Our world has seen a proliferation of very small countries. It’s not clear if that’s a good or a bad thing, but it does add an element of weirdness into keeping on top of macroeconomics.
Yesterday provided an example of how this happens. The International Court of Justice made a ruling siding with Mauritius that the Chagos Archipelago should be returned to that country. In and of itself, that’s a little weird: Mauritius has equal standing with the UK in international circles, because it’s a state with a country. It also has claims to be a nation, even though no one lived there permanently until the French started building plantations in the 1700’s.
I have a suspicion that this is going to end up with the Chagos Islands declaring independence from Mauritius, because they’re a thousand miles away across the open ocean.
I don’t think an element of “who cares” would be uncalled for here. Unfortunately, there are a lot of countries around the world that no one cared about until some problem there percolated to the top of the news cycle. So here’s the backstory.
The Chagos Archipelago is a group of atolls in the middle of the Indian Ocean (similar to tourist destinations like The Maldives and The Seychelles). The French claimed them, brought in people to work coconut plantations, and ruled them from Mauritius (a more substantial island, famous as the home of the now extinct dodo). In 1810 they ceded all of that to the UK. In 1965 the UK split the Chagos from Mauritius, and then leased one of the Chagos atolls to the U.S. military.
That atoll is Diego Garcia, which does pop up in the news in the U.S. once in a while. Usually this is as a landing strip for bombers and other long-range aircraft. Do note that the original reason to militarize the island was to watch for ICBM’s from the Soviet Union going the long way around the South Pole, which was a serious concern at the time. That morphed into the island being used to monitor spacecraft of all kinds (particularly manned ones that might be in trouble and needed to phone home over that part of the world); prior to that ships had to be on station in the Indian Ocean at all times.
Two things are important going forward though. One, the UN has a rule that colonies are supposed to be fixed until granted independence, so they can’t be split into non-functional entities easily dominated from the outside. Except that’s what the UK did. And they also deported all the islanders to Mauritius.
So, here’s what I see happening. The UK has little interest in fighting this ruling. I’m sure Mauritius wants these distant atolls for potential resource extraction. But, my guess is that the former Chagos islanders have not been well assimilated into Mauritius, and will want to go back (even though as a people they only lived there for about 200 years). Then they will want independence because they’re a lot closer to The Maldives, The Seychelles, India, and Sri Lanka than they are to Mauritius.. Give it a few years.
And why will this come up in the news in your future? Climate change. It’s become a commonplace for nations of atolls to ask for special aid from richer countries in case sea levels rise substantially in the future.
So, you heard it here first: in your middle age, these islands are going to be a country that pops up in your news feed.
No comments:
Post a Comment