The Genesis of the Falklands (Malvinas) Conflict

Argentina, Britain and the Failed Negotiations of the 1960s

M. González, N. Ashton, N. Ashton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137354235
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing on a wide range of British and Argentine sources, this book highlights the importance of the neglected 1960s as the decade in which the dormant Falklands (Malvinas) dispute became reactivated, developing into a dynamic set of bilateral negotiations on the question of sovereignty.

1

The Breakdown of the Status Quo

‘I am firmly of the view that our best policy is to let sleeping dogs lie’. Such was the conclusion of a long despatch on the dispute by Sir George Middleton, the British ambassador to Buenos Aires, in November 1963. But the length and tone of the report indicated that ‘the most somnolent of sleeping dogs’ had already reawakened.¹ Indeed, less than a year later Argentina and Britain were embroiled in the first round of a bitter diplomatic encounter at the United Nations Decolonization Committee – the culmination of the gradual revival of a conflict that had remained in obscurity for most of the hundred years that followed the British occupation of the archipelago in 1833. Most ‘northern’ scholars have blamed Argentine nationalism, and particularly its finest interlocutor, Juan Perón, for this revival. ‘It was the charismatic Perón’, writes Calvert, ‘in the days of his unquestioned power, who breathed new life into an old diplomatic grievance, and made the expansion of Argentina into the South Atlantic and the Antarctic regions a major part of his programme to get Argentina recognised as a Latin American and world power’.² Escudé, Kinney, Dodds and Freedman agree,³ and this view also permeated a significant portion of the British and North American press coverage of the 1982 crisis, as shown by the frequent comparisons made between Perón and Galtieri in the wake of the Argentine landing.⁴ In the 1940s and 1950s Peronist propaganda articulated and disseminated an imaginary sense of territorial loss which, it is argued, emboldened Argentina to seek the recovery of the islands. The parallel collapse of the once exemplary Anglo-Argentine partnership, Buenos Aires’ frustrations at the freezing of territorial expansionism imposed by the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, and the opportunities opened up by the new UN-sponsored ‘anti-colonial zeitgeist’ are all said to have further fuelled the Malvinas crusade under the General’s ‘indoctrinated’ successors. So widespread is the conviction about Argentina’s offensive and aggressive intent that we are even told, in one of the most respected analyses of the dispute, that the South American nation would have seized the archipelago in the early 1960s had it not been for the international community’s moderating influence.⁵ Thus the events of April 1982 ought to have been discernible 20 –if not 40– years earlier.

‘Southern’ pundits are in a way accomplices of this perspective, since they, too, portray Argentine post-1930 policies towards the islands as the result of a national awakening, and the postwar involvement of a progressively democratised UN as a historic opportunity ‘to force the obstinate interlocutor to change its attitude’.⁶ This crusade is viewed as the fight for a just cause (nothing less than the re-establishment of the country’s territorial integrity). While pro-Peronist analysts proudly concede that it was the General who initiated the malvinización of Argentine foreign policy, their anti-Peronist counterparts like to remind them that the Argentine case only received the world’s endorsement thanks to the diplomatic offensive of a Radical administration.⁷ Additionally, even though most of these accounts depict the revival of the dispute as an Argentine initiative, some make passing references to sinister British manoeuvres to grant the Falklands independence under the cover of decolonisation as an extra justification for Argentine activism. Interestingly, for example, the foreign minister between 1963 and 1966, Miguel Ángel Zavala Ortiz, later recalled that this last had been the driving force behind his government’s energetic policy on the Malvinas problem, both at the UN and at the Organization of American States: ‘Had we not been careful, Great Britain would have certainly presented the Malvinas Islands as an independent country with the right to participate as such in the American community of nations’.⁸

Building on these insights, this chapter portrays the reawakening of the Anglo-Argentine dispute as the unintended product of mutual fears and essentially defensive policies. The first two sections show that Buenos Aires was increasingly concerned at the potential revision of the islands’ political status in an era of British decolonisation and mounting international attention to colonial problems. Since it was perceived that such a revision could proceed in ways that might be highly detrimental to the Argentine claim, Peronist and post-Peronist governments reacted to the danger by increasing the dispute’s profile in their foreign and domestic policies. Even though this was a pragmatic and ultimately defensive strategy, the second half of the chapter explains how, in the early 1960s, it came to be interpreted by British policymakers as a nationalistic, aggressive and opportunistic gambit that compounded the wider problems London was facing in divesting itself of its remaining imperial relics. The Falklands were seen in Whitehall, from the outset, as a particularly cumbersome case of decolonisation, and although there initially was a certain degree of complacency about Britain’s ability to deal with the onslaught, it was increasingly feared that the Argentine diplomatic offensive could exploit London’s vulnerability at the UN and negatively affect the British standing in other territorial disputes. The response would also be inherently defensive – yet Argentine leaders would construe it as further proof of their anxieties. Hence the confrontation that crystallised in 1964 was born out of a typical security dilemma: the policies implemented by each party to secure their respective position were perceived by the other as threatening and revisionist.⁹ In these circumstances, Ambassador Middleton’s words reveal nostalgia for the past and wishful thinking for the future rather than a realistic appreciation of an intractable present.

Argentine Fears and the ‘Invention of the Malvinas’¹⁰

After the Second World War and the gradual demise of the British Empire, Argentine policymakers were forced to come to grips with the prospect of the erosion of the status quo in the South Atlantic. That status quo was of course far from ideal for Buenos Aires, which had claimed sovereignty over the archipelago ever since its loss, and had protested several times against London’s act of conquest.¹¹ Indeed, since the late 1920s a more assertive Argentina, at the zenith of its power and emboldened by the nationalist ideas that were then beginning to take root among part of its intelligentsia, had begun to display a growing measure of irredentism towards the islands. Particularly since the coup of 1930 the government had actively promoted the indoctrination of public opinion through the dissemination of maps and school textbooks with explicit references to the nation’s rights over the Malvinas; it had shown a greater determination to exercise administrative authority over those Falklanders visiting the mainland; and it had waged intermittent ‘philatelic wars’ against the British postal service.¹² As illustrated by the famous five-hour speech to the Senate by the Socialist representative Alfredo Palacios in 1934, or by the publication that same year of Argentina and British Imperialism by the Irazusta brothers, politicians and intellectuals had joined the bandwagon in appealing for the restoration of Argentine territorial integrity.¹³ Perón’s ascent to power in 1946 marked the culmination of this process. During his presidency a National Day of the Malvinas was decreed, a special Antarctic and Malvinas Islands Department was established within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the teaching of the subject at school was made compulsory, scholarly research on the islands flourished, and Perón himself nourished this revival with constant public allusions to the occupied territory.

Yet for more than a hundred years the claim had been overshadowed by the ‘Anglo-Argentine connection’, that very special relationship whereby Britain became Argentina’s crucial partner in the world – the best customer for her beef and grain, the source of her capital, the builder of her railways, the model for her navy, the fixer of her Andean boundaries, the motherland of her thriving British community, and, most importantly, the external balancer to her greatest regional competitor, the ascending United States. By the 1930s Argentina had become Britain’s ‘sixth dominion’, or the paradigmatic example of London’s ‘informal empire’.¹⁴ No nationalistic rhetoric could silence this reality. Thus, ironically, in January 1933, while Buenos Aires vigorously protested the British issuing of stamps commemorating the centenary of the Falklands colony, the Argentine vice-president arrived in London to seal the Roca–Runciman pact, which extended to Argentina the commercial privileges reserved for Commonwealth dominions. Neither its leadership’s flirtations with the fascist powers (whose intelligence services worked actively to stir up Argentine irredentism) nor the temptations arising from British weakness during the war translated into an Argentine military move on the islands. Churchill’s 1942 decision to garrison the colony against a possible takeover by German or Argentine forces might have played a role in deterring Buenos Aires, but it was mainly economic calculations which explain Argentine restraint. After all, Argentina was making enormous gains out of the Anglo-Argentine connection, which thrived during the war due to Britain’s desperate need for primary products. Since Argentina was even willing to accept being paid through blocked sterling balances (secured on British assets in Argentina), and since her neutral status actually made her a politically more difficult target for German warships, Britain for its part categorically refused to join the USA in the imposition of sanctions against Buenos Aires. Thus, from the Argentine perspective, an assault on the Falklands would have been suicidal: since it would have been interpreted as an unmistakable attack on the British Empire, it would have forced London to join Washington in a united Anglo-American front that would have deprived Argentina of its economic lifeline – all for the sake of an archipelago of little or no material value.¹⁵

It is true, as Dodds has observed, that ‘territorial disputes with Britain (…) were given considerable public precedence under Perón’s presidential years’ as part of a more general postwar unravelling of the Anglo-Argentine special relationship.¹⁶ But scholars have overstated Perón’s alleged nationalistic urge to evict the British from the South Atlantic. Argentine actual actions, as opposed to mere rhetoric, were carefully limited to Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic islands – that is, what Britain regarded as the Falkland Islands Dependencies. Thus in its annual Antarctic campaigns, the first of which was launched in the southern summer of 1946–1947, the Argentine navy established a string of military and scientific bases in the Antarctic Peninsula and in the nearby South Shetland and South Orkney archipelagos – all claimed by Britain. These operations provoked incidents between the two countries in 1947 and, most seriously, in 1952, when Argentine forces intervened to prevent the landing of a British scientific party at Hope Bay.¹⁷ The latter episode led the British government, then again under Churchill, to upgrade the Falklands’ defence. Yet notwithstanding Churchill’s worries, which his own Foreign Office deemed exaggerated,¹⁸ Argentina’s policies in Antarctica stood in stark contrast to its inaction over the Falklands, where Buenos Aires knew it would be challenging a consolidated British settlement. Whereas Antarctica was a contested territory (not simply de jure, but also and most crucially de facto) presenting Buenos Aires with a range of geopolitical opportunities that could be exploited through the medium of military-backed scientific expeditions, the Falklands were, at least for the time being, a closed issue. Hence the difference in strategies: whereas a prudent use of force was deemed appropriate to enforce the Antarctic claims, diplomacy was relied upon to voice the pretensions over the Falklands, both through the advocacy of the country’s case in international forums and via discreet attempts to raise the issue in bilateral contacts.¹⁹

Public pronouncements aside, the status quo in the Falklands was one that Buenos Aires was prepared to live with, even if ever more grudgingly. At the very least this situation kept the dispute within strict bilateral channels, and Argentine leaders – while protecting the country’s legal rights through routine protests – could expect that sooner or later Britain would make a gentlemanly gesture and return the islands to its long-standing South American friend.²⁰ Even if this did not happen, time appeared to be on Argentina’s side, as Perón noted:

Time offers men the best form of justice. We must, therefore, confidently wait because, if at this point what justly belongs to us is not acknowledged as ours, the progressively greater power of Argentina and time will form the undisputable basis of our rights. Some day, probably, if justice does not prevail, we shall make Argentine rights prevail, if necessary by the use of force.²¹

But Perón’s patience could not hide the general sense of unease that began to pervade Argentine official minds during the 1940s and 1950s, and that would turn into heightened concern immediately after 1960, as Buenos Aires witnessed impotently a drastic change in the rules of the game brought about by the prospect of British decolonisation. This change undermined the relative comfort that had typified Argentina’s handling of the dispute in its first hundred years, and belied Perón’s confidence in the shifting balance of power in the South Atlantic as the mechanism that would naturally solve the problem in Argentina’s favour. The fear that British decolonisation might instead result in the transformation of the Falklands into an autonomous entity, or in the internationalisation of their status, pushed Argentine leaders – including Perón himself – into a more active posture. It is this fear, rather than the rise of nationalism, that explains the gradual revival of the cause of the Malvinas in Buenos Aires’ foreign policy.

Argentine anxieties were evident as early as 1940. At an inter-American summit of foreign ministers in Havana, held immediately after the fall of France and the Low Countries in the Second World War, Argentine diplomats fought a rearguard battle against a US-inspired proposal to establish a joint administration by the American republics of any European territory in the Western Hemisphere that risked falling in the Axis’ hands. Washington was clearly thinking in terms of the British, French and Dutch colonies in the Caribbean rather than about the Falklands, but Buenos Aires regarded with alarm the eventuality of an internationalisation of the control of the disputed archipelago – a scenario that was not so hypothetical considering the war’s rapid extension into the South Atlantic through the Battle of the River Plate in December 1939. Argentina therefore only consented to the American proposal under the condition that European possessions claimed by American republics were exempted. The delegation explicitly reserved Argentina’s rights over the Falklands and made it clear that if the British occupation there ceased, the islands would pass under Argentine sovereignty and not under hemispheric supervision.²²

At the San Francisco Conference of 1945, in the debate on the establishment of an international trusteeship system within the United Nations, the Argentine delegate declared that ‘under no circumstances could the Argentine Republic ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Breakdown of the Status Quo
• 2  The Battle at the UN
• 3  The Decision for Negotiations: (i) The Triple Deterrent
• 4  The Decision for Negotiations: (ii) The Reasonable Claimant
• 5  Sovereignty on the Table
• 6  The Impossible Transfer
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index