The Allied victory over Germany in the Second World War, like that in the First, left the Mediterranean unsettled. After Greece emerged from its civil war with a pro-western government, there were ever louder rumbles in Cyprus, where the movement calling for enôsis, union with Greece, was gathering pace again. Precisely because the Greeks sided with the West, and because Turkey had kept out of the war, during the late 1940s the United States began to see the Mediterranean as an advance position in the new struggle against the expanding power of the Soviet Union. The explicit theme was the defence of democracy against Communist tyranny.1 Stalin’s realism had prevented him from supporting Communist insurgency in Greece, but he was keen to find ways of gaining free access to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles. In London and Washington, the fear that Soviet allies would establish themselves on the shores of the Mediterranean remained real, since the partisan leader in Yugoslavia, Tito, had played the right cards during the last stages of the war, even winning support from the British. Moreover, the Italians had lost Zadar along with the naval base at Kotor and chunks of Dalmatia they had greedily acquired during the war, while Albania, after an agonizing period of first Italian and then German occupation, had recovered its independence under the Paris-educated Communist leader Enver Hoxha, whose uncompromising stance was to bring his country into ever-greater isolation.
When he took power, Hoxha imagined that his country would form part of a brotherly band of socialist nations, alongside Tito’s renascent Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Close ties with the Yugoslavs were sealed by economic pacts which reveal Tito’s hope of drawing Albania into the Yugoslav federation. Hoxha had other aspirations, and in his view Albania’s right to defend every square inch of the national territory extended into the waters off the Albanian coast: the Corfu Channel, long used as a waterway linking Greece to the Adriatic, was mined to prevent foreign incursions. Britain decided to send warships through the channel, asserting its right to police the Mediterranean on behalf of the nations of the world. On 22 October 1946 two British warships passing close to Sarande, an Albanian port north-east of Corfu, struck mines and forty-four sailors were killed.2 Who provided the mines is a controversial question; a subsequent sweep of the channel showed that those that remained in the water were free of rust and newly greased, even though they were not brand new, and there is a strong suspicion that they were laid by Tito’s navy on Hoxha’s behalf. The Albanians lacked any boats suitable for mine-laying.3 Hoxha made no apologies and pointed his finger at the Greeks, highly unlikely culprits. That was the end of attempts to establish diplomatic relations between Britain and Hoxha’s Albania. On the other hand, Tito took offence at Soviet attempts to treat Yugoslavia as a satellite, denying the Soviet Union the naval bases it craved in Dalmatia.
On paper, British influence in the Mediterranean was still strong: Libya had been taken away from Italy and placed under a British mandate, though Britain, impoverished by the war, was keen to rid itself of the country as soon as possible. The Americans were granted full use of a vast complex of air bases at Wheelus Field, outside Tripoli, meaning that they gained more from Libya than the British – oil exploration began only in the late 1950s.4 But the inability of the British to mould the future of the Mediterranean was most clearly revealed by the crisis in Palestine, where the British mandatory authorities could no longer restrain violence between Jews and Arabs, and British troops were increasingly targeted by extremist factions.5 The American Defense Secretary, James Forrestal, became obsessed by the idea of the Mediterranean as an advance position against the Soviet Union, but he was also obsessed by Palestine, and indeed by the Jews, and argued that American interests in the Mediterranean were being fatally harmed by those in America who were pressing President Truman to support the creation of a Jewish state within Palestine. He took the view that this would alienate others, such as the Arab states, whose cooperation was vital if the United States wished to create naval bases in the Mediterranean. It was clear, too, that Stalin was using Palestine for his own ends, first encouraging insurrection, then, in May 1948, racing the United States to recognize the state of Israel, which was immediately supplied with arms from his satellite Czechoslovakia. Differences over such issues exasperated the president, who sacked Forrestal in 1949; soon afterwards Forrestal, a depressive, took his own life.6
In a Mediterranean setting, the significance of Israel was demographic as well as political. It has been seen how the inhabitants of Jaffa, the largest Arab city in Palestine, scattered even before the city fell to the Haganah, the future army of Israel. The other important port was Haifa, a mixed city of Arabs and Jews, which possessed a population of about 70,000 Arabs at the start of 1948. By the end of the war of independence there were only 4,000 Arabs, at most, left in the city. The circumstances were, inevitably, very confused: some of the Arab leaders gave up the fight early and left in April 1948, demoralizing those who remained behind; the Arab Higher Command seemed to want the Arabs to leave, fearing they could be used as hostages after the British finally left Palestine in May; the Haganah shelled the city, inducing panic and flight under fire to Acre and Beirut. The aim of the bombardment was to push the Arab leaders in Haifa towards a quick surrender. This tough policy was opposed by some Jewish leaders, who argued that the future of the city must be as a joint enterprise of Jews and Arabs – a Jewish delegation went to the Arab quarters of Haifa urging people not to leave, and British military intelligence noted that ‘the Jews have been making extensive efforts to prevent wholesale evacuation, but their propaganda appears to have had very little effect’.7 As news of the evacuation spread, other Arabs began to leave areas on which the Haganah was advancing: most notably Jaffa, but also the towns of the Galilee interior. There was, a Haganah report suggested, a ‘psychosis of flight’ rendered more severe by reports of expulsions from villages in the interior.8
Whereas the Jewish settlers earlier in the twentieth century had been guided by Zionist ideals, most of the later ones were guided by the search for a refuge, before, during and in the wake of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. British restrictions on immigration since 1938 were determined by the relentless opposition of Arab leaders, and made it a difficult refuge to reach. The vehement Arab hostility to a Jewish state was not confined to Palestine itself, and had the curious effect of bolstering the population of Israel, as a new exodus, that of Jews from Arab lands, gathered pace from 1948 onwards. Within a dozen years the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean were heavily concentrated in Israel. In North Africa, the creation of Israel resulted in anti-Jewish riots, leading to a steady exodus of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, though the wealthier and more westernized families often shunned the Middle East for France or Italy. Thus there was a south–north flow of Jews as well as a west–east flow. By 1967 the only major centre of Jewish population in the Mediterranean apart from Israel was southern France, as a result of migration from North Africa. Otherwise, 1,900 years of the Mediterranean diaspora had suddenly been reversed.
It was now that Britain, France and Italy began to lose control over their possessions in the eastern and southern Mediterranean. The Lebanese had already started agitating for independence from France in 1943 (not the best moment), but in 1946 a curious constitution, guaranteeing the rights of both Christians and Muslims, was enacted; with independence came an economic boom, as Beirut, with its westernized ways, became the major port and banking centre in the Arab Levant. In Egypt, the break with the past took a different form: in 1952 a cabal of Arab army officers seized power and King Farouk went into exile, marking the first stage in the dissolution of the mixed society of Alexandria over which his dynasty had presided all too lavishly. Agitation in French and Spanish Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia placed further pressure on the colonial powers. Direct British control was contracting inwards to the line from Gibraltar through Malta to Cyprus and the Suez Canal. This mattered less than it would have done during the war years; India obtained its independence two years after the war ended, and, even with the retention of Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong, the military and political importance of Suez was declining. All this meant that Churchill’s hopes of restoring British mastery over the Mediterranean were becoming irrelevant, with one proviso: that the Soviet Union did not, after all, find allies within the Mediterranean. By 1956 it had done precisely that.
The revolution that overthrew King Farouk aroused new worries. The new Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, began to present himself to the Arab world as the figure who would restore self-respect to the Arab nations (this was accompanied by the standard insistence that they were all ultimately a single pan-Arab nation). Even though Nasser had encouraged behind-the-scenes dialogue with Israel in 1954, neither side trusted the other, and hesitant attempts at rapprochement turned into hostility.9 Britain and France had agreed to withdraw troops from the Canal Zone in 1954, and should not have been greatly surprised by Nasser’s speech in Alexandria in July 1956 announcing the nationalization of the canal; perhaps what disturbed them most was the ranting tone in which he denounced the colonial powers. The British prime minister, Anthony Eden, decided that he faced a ‘Hitler on the Nile’. Behind these fears lay other, global worries: when the United States withdrew its support for the building of the Aswan High Dam, which was supposed to bring prosperity to Egypt, Nasser turned to the Soviet Union. The danger that he might offer his new ally a naval base within the Mediterranean could not be ignored.
The British and the French assumed that the Egyptians would make a mess of running the canal, while the Israelis were increasingly anxious to show that Egyptian bombardment of settlements in the Negev and raids into Israel by Arab fedayin from Egyptian-occupied Gaza must be stopped by force. In October 1956 Nasser built up his army within Gaza, and launched scathing verbal attacks on Israel, threatening to wipe it off the map – thereby raising further his prestige in the Arab world.10 At a secret meeting near Paris in October 1956, the Israeli prime minister, David Ben Gurion, encouraged France and Britain to make common cause against Egypt, setting out some fantastic ideas about restabilizing the Middle East with a friendly Christian Lebanon, a semi-autonomous West Bank under Israeli protection and a British ascendancy in Jordan and Iraq. The British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, thought this was all far too ambitious, and still believed that jaw-jaw was better than war-war, if only Nasser would listen. On the other hand, if there were to be war, then, he insisted, the aims must be ‘the conquest of the Canal Zone and the destruction of Nasser’. If Israel attacked Egypt, the French and British would intervene to protect the canal, giving them the chance to reoccupy what they had lost, but there was no possibility of siding openly with Israel.11
So the scene was set for the great fiasco that announced to the world the end of British and French power within the Mediterranean. Israel attacked Egypt, quickly seizing Gaza and Sinai; British and French troops landed in the Canal Zone, supposedly to protect the canal and separate the belligerents; but President Eisenhower’s disapproval brought the campaign to an early end, and Israel was required to withdraw from Sinai, securing little more than promises of free access up the Red Sea to Eilat (but not through the Suez Canal), and a tacit agreement that fedayin raids encouraged by Egypt would end. Nasser looked stronger than ever, while Eden lasted only a few more months as prime minister. European fears about the maintenance of the canal proved groundless, but the crisis had shaken the old master of the Mediterranean to its core.12 In the next eleven years Soviet influence in Egypt greatly increased, as it did in Syria, which was briefly joined to Egypt in the ‘United Arab Republic’. The USSR provided Nasser with ‘advisers’, while Egyptian invectives against Israel became ever more tasteless, including a host of anti-Semitic cartoons in the government-controlled press.
Nasser’s rhetoric against Israel worked well as a means to assert his dominance in the Arab world, but he became carried away by his own words as crowds throughout the Middle East gathered to acclaim him and denounce Israel. By early summer 1967 he was promising a maritime blockade of Israel, though in the Red Sea, not in the Mediterranean.13 A pre-emptive strike by Israel on 5 June culminated after only six days in the occupation of Gaza, Sinai, the Golan Heights and (after King Hussein of Jordan made the mistake of taking part) the Jordanian parts of Palestine. As a result the Suez Canal was blocked for ten years, becoming the front line of the opposing Israeli and Egyptian armies, which then fought a war of attrition across its banks until the Egyptians launched a surprise attack in October 1973 – the Yom Kippur War – whose aim was not, this time, to ‘throw Israel into the sea’ but, more realistically, to recover Sinai. Despite early successes, the Egyptians were finally pushed back across the canal, and it took four years for serious peace negotiations to begin, following President Sadat’s brave decision to enter the lion’s den and address the Israeli parliament, for which, before long, he paid with his life. After this, the canal was reopened to the shipping of all nations, including at last Israel. But a second result of the Six-Day War was the hardening of Soviet attitudes towards Israel; during the war the Soviet bloc, apart from unpredictable Romania, finally broke off diplomatic relations with Israel, a move designed to win approval within the Arab world and to emphasize that Israel’s friends were the bourgeois capitalist powers of Great Britain, France and, above all, the United States. The Yom Kippur War had, indeed, something of the character of a proxy war between the Soviet Union and the United States: the Soviets supplied large quantities of arms to the Egyptians and Syrians, while the Americans ferried in armaments by way of US bases in the Azores. Further Soviet mischief was created by support for violent Palestinian radicals, some of whom, like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, were comfortably ensconced in Damascus, where they proclaimed a version of Marxist doctrines.
The Soviet entry into Mediterranean politics was not all plain sailing. Stalin had accepted that Italy and Greece would remain in the western sphere, and in 1952 both Greece and Turkey were drawn into the new alliance the United States, Britain and France had created three years earlier, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a misnomer for a body that also included Italy. But NATO came to see the Mediterranean as a front line against Soviet expansion: both France, with its North African empire, and Britain, with its bases in Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus, were Mediterranean powers. And the United States, still present at Wheelus Field in Libya, had its own ideas about how to defend the Mediterranean against Soviet ambitions. In 1952 the US Sixth Fleet visited eight Spanish ports, including Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca, thereby bringing Generalissimo Franco respectability while he was still merrily despatching the regime’s enemies to the next world. Although Spanish entry into NATO would have to await the dictator’s death in 1975, the United States began to establish air bases within Spain well before then.
In the 1950s France increasingly looked away from the Mediterranean. This was partly because the centre of gravity within Europe now lay, more clearly than ever, within northern Europe: the creation of the European Economic Community in 1957 was seen not just as an instrument to promote economic cooperation, but as a means to prevent new conflict between France and Germany. The adhesion of Italy appeared to give the EEC a Mediterranean dimension, but this should not be exaggerated: Italy qualified for entry thanks to Milan and Turin, industrial cities away from the Mediterranean, and during the first fifteen years of the EEC it was the poorest state in the community, with a poverty-stricken south bedevilled by low literacy, agricultural backwardness and lack of industrialization.14 Further evidence of a turning away from the Mediterranean can be found in the troubled history of French decolonization. France conceded first autonomy and then independence to the troublesome Moroccans and Tunisians, and then imagined it could hold Algeria, the northern coast of which had been incorporated into metropolitan France. The already vicious war between French troops and the nationalist Front de Libération Nationale was complicated by the intervention of the activists of the Organisation de l’armée secrète, fighting both the Algerian nationalists and the French government to protect what they saw as French interests in Algeria. The Algerian question convulsed public opinion and French politics. The generals’ coup that led to the overthrow of the Fourth Republic and the assumption of power by General de Gaulle in 1958 began when French settlers in Algeria occupied government buildings in Algiers; it continued with landings by troops in Corsica. De Gaulle came to power arguing that Algeria must stay French, but before long he conceded that this was impossible, and several of his fellow-generals decided he had betrayed their cause and launched a conspiracy against him. Undeterred by these threats, de Gaulle let Algeria go in 1962. The consequences were predictable: another mass movement of population. Those Europeans who had not already left Algeria were encouraged to do so by the ‘massacre of Oran’ on 5 July 1962: on the day the country became independent the European quarter of Oran was raided by nationalists who killed a disputed number of people (the lowest estimates hover around 100) but succeeded in their aim of scaring away hundreds of thousands of Europeans. French troops, still in Oran, stood aside, under orders to maintain neutrality. Perhaps 900,000 French Algerians left in the months before and after independence, including both the descendants of settlers and Algerian Jews, with vast numbers settling in southern France. They were followed by a wave of native Algerian immigration, and immigration from Morocco and Tunisia, transforming the heart of Marseilles and other cities. Rather than creating a new convivencia, the presence of a teeming North African population unlocked ugly, xenophobic sentiments in southern France, accentuated by memories of the terrorism of the FLN.
Britain too faced emphatic demands for independence from its Mediterranean possessions. The Maltese faced three options: to join Italy, an idea fashionable before the war but unthinkable after the siege; to strengthen the bond with its master by union with Great Britain; to gain independence. The second option attracted extensive support, but it became obvious that the Royal Navy had less and less use for the Malta dockyards, as Britain reduced its presence within the Mediterranean, and by 1964 the independence movement had triumphed, though Malta retained Queen Elizabeth as its head of state for another ten years, and remained within the Commonwealth. Later, under the socialist government of Dom Mintoff, Malta would vaunt its non-aligned status and would seek allies in the region, including the highly unpredictable Colonel Gaddafi, who seized power in Libya in 1969. The island retained a strange legacy: fish and chips, sticky buns and the English language, though now in second place to Maltese. Successive Maltese governments were left with a headache, for it was unclear how the assets of the Grand Harbour could be deployed to good advantage without the presence of the British fleet. The island’s non-aligned status meant that the Soviet fleet could not expect much benefit from Malta, but the Chinese began to see an opportunity as their relations with the USSR deteriorated into ideological name-calling. Diplomatic relations were solemnly established between tiny Malta and the vast People’s Republic, and the Chinese invested in improvements to Malta’s dry docks. On the other hand, until the late 1970s, China enjoyed access to naval facilities in Albania, its one close European ally, which now delighted in denying facilities to the ‘revisionist social Fascists’ of Moscow.15
To Britain, Malta was an irritating mosquito, but Cyprus was a giant hornets’ nest. The Greek Cypriot demand for enôsis with Greece, and a growing divide between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, had a predictable result: the Turkish government insisted that a Greek-owned Cyprus was a strategic threat in the waters to the south of Turkey. Yet the focus of opposition was not simply the other community. The colonial power was targeted by violent Greek nationalists, who included increasingly radicalized high-school pupils. They imagined that they were reliving the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottomans, and a number joined the thousand-odd members of the Ethniki Organôsis Kypriôn Agonistôn (EOKA), the ‘National Organization of Cypriot Fighters’. Its youth wing required members to swear in the name of the Trinity that they would ‘work with all my power for the liberation of Cyprus from the British yoke, sacrificing for this even my life’.16 But this was no game. The EOKA commander, George Grivas, was a fanatical nationalist who gave no quarter. At the height of the emergency, the streets of Nicosia saw daily killings of British troops (over 100 in all) and of Turks, and the Greek and Turkish communities bunkered down in distinct areas, separated by barbed wire or guarded by armed irregulars.17
Lawrence Durrell, who taught in a Greek high school in Nicosia and then became a British information officer in Cyprus, remembered the indecisiveness of the British colonial authorities as the troubles began:
Should one for example behave as if the Greeks were Greeks? The Greek National Anthem – should it be played on Independence Day while Athens was broadcasting scurrilous and inflammatory material, inciting Greeks to rise? There seemed to be no clear line on this so I was forced to steer a course between vague amiabilities and reproaches for the time being.18
The invocation of the Trinity in the EOKA oath underlined the role of Greek Orthodoxy in the struggle for enôsis, for the Greek Church, not a sense of being the heirs of Perikles, was the focus of Greek identity – the Turks were more casual about their attachment to Islam. Archbishop Makarios functioned as ‘Ethnarch’ at the head of the Greek community, though the British authorities shipped him out of the island in 1956, detaining him in the Seychelles for three years. He was a staunch advocate of decolonization, to be followed by enôsis, and the Turks countered with the argument that the only way to ease tensions between Turk and Greek was to divide the island. It was difficult to see how this could be done, since the Turks were scattered all over it. Moreover, the Greeks tended to occupy the commanding economic positions, and Turkish areas within mixed villages often remained poor.
The republic of Cyprus came into existence in 1960, with Makarios as president, but required careful nurturing. Greece, Turkey and Great Britain were the guarantor powers, with the right to intervene if Cyprus was under threat. Britain retained two irregularly shaped bases at Dhekelia and Akrotiri, encompassing nearly 100 square miles (250 square kilometres), and constituting sovereign British territory; they became important Middle Eastern listening-stations for NATO. Under the Cypriot constitution the Turks provided a vice-president and had (the Greeks maintained) stronger political influence than their numbers warranted. But of course the intention of the constitution was to make sure that the Greeks did not haul the island into union with Greece. Although in 1960 Makarios had accepted that Cyprus would become a separate republic, enôsis remained on the Greek Cypriot agenda even after 1967, when a brutal, intensely nationalistic military regime seized power in Athens. Greek officers stationed in Cyprus became a source of trouble in summer 1974, and Makarios was overthrown in a coup. It seemed that the Greek colonels intended to achieve enôsis by force. The Turkish government intervened in late July, claiming the right to do so as a guarantor power; Turkey landed 30,000 troops on the island and occupied the northern third, while the junta in Athens, thoroughly discredited, fell from power. Within Cyprus, the human effects were predictable. As many as 190,000 Greek Cypriots fled south from Kyrenia, Famagusta and smaller towns and villages into the Greek-controlled areas, and tens of thousands of Turkish Cypriots hurried northwards to seek the protection of the Turkish army. The island was thus at last ethnically divided, but there were deep scars, physical and mental: close to the Turkish front line, the seashore of Famagusta, bristling with hotels built by Greeks to take advantage of the relative peace that had followed independence, became a deserted ghost town, complementing old Famagusta, a ghost town of ruined Gothic churches ever since it had been bombarded by the Turks 400 years earlier. Across the island, stretches of no-man’s-land under United Nations supervision separated the two sides. Nicosia had already become divided between Turks and Greeks in 1963, with barricaded areas inhabited by the Turks.19 The frontier between Turks and Greeks cut right through the middle of the old city. Only in April 2008 was a crossing-point opened within old Nicosia.
The Turks went on to enact the policy they had been advocating in response to enôsis. In 1983 the ‘Turkish Republic of North Cyprus’ was created, unrecognized internationally except by Turkey, which maintained large forces there and encouraged tens of thousands of Anatolian Turks to find a new life in Turkish Cyprus. The political changes in Cyprus can be measured in changes to place-names, in the abandonment of disused places of worship and, of course, in the presence of flags everywhere – in northern Cyprus the Turkish flag fluttering alongside its variant, the northern Cypriot flag, white with a red crescent; in the south the Greek flag alongside that of the Republic of Cyprus. De facto, Cyprus falls under four separate authorities: the Greek Cypriot republic, the Turkish Cypriot republic, Great Britain and the United Nations. The adhesion of Greek Cyprus to the European Union in 2004 was accompanied by attempts to bring the sides together, and, since the EU regards the Greek republic as the government of all Cyprus, EU investment has also benefited projects in Turkish Nicosia, Kyrenia and other parts of northern Cyprus. The admission of Cyprus to the Union was, not surprisingly, fervently urged by Greece, which saw this as a chance to gain a second Hellenic voice at the EU table, to involve the EU more deeply in Graeco-Turkish rivalries, and to bring the issue of a divided Cyprus into the international arena.20 While the Turkish population is generally ready to accept plans for a united federal Cyprus, the Greek Cypriots have refused to countenance the loss of their properties in the north, and hopes that the problem would or could be resolved around the time Cyprus joined the EU were over-optimistic. The most important factor pressing North Cyprus towards a resolution has been the difficult economic position of an unrecognized state that depends so heavily on Turkish economic, not to mention military, support.21
The third and smallest British territory in the Mediterranean had no chance of decolonization – nor any wish to be decolonized. Britain still saw Gibraltar as a vital naval base immediately after the Second World War, though its importance faded as British commitments in the Mediterranean declined, and the Americans had no use for it once they had contracted with Franco for the use of bases in southern Spain. Franco imagined that he could have Gibraltar if he made enough noise. But around 1950 Britain was not very interested in developing ties with the Spanish government, which was badly tarnished by its record of oppression; nor could Spain make its voice heard at the UN, which it was not permitted to join until 1955.22 One year before that, the new queen, Elizabeth, visited Gibraltar at the end of her six-month world tour, which gave Franco the excuse to mobilize crowds on the streets of Madrid. Spain argued that it had a right to every inch of its national territory, and that many of the Gibraltarians were as alien as the British, claiming that the true Gibraltar lived on among the inhabitants of San Roque, the Spanish town nearby which had been settled by the original inhabitants of the rock in 1704.23 Unlike other decolonization arguments, the issue was not the right of the inhabitants to govern themselves, but a more traditional one about natural frontiers (how this applied to Moroccan claims to the Spanish outposts at Ceuta and Melilla was not clearly explained). Following the royal visit, Franco imposed increasingly severe restrictions on movement between Spain and the rock. A former pilot in the USAF writes:
I flew into Gibraltar from Naples and Sicily on several occasions in the late 70s and early 80s. It was one of the most difficult approaches I was required to make because Spanish Air Traffic Control imposed extremely tight approach corridors on aircraft landing to the east.24
Britain wavered over the issue, seeing less use for Gibraltar than in the glory days of the Royal Navy, but impressed by the constantly stated loyalty of the Gibraltarians to Britain.25
Britain insisted that what mattered was not territorial integrity but the wishes of the Gibraltarians. In May 1969, the British government made it plain that ‘Her Majesty’s Government will never enter into arrangements under which the people of Gibraltar would pass under the sovereignty of another state against their freely and democratically expressed wishes.’26 Frustrated and outraged, Franco, who had never lost his capacity to bully, completely closed the border between Spain and Gibraltar. It remained so for thirteen years, well into the era of democratic Spain, and was fully opened only when Spain joined the European Community in 1986. During that time, Spanish workers with jobs in Gibraltar were cut off from their place of work, and Gibraltarians were able to visit Spain only by a roundabout route through Tangier. Spanish sensitivity reached extraordinary levels: in 1965 Spain threatened to boycott the Miss World contest if Miss Gibraltar were allowed to compete; but any temptation in the Foreign Office to let Spain have its way has been consistently blocked by the refusal of nearly all the inhabitants to dissolve the tie to Great Britain.27 With its mixed population of British, Spanish, Genoese, Maltese, Jewish, Hindu and latterly Muslim inhabitants, Gibraltar can be seen as one of the last survivors of a once widespread phenomenon, the Mediterranean port city.