonism of the State as absolute owner of the whole of the territorial space conceived as a "continuum". History sometimes has the last word.
Time always consolidates rights and gives firmness to their acquisition. The principle of acquired rights is a fundamental legal principle that provides legal certainty. Allal al-Fassi, the founder of the Istiqlal Party and leader of the emancipation of Morocco with King Mohammed V, defended against all odds the territorial reintegration of Morocco in one fell swoop, and not in a fraction as it finally came about. First the French protectorate, then the Spanish, Tangier, Tarfaya strip, Sidi Ifni and the Sahara. It so happens that these reintegrations or retrocession of territories that left their control or full sovereignty were recovered during the same 20th century. They share another condition, none of them having a significant but very minority and recent population component. None of them would have required a referendum under any conditions. The exception is the Western Sahara owing to historical circumstances which have accumulated over very few years.
These territories are therefore the product of colonialism. However, Ceuta and Melilla predate the birth of colonialism by a long way. Not so the Chafarinas Islands, which are fully inserted in the colonial evolution, Spain is ahead of France in its conquest in the 19th century, which the UN ignored.
The right to self-determination is limited by another right, not a minor one, which is that of territorial integrity. The right to self-determination originated in Europe and was promoted by US President Thomas Woodrow Wilson after the end of World War I, and was theorised by Stalin, the Austro-Marxists Bauer, Adler and others, and incorporated into the nascent constitution of the USSR. This law was given new life by the process of dismembering the former Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, which were dominated by de facto partitions, thanks to the ethnicist euphoria of the time, negotiated or recognised by third parties.
The United Nations has only regulated the departure of colonised countries from the cities, establishing the procedure for unresolved colonial problems or survival. Chapter XI of the United Nations Charter embodies a "Declaration on Non-Self-Governing Territories". Since 1946, the General Assembly has maintained a list of Non-Self-Governing Territories which has varied since then; the list now stands at 17. It is very important to know which are these 17 territories in order to be able to gauge the importance and operability for the purpose of the list: to achieve independence.
These are: American Samoa, Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Montserrat, St Helena, French Polynesia, Guam, New Caledonia, Pitcairn Islands, Tokelau, Gibraltar, Turks and Caicos Islands, Western Sahara.
The population ranges from 567,000 in the Sahara (data from the time) followed by 267,918 in French Polynesia to 48 in Pitcairn, we are talking about medium sized towns and villages. How can they be listed as territories pending decolonization?
What could have happened for these tiny entities, which are difficult to manage on their own, to become candidates for sovereign nations and, even more surprisingly, to remain under this condition and in this wait? It could well be called anachronistic and extemporaneous if it were not for the absurdity and folly of it.
Ceuta and Melilla were not on the colonial list, but in the future, given an eventual crisis of sovereignty, the idea of self-determination and the will of the population would act as a kind of jurisprudence of the United Nations or International Law.
The birth of the United Nations at the end of the Second World War is also that of the new emancipated or emancipating nations. Gathered together in a text with a bias and quasi-sacred edges, not only will justice be done to facts, cases, conflicts and needs, but great principles will be written and a supra-historical will proclaimed, with a reference to universal justice, absolutely broken down and without any interference from the reality of the historical process, as the list of the 17 is in charge of demonstrating.
It is very difficult for us to find in the 17 Non-Self-Governing Territories interest in the design that the UN has envisaged for them, which does not seem to reflect the gratitude and opportunity of their constituents. One of them, New Caledonia, recently did not thank them for their efforts, preferring to remain anchored to France.
Gibraltar did the same in 2002; they want to remain British. The Malvinas would not risk ceasing to be British and so would everyone else, except for the Sahara, where it now seems certain that the right to self-determination as initially conceived is not relevant either, as it could not even be fulfilled as envisaged vis-à-vis Spain.
Although the subjects of international law are the territories, and the 17 non-self-governing territories are called such, the exercise of these rights is carried out by their inhabitants, the citizen is the holder - who exercises - the right.
The United Nations has not provided for any solution other than through the inhabitants. In the case of the Sahara, it has been seen that the anti-colonialist joys of half a century ago were the product of the anti-colonial clamour of that time. It was a question of reversing a problem, turning the colonial situation around and inaugurating a new historical phase with the participation of the countries that had agreed to its decolonisation: the already emancipated countries.
It happens that the UN loses sight of historicity or the historical frameworks for which it provides and regulates procedures, as well as the evolution of political, cultural, ideological, psychological or moral patterns. None of this is regulated by the UN, which disciplines the practice of aspiring states as it should be. Not the fluctuating pulse of societies and citizens.
We cannot ignore the gap between the dead letter of the UN resolutions and the changing reality and even the absolute mutation of vast general clamours that the international organisation believed it was interpreting and, indeed, did interpret.
There was a time in the past century when the United Kingdom, on realising that the military strategic value of the Rock of Gibraltar had declined considerably in relation to its high maintenance and the advantages it provided, had the idea of negotiating its return or a new model of domination. Spanish patriotism, which was exalted by Franco's government with the closure of the border, not only eliminated the possibility that Britain seemed to be sponsoring, but also made the Gibraltarian population uneasy with Spain forever. Headlines of the final decision of its future.
Ceuta and Melilla have a growing population of Moroccan origin who are also Spanish. Spaniards who do not form part of the country's hegemonic culture, with Christian and European roots. They really are a minority, but are ceasing, if not already, to be in those cities. They even hold high positions of institutional representation. A large part of the elite Spanish troops established in these cities are made up of soldiers of Moroccan origin.
Being a minority is always hard, even if socially it was at a less developed stage than the majority, and the idea of offence and discrimination is therefore real and must be felt, but perhaps they coexist with other feelings, as these do not necessarily always go in one direction but can be ambivalent.
It is very possible that even from a position of inferiority, which formal and legal equality does not make it disappear, they also feel Spanish. And they should know that the Spanish passport is a European passport and that the Spanish language is one of the most widely spoken in the world. They should also realise that, in addition to the disadvantages, the advantages are not to be ignored; in the end, Spain is also their country, as it is for those who have arrived much later than them and who have no previous links with Spain.
The fact that the majority population of these two cities will be, if not already, of Muslim culture and Moroccan origin does not guarantee anything about the future, but it is important because they would be the ones to decide the future of these places of Spanish sovereignty. In case there were debates or controversies about their status quo (or sovereignty).
It does not seem that, if the population of these cities were given the opportunity, the population of Muslim origin, which is increasingly distant from that origin, would decide to stop being Spanish, because in any case, how they experience it, they are also Spanish. But the fact is that there are (or will be) perhaps a million nationalised Moroccans who are Spanish, with less roots and ties than they are. The solutions could lie in dual nationality rather than in shared sovereignty. Without totally excluding the possibility that the population of European origin could also benefit from the two passports, in order to reinforce the idea of community between the two populations.
Dual nationality is based on people, on the idea of original personal ownership, more in line with today's world, while shared sovereignty refers to States as constitutive sources of law. This is the distinction between personal and state-territorial quality that we maintain.