• barsoap
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    7 months ago

    People lived on Hawaii since time immemorial. They had a proper Kingdom and everything with the US meddling with putsches and coups, then they had a Republic, then the US annexed the whole thing, very much not with consent of the Hawaiians. That was 1898, statehood was granted in 1959. The Falklands were uninhabited, settled first by the French in 1764. They also enjoy autonomy in everything but foreign relations and defence and if they wanted to they would readily be granted independence, the situation couldn’t be more different. Practically speaking the relation of the Falklands to the UK is much more similar than that of Greenland to Denmark than that of, say, Indiana to the US federal government, which is the exact relationship Hawaii has with the federal government.

    Also it’s not by far the largest European overseas territory, that’d be French Guyana. Who btw overwhelmingly voted against becoming an overseas collectivity, they kept their status as “just another department” with no more autonomy than the departments in Europe. European colonialism died pretty much exactly with Algerian independence, what’s left are a flurry of overseas territories which we couldn’t get rid of if we wanted because they want to stay, politically, part of Europe.