We live in a weird world where Western nations are expected to abide by international law and norms while authoritarian regimes see such rules and norms as tools to facilitate their imperial ambitions.
Why is that unfortunate? The alternative seems like unilateral disarmament. If one bad apple spoils the bunch, then all the good apples have to fortify themselves against that one bad apple.
I would contest that modern Republicans aren’t western.
They aren’t Western liberals, but rather are the product of a weird fusion of postmodernism and critical theory. It’s Hobbesian Leviathan with a mix of monarchism and the worst aspects of French thinking mixed together into a post truth nihilistic nightmare.
In short, the French are the true villains of history.
What non-Western regime brought enslaved over to an island on the other side of the Earth and then forcibly expelled their descendants to make way for a military base? Colonization was a Western thing so that’s why decolonization is too.
The Soviets colonized Eastern Europe. They set up puppet governments, enforced their ideology, suppressed local cultures, and imposed their underperforming extractive economic system there.
For example, why are there so many European-looking Turks if the Turks come from Central Asia? Why is Zanzibar a Persian name. Welcome to the East African and Mediterranean slave trade.
In the case of Turks, because almost no Turk-from-Turkey is biologically a Turk-from-Turkestan but a Greek or Armenian who changed language and religion
You're forgetting the massive population transfer from Slavic and Balkan lands (and Mediterranean areas) and the expulsion of the Circassians and Crimean Tatars.
This is exaggerated. Almost all Turks-from-Turkey have some degree of Central Asian ancestry, just as almost all Angles-from-England have some degree of Germanic ancestry. In each case, the conqueror population assimilated into the local, to the point that everyone alive today is descended from everyone back then, both conqueror and native, who left any descendants at all.
And where did I say those things were ok? I didn’t. I stated that Western values like international law are used by regimes that flagrantly disregard them to undermine the goals of international law.
As if the CCP didn’t colonize Tibet or Xinjiang? As if the CCP isn’t current using Uyghur slave labor. As if the CCP isn’t trying to eradicate the identity of Hong Kongers.
You have already written lengthy apologia for state directed famines today and here you are abusing Western notions of human rights and past harms for what? Infinite sympathy for butchers like Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot and zero for the Western Democracies that invented the concepts of human rights and international law.
If you go digging you find analysis by military think tanks and military wargames. Against a 1990s China Britain could have "held" Hong Kong (with the new territories it is incredible defensible and 1990s China was militarily weak compared to 1990s Britain) but Hong Kong would have been rendered worthless by the damage from the war and Britain would have permanently destroyed its relations with China and much of the world for it. China was fairly clear that the century would not end with an intact Hong Kong in British hands.
There probably isn't a counterfactual where Britain manages to negotiate to keep it short of a radically different outcome to the Chinese Civil War. I don't even think a KMT victory would have been enough, you'd need a China that never really recovers and reconsolidates central control.
The issue was that because the Hong Kong mainland had to revert back to China given its lease was expiring, the island wasn't viable. As Thatcher once explained, the PRC could literally turn off the water to the island as soon as they had the mainland
It didn't *have* to. Britain always had the option of just reneging on the lease terms and saying the New Territories are now British.
Of course that would have been unbelievably damaging to Britain diplomatically (in this thread counterfactual where Britain threatens nuclear war over it to avoid a military response) and not remotely worth it.
Deterrent in a box needs to be pulled off as a perfect fait accompli for Taiwan or you recreate the Cuban Missile Crisis with all of its lovely risk of a nuclear first strike. If it leaks before Taiwan has the credible ability to launch a second strike independently (i.e. it won't just be seen and reacted to as a US strike) then China will do anything to stop it.
We can still lament what has happened to Hong Kong or how once again the CCP broke their promise and enacted their own colonial regime on the people. It is not as vulgar as Tibet or Xinjiang, but it is colonial. The CCP has colonial ambitions for Nepal, Bhutan, and northern India too.
I’ll admit that I *gasp* made a substack comment without being much of an expert. But what would have stopped the UK from saying, “our lease was with a previous government and we’re not comfortable handing over millions of people to a dictatorship. It’s nice that you seem to be liberalizing but finish the job and have nationwide elections and HK is yours.”?
Hong Kong's economy was and is completely dependent on Mainland China, the Brits made the calculation that Hong Kong was worth more to the CCP as a mostly free entrepot rather than the husk they could've gotten anyway by turning off the tap of trade (and the literal water taps). Worked a while before Commies Commied, hard to blame the Brits for making the deal, could have given Hong Kongers right to abode in the UK.
Now the most entertaining proposal to deal with Hong Kong's recession back to the mainland was to move Hong Kong to Northern Ireland.
Calling the handover an unmitigated disaster is just so hyperbolic I can't help but wonder of OP is just pining for a war with China. The political situation in HK is supremely undemocratic but Hong Kongers are fabulously wealthy, educated, and healthy.
It's weird to me that people can't hold two ideas in their brains simultaneously: 1) Authoritarianism is horrible as a principle: and 2) Some authoritarian regimes succeed in providing a very high quality of life to their citizens.
I lived in Hong Kong post handover and pre-crackdown - it was one of the greatest cities on earth. I have friends who have emigrated since the crackdown and some who have stayed. But even those who left wouldn't say the city is an "unmitigated disaster".
The British conquered Hong Kong in an infamous imperialist war justified by China trying to prevent Opium imports. It’s not a good idea to make that type of conquest a legitimate precedent. Maybe random third world nations have to lie down and take it but China is on the way to becoming a major power.
One wonders precisely how China south of the Yellow River Valley became Chinese. Or, you know, Yunnan, Guizhou, Qinghai, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Manchuria...
We did but via gunboat diplomacy. The Qing were willing to lease the New Territories because it had just lost a war over concessions, they were terrified of the industrialised powers just sending in gunboats and seizing more territory by force like the Japanese and Russians had just done.
It is a fundamental problem with anti-colonial logic, the idea that Westerners running a place is wrong but non-Westerners from a nearbyish but completely different cultural group is somehow ok.
It meant that on many occasions the anti-colonialsts supported oppression of minority group by unpleasant dictatorships of a completely different ethnic or religious group to the oppressed purely on the grounds of the dominant groups non-Western nature (Probably not a huge concern in this example).
> Among those aboard was a man, now in his 70s and one of the few remaining native-born Chagossians. He was 14 when British officials forced his family onto a boat leaving the islands. When the archipelago finally came into view again decades later, those on board said he cried.
I guess I am feeling cold-hearted in tune with the weather this late March afternoon, but my god, I hope we are not attempting to craft semi-permanent geopolitical realities based on the sentimentalities of retirees.
Yep, we fucked that up 60 years ago! Or in other cases, 200 or 400 years ago! *Now*, today, what do we do?
Your misunderstanding. The Chagos Islanders OPPOSE the deal. Britain is trying to do a deal to save the base from being ostracised by its neighbours. It has nothing at all to do with being nice to Chagos Islanders who are pissed, and everyone knew they would be
Agree 100%. We simply cannot relitigate every past displacement of peoples and border changes. The world moves on. For example, millions of Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe after WW2 in what would. This was ethnic cleansing that would be unacceptable today, but it cannot be undone.
Fun trivia fact: You know the .io top-level domain, that is or at least was trendy among tech startups? This territory is who it technically belongs to.
The domain is currently administered by a private equity firm. The islanders haven't seen any of the proceeds, and have complained about this; the issue occasionally surfaces in tech spaces that are on the woker side of the spectrum.
It's unclear how this agreement, if it happens, will affect things; technically the domain is supposed to stop existing if the territory loses its special status (and doesn't become a new sovereign country), but I don't think that'll happen since it'd break the internet.
"The U.K.’s goals seem to be: (1) Improving Britain’s reputation at the U.N. and around the world (2) Righting injustices done to the Chagossian people (3)Ensuring U.K. and U.S. national security is not compromised
While this proposed deal does address (1) well, there are serious questions of its ability to accomplish points (2) and (3)"
(1) is nonsense. the Lefty-Anti-Western types who care about such things overall will simply gallop on to the next point to hate UK/west over. Given the tiny marginal nature of this (and indeed as Islands were unihabited before colonial implantation)
Generally speaking Maldives by geography etc. is much more sensible a resolution (after the other choice, not doing anything at all to buy 15 minutes of virtue signaling that will be forgotten with great rapidity for no particularly great results)
A lot of the controversy in the UK comes from the fact that the deal involves a payment to Mauritius of several billion pounds which seems odd when returning territory. There is also controversy over the lawyers for Mauritius being connected and good friends of Starmer and his attorney general Lord Hermer.
This attitude of treating people's like they were individuals has always puzzled me. If the idea is that the island somehow belongs to the descendants of the people who lived there in the 1770s then that almost certainly means it should belong to the UK since there are only about 10k Chagosians in the islands, a 3000 person ethnic community in Crawley in the UK and a quick estimate strongly suggests that if you count up all the descendants of people from Chagos living in the UK it's going to be way more than 10k.
I don't mean to suggest that the forced removal in the 1970s was ok (sounds bad but I don't know much about it) and I dunno what is a good solution here. But just in general, it seems really objectionable to have this default favoritism toward the parts of a group who retain their traditional practices.
For instance, I found it particularly upsetting that during the controversy about the use of Mauna Kea for the next giant telescope we treated traditional Hawaiian cultural organizations as if they had some special status when the only poll I could find that tried to just look at support amoung people of Hawaiian descent in Hawaii it was quite positive.
More generally, it seems to be a troubling concept no matter how you slice it. Either you effectively ignore the interests of everyone who decides to give up traditions -- a weird position for a modern secular society to take -- or you end up with a weird kind of ethnic essentialism. Both options seem bad.
Maybe we should just admit that fairness is a notion that applies to people not groups and just deal with it at that level -- eg compensation payments to the people actually removed. This seems particularly desirable since it doesn't have the perverse effect of treating wrongs as less important when they are done to mixed ethnic groups.
Considering that China has done nothing to help its "allies" Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba over the past few months, we could tell Mauritius to pound sand without issue. What is even the benefit at this point for developing countries to become Chinese dependencies? Massive cash bribes?
China is basically just speed-running the US's 1950-1970 "developmentalism" trial, that ultimately floundered and sank because it doesn't work.
The profitable projects from the BRI are all in developed or upper-middle income countries, most of the development aid to poor nations just vanishes into leadership-owned black holes with no effect on GDP growth or outcomes.
There's going to be a retrenchment at some point, there's already a very prominent strain of popular opinion that amounts to "stop pissing away money on this and spend it on needs here."
For some reason the Starmer ministry really, really, really believes in adhering to international law (whether this is naive, altruistic or rank corruption (various key figures like Phillipe Sands and Lord Hermer have really shady links to the deal) depends on how cynical you are) which is why they seem so deadset on going through with this despite as you say, there is no real benefit to it or risk to not doing it. Also why the British opposition campaign is mostly trying to appeal to America to block it.
I'm sorry this what I mean about getting your information from twitter racists. The negotiations began under Sunak not Starmer. Hermer does not have a shady role in the negotiations, he's Britain's chief law officer! And the initial request came from the Americans, because its fundamentally an American base!
Its pretty rude to accuse me of getting my information from Twitter racists. I get mine from a variety of mainstream sources, do you normally accuse people in comment sections of getting all of their news from the far right?
The previous Conservative governments walked away from the negotiations, Hermer and Sands are closely linked to the deal on a personal level (I notice that you just ignored that I mentioned Sands, convenient that isn't it, doesn't fit your accusation that I'm a racist though does it) and plenty of respected publications have raised these concerns.
If you just want to accuse me of getting my news from the far right again while presenting misleading information then please do not bother to reply to me ever again. I have no interest in discussing current events with someone who thinks opening with accusations of racism by talking about things reported on by sources like Reuters and the Telegraph.
Rather absurd that Mauritius supposedly has the right to colonize Diego Garcia because they were previously part of the same British colony administratively
I’m sort of convinced the British have never and will never do the right thing. Even when they try to do the right thing, it’s wrong. They should just pack it in, sign their sovereignty over to someone else, and know it couldn’t possibly be worse.
We in the US wisely stayed out of WW1 while you idiots in Europe killed each other in huge numbers over nothing. In the end, we were sucked in by your foolishness and did our bit to bring the general war to an end. Seems like the US did pretty well there.
No, I continue to think WW1 was a huge mistake by all the parties. We'd all be better off if it had never happened. It was the great hinge point of the 20th century and caused a half century of slaughter.
Don't remember America objecting to that. Quite the opposite. And it was the French who failed to honour their alliance with the Czechoslovakia, we were along for the ride.
(It was also the right thing to do. The extra year helped unifying the British Empire and better prepare us for war)
My son married a Mauritian and we have been there for family events, so I’ve some on the ground knowledge.
It is a Hindu majority country with deep Indian roots. India has built a naval base there due to concerns about the Chinese, so Europe and America having bases in the region is both understandable and a well established fact. The French still control nearby Réunion as a an overseas Department of France and has a large military presence.
All of the inhabitants were brought there by either the French or the British. As such, ‘Indigenous’ peoples claims are a moot point. Given the distance from Mauritius and the fact that the so called locals were brought there by the British to begin with it seems to be odd that there is a fuss about ownership. Britain ran away from places such as Mauritius due to its post WW11 economic plight. It is really the Americans that have an interest in the islands and it probably would have been better if they had taken it over from the British. Mauritian claims are tenuous as it was Britain’s that created a link by administering the islands from Mauritius.
I'm sorry this is a terrible article that completely misses the point. Of course this deal screws ovet the Chagos Islanders but it was never meant to help them. It was meant to place Diego Garcia's status on a firmer legal footing to avoid the possibility that neighbouring countries would render it unusable by not letting plans or ships stop in their territory on the way to Diego Garcia. And Mauritius is clearly right - we told them that they must give the islands to get their independence. That's coercion and clearly illegal under UN decolonialisation law. It was for this reason that Biden told the previous British government to do a deal with Mauritius. And the talk of them being allies with China is hysterical nonsense. Their key relationship is with India who has also been pushing for a deal to be done. Trump is lashing out because he fell out with Modi and Starmer over other issues. And no one in Britain cares about this because it's not really our base. We'd have properly gave it up ages ago, but the Americans wanted it. Please Matt, stop getting your UK news from British Racist Twitter. It's making you look ridiculous
Mr. Will, anyone who thinks somebody else has RFP details memorized for flights out of Diego Garcia--maybe somebody has that memorized, I don't know--that person is an enormous dipshit.
calm down. it's cool to have opinions but please be respectful of the author taking the time to write and publish this piece. I for one learned something even if you supposedly did not.
I didn't say Matt was the author. I quite clearly saw it was a guest post. But there is a consistent problem with this site's editorial stance towards the UK being overly influence by unrepresentative and bad faith actors on twitter
The idea that SB has some kind of rigid "editorial stance" such that what is very obviously Caroline's project can't be published unless it rigorously complies to that "stance" is overwrought to the point of risibility.
Im sorry but Matt literally wrote on Friday about the importance of editing to improve the product. This article has errors similar to other recent references to the UK. That is a failure of research and editing.
And you can see that in this debate which got massively sidetracked that we were doing this to be nice to Chagos Islanders because the author got her facts wrong
Could you please explain more about this "UN decolonization law", preferably with some citations? The only relevant "law" I'm aware of is UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/declaration-granting-independence-colonial-countries-and-peoples), which does say that "Any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations". (Let's assume for the sake of argument that UN General Assembly resolutions count as "law", although that itself is far from obvious: they are not generally considered legally binding or enforceable, although they can influence the direction of the law.)
But it is not at all clear that the separation of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius was in violation of that resolution - because they were not in any meaningful sense part of "a country" with "territorial integrity" or "national unity". Mauritius had never owned the islands; they were simply part of the same colonial administrative district, and colonial administrative districts were in other places sometimes split up on decolonization - for example, French Indochina, on decolonization, was divided into three countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In that case the three countries had separate histories, so it made sense for them to be separate on decolonization - but so too did Mauritius and the Chagos Islands have separate histories.
And Resolution 1514 would be violated in a different way by handing the islands to Mauritius, since it also says "All peoples have the right to self-determination" - and (as you acknowledge) the Chagos Islanders do not wish to be ruled by Mauritius.
So - even if it counts as "law" - I can't see that there is any violation of Resolution 1514 in the refusal to give the islands to Mauritius, let alone something that would make it "clearly illegal". Or is there some other "UN decolonization law" that you are referring to?
You've got the right law but I believe the issue that makes the British case so weak is the decision to separate out the Chagos Islands was done deliberately to smooth the pathway to keep the base. And its hard to claim Mauritius is separate from Chagos Islands given most of the Islanders ended up there after being expelled. Again it was American concern that a legal loss would make the base unviable that made thell us to do a deal. Thats why the government has paused its passage in the House of Lords because its trying to work out what the Americans want it to do
Obviously the British were separating it out cynically to keep the base - but in an alternate universe in which there was no base on Diego Garcia, the correct thing under UN Resolution 1514 would still have been to separate it out, given the lack of shared history (not to mention the lack of geographic proximity) and the unwillingness of the Chagos Islanders to be part of Mauritius.
Most of them were indeed sent to Mauritius, simply because (as I said) they were part of the same colonial administrative district. But the country where a population unwillingly ends up after a forced expulsion does not thereby become the same country. (If things worked that way, then the history of Palestine - to name one obvious instance - would be very different.)
"The British case" for expelling the Chagos Islanders and keeping the base was indeed weak - but it was weak because of the expulsion of people from their territory, not because of the division of the territory. The case for the division of the territory - then and now - is legally strong. (Again, assuming that UN Resolution 1514 counts as "law"). Whether it is politically desirable is a separate question.
Yeah Im dubious that will stand up to be honest. You're talking them being administered together since before the British ruled them. You're talking hundreds of years. And my understanding you have to correct the coercive splitting of the territory, and then let the Mauritians and Chagos Islanders sort the future. A d of course Chagos Islanders independence would not help keep the base nor stop Chinese influence growing. Quite opposite really
But the "coercive splitting of the territory" was what was legally required at the time - so unsplitting it now would be in violation of that.
As far as "administered together since before the British ruled them", that is stretching the truth. They were administered together under French colonial rule from 1715 to 1810, but there was no one actually living on the Chagos Islands for most of that time. People only started living there in the 1770s. I don't think a few decades of shared French rule makes much of a difference to the case.
Again the article has misled the debate here. The British is not trying to be nice to the Chagos Islanders. It's trying to get everyone's agreement for the continuation of the base. And to also remove a running sore in its relations with other nations, particularly India
I assure you I haven't been misled. I've been following the Chagos Islands debates for literally 25 years. At no point have I suggested that the British are acting for ethical reasons (they certainly are not).
But regardless of the British motives, the ethically right (and, for what it is worth, legal) thing is to return the Chagos Islanders to the islands and keep them independent from Mauritius, both of which are in accordance with their wishes.
Who cares? The UK practices parliamentary sovereignty and there's no such thing as international law. I personally think democracy is the best way to run society- would you agree? Assuming so, can you refresh my memory as to when the global elections were for the UN? Because there weren't any, there's no democratically elected world government that we all assented to, and thus no 'international law' of any consequence. You can't have laws without a government. Laws come from freely elected governments in sovereign countries, not technocrats. The UK is perfectly free to ignore the UN just as any other country can.
Sigh. I explained this already The fear from the *Americans who base it really is* was that if such a ruling was made, neighbouring countries would refuse to let their territory be used to connect to or supply Diego Garcia, rendering it useless.
If the US doesn't make marijuana illegal again tomorrow, I'm worried that neighboring countries will invade us- after all, we're technically in violation of the 1961 UN Convention on Narcotics treaty we signed.
If the House of Lords stalls the bill, then I guess you guys do want the base, eh?
The negotiations began under the previous government. It's a complete coincidence It's Starmer pushing it through. Again we began this process at the request of Biden
We live in a weird world where Western nations are expected to abide by international law and norms while authoritarian regimes see such rules and norms as tools to facilitate their imperial ambitions.
And unfortunately, the US is not a Western nation when Republicans are in control
Why is that unfortunate? The alternative seems like unilateral disarmament. If one bad apple spoils the bunch, then all the good apples have to fortify themselves against that one bad apple.
> Why is X unfortunate?
because it would be better if X weren't true
I would contest that modern Republicans aren’t western.
They aren’t Western liberals, but rather are the product of a weird fusion of postmodernism and critical theory. It’s Hobbesian Leviathan with a mix of monarchism and the worst aspects of French thinking mixed together into a post truth nihilistic nightmare.
In short, the French are the true villains of history.
They are closer to realism not Utopian delusion.
What non-Western regime brought enslaved over to an island on the other side of the Earth and then forcibly expelled their descendants to make way for a military base? Colonization was a Western thing so that’s why decolonization is too.
Allow me to introduce you to the Ottoman, Mughal, and Mongol empires. Also the Chinese and Japanese empires.
But THOSE are fine. Or historical. Or something.
W[capital W]itehood is uniquely bad.
The Soviets colonized Eastern Europe. They set up puppet governments, enforced their ideology, suppressed local cultures, and imposed their underperforming extractive economic system there.
For example, why are there so many European-looking Turks if the Turks come from Central Asia? Why is Zanzibar a Persian name. Welcome to the East African and Mediterranean slave trade.
In the case of Turks, because almost no Turk-from-Turkey is biologically a Turk-from-Turkestan but a Greek or Armenian who changed language and religion
You're forgetting the massive population transfer from Slavic and Balkan lands (and Mediterranean areas) and the expulsion of the Circassians and Crimean Tatars.
This is exaggerated. Almost all Turks-from-Turkey have some degree of Central Asian ancestry, just as almost all Angles-from-England have some degree of Germanic ancestry. In each case, the conqueror population assimilated into the local, to the point that everyone alive today is descended from everyone back then, both conqueror and native, who left any descendants at all.
Exaggerated relative to what? Large population transfers and slave trading was Ottoman state policy.
It’s because Byzantine women dressed so provocatively! (Or you know, cultural assimilation and the blurring of ethnic identities over centuries.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire
And where did I say those things were ok? I didn’t. I stated that Western values like international law are used by regimes that flagrantly disregard them to undermine the goals of international law.
As if the CCP didn’t colonize Tibet or Xinjiang? As if the CCP isn’t current using Uyghur slave labor. As if the CCP isn’t trying to eradicate the identity of Hong Kongers.
You have already written lengthy apologia for state directed famines today and here you are abusing Western notions of human rights and past harms for what? Infinite sympathy for butchers like Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot and zero for the Western Democracies that invented the concepts of human rights and international law.
He's in the tank for China.
Reminds me of Britain handing over Hong Kong to China against Hong Kong people’s will — also an unmitigated disaster
The People's Republic is Bad, Actually. Grind it under a tank tread--kind of their thing.
But it's not obvious to me that the UK could have actually protected Hong Kong's semi-sovereignty before or after 1997.
If you go digging you find analysis by military think tanks and military wargames. Against a 1990s China Britain could have "held" Hong Kong (with the new territories it is incredible defensible and 1990s China was militarily weak compared to 1990s Britain) but Hong Kong would have been rendered worthless by the damage from the war and Britain would have permanently destroyed its relations with China and much of the world for it. China was fairly clear that the century would not end with an intact Hong Kong in British hands.
There probably isn't a counterfactual where Britain manages to negotiate to keep it short of a radically different outcome to the Chinese Civil War. I don't even think a KMT victory would have been enough, you'd need a China that never really recovers and reconsolidates central control.
They had nuclear weapons, station a Nuclear Sub in the harbor and give it to the control of the hong kongers
The issue was that because the Hong Kong mainland had to revert back to China given its lease was expiring, the island wasn't viable. As Thatcher once explained, the PRC could literally turn off the water to the island as soon as they had the mainland
It didn't *have* to. Britain always had the option of just reneging on the lease terms and saying the New Territories are now British.
Of course that would have been unbelievably damaging to Britain diplomatically (in this thread counterfactual where Britain threatens nuclear war over it to avoid a military response) and not remotely worth it.
This is probably close to the optimal policy for Taiwan (hand it a "Deterrent in a Box") but would never have worked for HK.
Deterrent in a box needs to be pulled off as a perfect fait accompli for Taiwan or you recreate the Cuban Missile Crisis with all of its lovely risk of a nuclear first strike. If it leaks before Taiwan has the credible ability to launch a second strike independently (i.e. it won't just be seen and reacted to as a US strike) then China will do anything to stop it.
There was never any chance that Hong Kong was not going to be part of China. A little real politik please.
We can still lament what has happened to Hong Kong or how once again the CCP broke their promise and enacted their own colonial regime on the people. It is not as vulgar as Tibet or Xinjiang, but it is colonial. The CCP has colonial ambitions for Nepal, Bhutan, and northern India too.
Not if you’re Freddie and think what’s happened is good.
Curious to hear if that’s not your belief Freddie?
Hopeful for such realpolitik when Marco Rubio is rightfully subcomandante de Cuba later this year 🙏🏻
I'm sorry no. Mainland Hong Kong had a lease that was due to aspire. We looked into letting the island stay outside PRC but it wouldn't be viable.
The Chagos Islands probably won't exist when the proposed lease is over because of rising sea levels
"due to aspire", lol
You're subscribing to Matt's blog and making fun of someone for typos? Be serious now
Hey that just reeks of dictated text. Which beats the fuck out of AI generated text! At least you know he originated that comment
I’ll admit that I *gasp* made a substack comment without being much of an expert. But what would have stopped the UK from saying, “our lease was with a previous government and we’re not comfortable handing over millions of people to a dictatorship. It’s nice that you seem to be liberalizing but finish the job and have nationwide elections and HK is yours.”?
Hong Kong's economy was and is completely dependent on Mainland China, the Brits made the calculation that Hong Kong was worth more to the CCP as a mostly free entrepot rather than the husk they could've gotten anyway by turning off the tap of trade (and the literal water taps). Worked a while before Commies Commied, hard to blame the Brits for making the deal, could have given Hong Kongers right to abode in the UK.
Now the most entertaining proposal to deal with Hong Kong's recession back to the mainland was to move Hong Kong to Northern Ireland.
I mean Hong Kong wasn't a democracy under Britain either.
Calling the handover an unmitigated disaster is just so hyperbolic I can't help but wonder of OP is just pining for a war with China. The political situation in HK is supremely undemocratic but Hong Kongers are fabulously wealthy, educated, and healthy.
It's weird to me that people can't hold two ideas in their brains simultaneously: 1) Authoritarianism is horrible as a principle: and 2) Some authoritarian regimes succeed in providing a very high quality of life to their citizens.
I lived in Hong Kong post handover and pre-crackdown - it was one of the greatest cities on earth. I have friends who have emigrated since the crackdown and some who have stayed. But even those who left wouldn't say the city is an "unmitigated disaster".
The British conquered Hong Kong in an infamous imperialist war justified by China trying to prevent Opium imports. It’s not a good idea to make that type of conquest a legitimate precedent. Maybe random third world nations have to lie down and take it but China is on the way to becoming a major power.
Ah yes, those noted pacifists, the Chinese Empire. Ever spoken to someone from Vietnam?
One wonders precisely how China south of the Yellow River Valley became Chinese. Or, you know, Yunnan, Guizhou, Qinghai, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Manchuria...
I want the Romans to give Paris back to the Irish.
We conquered the island that way. We leased the mainland from them
We did but via gunboat diplomacy. The Qing were willing to lease the New Territories because it had just lost a war over concessions, they were terrified of the industrialised powers just sending in gunboats and seizing more territory by force like the Japanese and Russians had just done.
Quite a lot of examples
It is a fundamental problem with anti-colonial logic, the idea that Westerners running a place is wrong but non-Westerners from a nearbyish but completely different cultural group is somehow ok.
It meant that on many occasions the anti-colonialsts supported oppression of minority group by unpleasant dictatorships of a completely different ethnic or religious group to the oppressed purely on the grounds of the dominant groups non-Western nature (Probably not a huge concern in this example).
This breaks people's brain, but yes. The colonized can also do oppression and colonization too.
Non-white people are perfect noble savages
> Among those aboard was a man, now in his 70s and one of the few remaining native-born Chagossians. He was 14 when British officials forced his family onto a boat leaving the islands. When the archipelago finally came into view again decades later, those on board said he cried.
I guess I am feeling cold-hearted in tune with the weather this late March afternoon, but my god, I hope we are not attempting to craft semi-permanent geopolitical realities based on the sentimentalities of retirees.
Yep, we fucked that up 60 years ago! Or in other cases, 200 or 400 years ago! *Now*, today, what do we do?
Your misunderstanding. The Chagos Islanders OPPOSE the deal. Britain is trying to do a deal to save the base from being ostracised by its neighbours. It has nothing at all to do with being nice to Chagos Islanders who are pissed, and everyone knew they would be
Agree 100%. We simply cannot relitigate every past displacement of peoples and border changes. The world moves on. For example, millions of Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe after WW2 in what would. This was ethnic cleansing that would be unacceptable today, but it cannot be undone.
Fun trivia fact: You know the .io top-level domain, that is or at least was trendy among tech startups? This territory is who it technically belongs to.
The domain is currently administered by a private equity firm. The islanders haven't seen any of the proceeds, and have complained about this; the issue occasionally surfaces in tech spaces that are on the woker side of the spectrum.
It's unclear how this agreement, if it happens, will affect things; technically the domain is supposed to stop existing if the territory loses its special status (and doesn't become a new sovereign country), but I don't think that'll happen since it'd break the internet.
Up to UK however
"The U.K.’s goals seem to be: (1) Improving Britain’s reputation at the U.N. and around the world (2) Righting injustices done to the Chagossian people (3)Ensuring U.K. and U.S. national security is not compromised
While this proposed deal does address (1) well, there are serious questions of its ability to accomplish points (2) and (3)"
(1) is nonsense. the Lefty-Anti-Western types who care about such things overall will simply gallop on to the next point to hate UK/west over. Given the tiny marginal nature of this (and indeed as Islands were unihabited before colonial implantation)
Generally speaking Maldives by geography etc. is much more sensible a resolution (after the other choice, not doing anything at all to buy 15 minutes of virtue signaling that will be forgotten with great rapidity for no particularly great results)
A lot of the controversy in the UK comes from the fact that the deal involves a payment to Mauritius of several billion pounds which seems odd when returning territory. There is also controversy over the lawyers for Mauritius being connected and good friends of Starmer and his attorney general Lord Hermer.
I think Matt needs to send Halina to Mauritius to meet with the local activists and local government officials to get the inside scoop.
https://www.fourseasons.com/mauritius/
Should take a look at the Mauritian zoning laws as long as she's there anyway.
This attitude of treating people's like they were individuals has always puzzled me. If the idea is that the island somehow belongs to the descendants of the people who lived there in the 1770s then that almost certainly means it should belong to the UK since there are only about 10k Chagosians in the islands, a 3000 person ethnic community in Crawley in the UK and a quick estimate strongly suggests that if you count up all the descendants of people from Chagos living in the UK it's going to be way more than 10k.
I don't mean to suggest that the forced removal in the 1970s was ok (sounds bad but I don't know much about it) and I dunno what is a good solution here. But just in general, it seems really objectionable to have this default favoritism toward the parts of a group who retain their traditional practices.
For instance, I found it particularly upsetting that during the controversy about the use of Mauna Kea for the next giant telescope we treated traditional Hawaiian cultural organizations as if they had some special status when the only poll I could find that tried to just look at support amoung people of Hawaiian descent in Hawaii it was quite positive.
More generally, it seems to be a troubling concept no matter how you slice it. Either you effectively ignore the interests of everyone who decides to give up traditions -- a weird position for a modern secular society to take -- or you end up with a weird kind of ethnic essentialism. Both options seem bad.
Maybe we should just admit that fairness is a notion that applies to people not groups and just deal with it at that level -- eg compensation payments to the people actually removed. This seems particularly desirable since it doesn't have the perverse effect of treating wrongs as less important when they are done to mixed ethnic groups.
Considering that China has done nothing to help its "allies" Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba over the past few months, we could tell Mauritius to pound sand without issue. What is even the benefit at this point for developing countries to become Chinese dependencies? Massive cash bribes?
China is basically just speed-running the US's 1950-1970 "developmentalism" trial, that ultimately floundered and sank because it doesn't work.
The profitable projects from the BRI are all in developed or upper-middle income countries, most of the development aid to poor nations just vanishes into leadership-owned black holes with no effect on GDP growth or outcomes.
There's going to be a retrenchment at some point, there's already a very prominent strain of popular opinion that amounts to "stop pissing away money on this and spend it on needs here."
Yes and yes
What a pathetic way to do colonialism.
For some reason the Starmer ministry really, really, really believes in adhering to international law (whether this is naive, altruistic or rank corruption (various key figures like Phillipe Sands and Lord Hermer have really shady links to the deal) depends on how cynical you are) which is why they seem so deadset on going through with this despite as you say, there is no real benefit to it or risk to not doing it. Also why the British opposition campaign is mostly trying to appeal to America to block it.
I'm sorry this what I mean about getting your information from twitter racists. The negotiations began under Sunak not Starmer. Hermer does not have a shady role in the negotiations, he's Britain's chief law officer! And the initial request came from the Americans, because its fundamentally an American base!
Its pretty rude to accuse me of getting my information from Twitter racists. I get mine from a variety of mainstream sources, do you normally accuse people in comment sections of getting all of their news from the far right?
The previous Conservative governments walked away from the negotiations, Hermer and Sands are closely linked to the deal on a personal level (I notice that you just ignored that I mentioned Sands, convenient that isn't it, doesn't fit your accusation that I'm a racist though does it) and plenty of respected publications have raised these concerns.
If you just want to accuse me of getting my news from the far right again while presenting misleading information then please do not bother to reply to me ever again. I have no interest in discussing current events with someone who thinks opening with accusations of racism by talking about things reported on by sources like Reuters and the Telegraph.
Rather absurd that Mauritius supposedly has the right to colonize Diego Garcia because they were previously part of the same British colony administratively
I’m sort of convinced the British have never and will never do the right thing. Even when they try to do the right thing, it’s wrong. They should just pack it in, sign their sovereignty over to someone else, and know it couldn’t possibly be worse.
Pretty rich from the country that sat on its hands for two years as Hitler rampaged round Europe
As the old WW1 joke goes, the only thing the Americans charged was their 10%
We in the US wisely stayed out of WW1 while you idiots in Europe killed each other in huge numbers over nothing. In the end, we were sucked in by your foolishness and did our bit to bring the general war to an end. Seems like the US did pretty well there.
As if you wouldn't be begging to join the war from the start if you were alive back then.
No, I continue to think WW1 was a huge mistake by all the parties. We'd all be better off if it had never happened. It was the great hinge point of the 20th century and caused a half century of slaughter.
Yet somehow America lost twice as many men in World War I as it did in Vietnam.
I was unaware that I had achieved nationhood.
Are you from the country that signed away Czech sovereignty and announced peace in our time?
Don't remember America objecting to that. Quite the opposite. And it was the French who failed to honour their alliance with the Czechoslovakia, we were along for the ride.
(It was also the right thing to do. The extra year helped unifying the British Empire and better prepare us for war)
Oh, I see, if something bad happens, it's always someone else's fault. Perfidious Albion strikes again.
I didnt say it was bad. I clearly said the Munich Agreement was correct
Didn't turn out so well for the Czechs.
The whole island is cursed. Probably due to some item held in the British Museum.
My son married a Mauritian and we have been there for family events, so I’ve some on the ground knowledge.
It is a Hindu majority country with deep Indian roots. India has built a naval base there due to concerns about the Chinese, so Europe and America having bases in the region is both understandable and a well established fact. The French still control nearby Réunion as a an overseas Department of France and has a large military presence.
All of the inhabitants were brought there by either the French or the British. As such, ‘Indigenous’ peoples claims are a moot point. Given the distance from Mauritius and the fact that the so called locals were brought there by the British to begin with it seems to be odd that there is a fuss about ownership. Britain ran away from places such as Mauritius due to its post WW11 economic plight. It is really the Americans that have an interest in the islands and it probably would have been better if they had taken it over from the British. Mauritian claims are tenuous as it was Britain’s that created a link by administering the islands from Mauritius.
I'm sorry this is a terrible article that completely misses the point. Of course this deal screws ovet the Chagos Islanders but it was never meant to help them. It was meant to place Diego Garcia's status on a firmer legal footing to avoid the possibility that neighbouring countries would render it unusable by not letting plans or ships stop in their territory on the way to Diego Garcia. And Mauritius is clearly right - we told them that they must give the islands to get their independence. That's coercion and clearly illegal under UN decolonialisation law. It was for this reason that Biden told the previous British government to do a deal with Mauritius. And the talk of them being allies with China is hysterical nonsense. Their key relationship is with India who has also been pushing for a deal to be done. Trump is lashing out because he fell out with Modi and Starmer over other issues. And no one in Britain cares about this because it's not really our base. We'd have properly gave it up ages ago, but the Americans wanted it. Please Matt, stop getting your UK news from British Racist Twitter. It's making you look ridiculous
I've read some silly comments here over the years. Congratulations, this is one of them.
I highly doubt you had ever heard of Diego Garcia until reading this nonsense, so I won't lose any sleep about you disagreeing with me to be honest
I'm deeply embedded in the aerospace industry, so your doubt is badly unfounded. So, I guess there's that.
Well, there goes ignorance as an excuse for your response being ao stupid
Mr. Will, anyone who thinks somebody else has RFP details memorized for flights out of Diego Garcia--maybe somebody has that memorized, I don't know--that person is an enormous dipshit.
I'm not saying. But many such cases.
calm down. it's cool to have opinions but please be respectful of the author taking the time to write and publish this piece. I for one learned something even if you supposedly did not.
I thought it was a good article about the situation. Well done.
I was perfectly respectful. It's not my fault it has several mistakes of fact in it
Calling something "hysterical nonsense" is not being perfectly respectable.
Claiming Mauritius is an ally of China is hysterical nonsense.
Nevertheless, you are not being perfectly respectful.
First rule of being a jerk on the internet (believe me, I know!): be correct.
This post is not correct in a very important particular. Namely, who the author is.
I didn't say Matt was the author. I quite clearly saw it was a guest post. But there is a consistent problem with this site's editorial stance towards the UK being overly influence by unrepresentative and bad faith actors on twitter
The idea that SB has some kind of rigid "editorial stance" such that what is very obviously Caroline's project can't be published unless it rigorously complies to that "stance" is overwrought to the point of risibility.
Get a grip.
Im sorry but Matt literally wrote on Friday about the importance of editing to improve the product. This article has errors similar to other recent references to the UK. That is a failure of research and editing.
And you can see that in this debate which got massively sidetracked that we were doing this to be nice to Chagos Islanders because the author got her facts wrong
You're way out of line here. If you have constructive feedback for a junior journalist, offer it in a kind and helpful way. This is... not.
Could you please explain more about this "UN decolonization law", preferably with some citations? The only relevant "law" I'm aware of is UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/declaration-granting-independence-colonial-countries-and-peoples), which does say that "Any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations". (Let's assume for the sake of argument that UN General Assembly resolutions count as "law", although that itself is far from obvious: they are not generally considered legally binding or enforceable, although they can influence the direction of the law.)
But it is not at all clear that the separation of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius was in violation of that resolution - because they were not in any meaningful sense part of "a country" with "territorial integrity" or "national unity". Mauritius had never owned the islands; they were simply part of the same colonial administrative district, and colonial administrative districts were in other places sometimes split up on decolonization - for example, French Indochina, on decolonization, was divided into three countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In that case the three countries had separate histories, so it made sense for them to be separate on decolonization - but so too did Mauritius and the Chagos Islands have separate histories.
And Resolution 1514 would be violated in a different way by handing the islands to Mauritius, since it also says "All peoples have the right to self-determination" - and (as you acknowledge) the Chagos Islanders do not wish to be ruled by Mauritius.
So - even if it counts as "law" - I can't see that there is any violation of Resolution 1514 in the refusal to give the islands to Mauritius, let alone something that would make it "clearly illegal". Or is there some other "UN decolonization law" that you are referring to?
You've got the right law but I believe the issue that makes the British case so weak is the decision to separate out the Chagos Islands was done deliberately to smooth the pathway to keep the base. And its hard to claim Mauritius is separate from Chagos Islands given most of the Islanders ended up there after being expelled. Again it was American concern that a legal loss would make the base unviable that made thell us to do a deal. Thats why the government has paused its passage in the House of Lords because its trying to work out what the Americans want it to do
Obviously the British were separating it out cynically to keep the base - but in an alternate universe in which there was no base on Diego Garcia, the correct thing under UN Resolution 1514 would still have been to separate it out, given the lack of shared history (not to mention the lack of geographic proximity) and the unwillingness of the Chagos Islanders to be part of Mauritius.
Most of them were indeed sent to Mauritius, simply because (as I said) they were part of the same colonial administrative district. But the country where a population unwillingly ends up after a forced expulsion does not thereby become the same country. (If things worked that way, then the history of Palestine - to name one obvious instance - would be very different.)
"The British case" for expelling the Chagos Islanders and keeping the base was indeed weak - but it was weak because of the expulsion of people from their territory, not because of the division of the territory. The case for the division of the territory - then and now - is legally strong. (Again, assuming that UN Resolution 1514 counts as "law"). Whether it is politically desirable is a separate question.
Yeah Im dubious that will stand up to be honest. You're talking them being administered together since before the British ruled them. You're talking hundreds of years. And my understanding you have to correct the coercive splitting of the territory, and then let the Mauritians and Chagos Islanders sort the future. A d of course Chagos Islanders independence would not help keep the base nor stop Chinese influence growing. Quite opposite really
But the "coercive splitting of the territory" was what was legally required at the time - so unsplitting it now would be in violation of that.
As far as "administered together since before the British ruled them", that is stretching the truth. They were administered together under French colonial rule from 1715 to 1810, but there was no one actually living on the Chagos Islands for most of that time. People only started living there in the 1770s. I don't think a few decades of shared French rule makes much of a difference to the case.
Again the article has misled the debate here. The British is not trying to be nice to the Chagos Islanders. It's trying to get everyone's agreement for the continuation of the base. And to also remove a running sore in its relations with other nations, particularly India
I assure you I haven't been misled. I've been following the Chagos Islands debates for literally 25 years. At no point have I suggested that the British are acting for ethical reasons (they certainly are not).
But regardless of the British motives, the ethically right (and, for what it is worth, legal) thing is to return the Chagos Islanders to the islands and keep them independent from Mauritius, both of which are in accordance with their wishes.
>illegal under UN decolonialisation law
Who cares? The UK practices parliamentary sovereignty and there's no such thing as international law. I personally think democracy is the best way to run society- would you agree? Assuming so, can you refresh my memory as to when the global elections were for the UN? Because there weren't any, there's no democratically elected world government that we all assented to, and thus no 'international law' of any consequence. You can't have laws without a government. Laws come from freely elected governments in sovereign countries, not technocrats. The UK is perfectly free to ignore the UN just as any other country can.
Frankly, the UK should leave the ECHR next
Sigh. I explained this already The fear from the *Americans who base it really is* was that if such a ruling was made, neighbouring countries would refuse to let their territory be used to connect to or supply Diego Garcia, rendering it useless.
Who are these neighboring countries? The US and UK could easily overpower them, c'mon
Oh really? How's Iran going for you guys.
And again *we don't want the sodding base*. It would have gone with the rest of Mauritius if it wasn't that the Americans wanted a base there
If the US doesn't make marijuana illegal again tomorrow, I'm worried that neighboring countries will invade us- after all, we're technically in violation of the 1961 UN Convention on Narcotics treaty we signed.
If the House of Lords stalls the bill, then I guess you guys do want the base, eh?
There are ~10,000 Chagossians, they can't just be paid off?
This is what happens when you elect an international human rights lawyer as your PM
The negotiations began under the previous government. It's a complete coincidence It's Starmer pushing it through. Again we began this process at the request of Biden