GIBRALTAR
Gibraltar and the Mediterranean. By G. T. Garratt. (Cape. ros. 6d.) Tuts Iok falls into two equal and opposite parts : a clear, painstaking, cautious and unsensational history of Gibraltar from its earliest times to 1914, and a highly coloured and frankly partisan review, in which fact, conjecture and fiction are inextricably blended, of the problems of policy relating to Gibraltar and the Mediterranean in the past few years. Mr. Garratt remarks that no history of Gibraltar has been written for some seventy years. It is significant that the study of this " outpost of Empire " should now have been taken up by a representative of the far Left. Mr. Garratt's general method of approach is typical enough to be interesting and instructive. In dealing with the fifteen years before the War, he takes what may be called an extreme anti-imperialist attitude, quoting several times the writings of E. D. Morel. On the other hand, when he reaches the present day, his attitude is that of a whole- hearted imperialist, and his only regret is that the British Government no longer lives up to the once favourite quota- tion of the jingoes :
" Come the three-quarters of the world in arms And we shall shock them. . . ."
The story of Gibraltar does not differ essentially from that of many other of our minor overseas possessions. It was acquired, more or less at haphazard, to meet a strategic need In time of war, and rapidly developed into a new and permanent strategic base. That no interest was taken in its few inhabitants goes without saying, for down to the nine- teenth century little enough interest was taken in the welfare even of the British soldiers who formed its garrison. Gibraltar has been less troubled than almost any other British possession by the embarrassing presence of a " native " population. Indeed, it imports a small army of Spanish daily workers from across the frontier—a situation which Mr. Garratt regards with anxiety. But a stoppage of the labour supply is so much the smallest of the problems with which a hostile Spain would confront Gibraltar, that it scarcely seems of serious account.
The lesson of the eighteenth century was that " Gibraltar was impregnable so long as England still held command of the sea, and without that command it was valueless." That lesson holds good. The future of Gibraltar is bound up with the future of sea power ; and the uncertainties which surround one also weigh on the other. If aircraft and submarine have made naval bases valueless, then the fate of Gibraltar is sealed whatever the policy of the British Government. The other fundamental point is the attitude of Spain. Mr. Garratt, who Is careful never to err on the side of optimism, stresses the
fact that the possession of Gibraltar always gives a handle to anti-British feeling in Spain ; and he appears to regard the army officer and the landowner as irrevocably anti-British.
Hence Spain and Spanish Morocco are always a potential base for an enemy Power. This picture seems to be rather strongly coloured by Mc. Garratt's outspoken partisanship in the civil war ; and in all his prognostications he appears to treat Gibraltar merely as a passive target, and to ignore the possi- bility of counter-attack in any direction.
Mr. Garratt has made a very careful study of British policy in regard to the Mediterranean during the past five years, and, like many other people, finds it difficult to under- stand. He does not—except in occasional outbursts of pique— believe that deliberate duplicity was at work. But he does not readily reconcile himself to the simple, if unedifying, explanation that there were two policies at work, and that the Government never wholeheartedly made the choice between them ; the policy of regarding Italy as a serious menace to British power in the Mediterranean, and of doing everything to weaken her, and the policy of regarding Italy as a potential partner whose claims, however embarrassing at the moment, should be satisfied as far as vital British (and French) interests allowed. There was—and is—more than Mr. Garratt is pre- pared to allow in favour of postponing the choice as long as possible.
Nor does Mr. Garratt escape inconsistencies of his own. He frequently speaks with contempt of Italian power, and makes it clear that in his view—even in Spain—it is Germany that matters, not Italy. Yet one of the outmoded assumptions which he accuses the British Government of making is that Italy is only a second-rate Power. He alternately attacks us for our meanness and blindness in not turning a more sym- pathetic ear to Italy's claims, or for our complaisance in allowing her to help herself. Moreover, he makes the task of understanding British policy more difficult by himself making a number of certainly false assumptions. It was not common knowledge as early as 1934 that Signor Mussolini intended to conquer Abyssinia. It is certainly untrue that the British Government " confidently expected that a military parade into Ethiopia would be sufficient to end the affair." It is well known that, almost up to the eve of the Abyssinian collapse, the British and French military experts exaggerated the hazards of the campaign, and believed a rapid Italian success to be out of the question. Similarly, I do not think that there is any evidence that the Foreign Office in 1936 expected the Spanish civil war to be over in a few weeks. Whenever the Catholic Church comes into the picture Mr. Garratt indulges in wild exaggerations, witness the statement that the Lateran Treaty of 1929 " virtually places the resources of the Church at the disposal of the Fascist Government." Thus a certain lack of balance, and a constant eagerness to counteract national self- complacency by loading all the dice against his own country, mar what is in many ways a sincere and well-informed study of a highly complex problem.
It is perhaps in the handling of strategic issues that Mr. Garratt's weaknesses are most apparent. Strategy is nowadays an extremely technical business, and Mr. Garratt has—and makes—no claim to possess technical qualifications even of an elementary kind. Moreover, official pronouncements on ques- tions of strategy are necessarily, as Mr. Garratt points out, " compounded with a certain economy of truth "; and the diffi- culty of intelligent discussion of such questions in ignorance of most of the vital factors is one of the serious problems of the democratic control of foreign policy. Mr. Garratt seems too often content, when in doubt, to fall back on two assump- tions : first, that anything done by any British Government in the last fifteen years was wrong unless it can be proved to have been right ; and, secondly, that any statement of any British spokesman is false if it conflicts with any report or rumour which happens to have reached Mr. Garratt's ears from other sources. Thus, when Lord Cranborne said in 1937, in answer to a question in the House of Commons, that the guns at Ceuta were of inferior calibre to those at Gibraltar, Mr. Garratt appears to have drawn two conclusions: (a) That the state- ment itself was an admission that the guns were directed
against Gibraltar, since otherwise the comparison would have been obviously meaningless ; and (b) that the statement about
the calibre of the guns was obviously false. Starting from such premises, an agile mind like Mr. Garratt's can prove anything. But not all readers may be agile enough to follow
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