While researching this book I interviewed a former minister in the Thatcher government. As we sat in his private members club, sipping tea and balancing biscuits on delicate china saucers, he told me that British ministers had given little thought to the human rights abuses being committed by the Argentine dictatorship in the years before the Falklands war. It was the Cold War he reminded me. I was surprised and impressed by his frankness, but when I wrote to him afterwards asking for permission to cite his exact words, he refused and instead supplied me with an anodyne quote which bore little relation to his previous remarks.
Interviewees can be unreliable sources for historians. It is hard for anyone to remember accurately events from decades before. Politicians, especially, can be prone to embellish or omit facts to ensure that they are remembered in the best possible light. But after a war, the temptation to embroider or erase is particularly great. It is therefore vital that we go back to the contemporary records to find out what government ministers and officials actually said at the time.
Using the newly-opened British government papers at the National Archives, this book looks at Britain’s relations with the Argentine dictatorship that came to power in 1976. It not only gives the most complete picture of British arms sales to the regime, providing evidence that ministers violated their own guidelines on human rights, but also outlines the political and military links between Britain and the junta. Neither Labour nor Conservative governments imposed any sanctions on the Argentine military government before the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982. Both governments promoted trade and sold military hardware that was later used against British forces.
In contrast, the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan (1974–1979) imposed a series of measures against the regime of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile that represented an early example of an ‘ethical’ foreign policy—an arms embargo, a refugee programme, the cutting of export credits and the withdrawal of the British ambassador. These measures were overturned when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government came to power in 1979. While the British labour movement barely noticed the coup in Argentina in 1976, it had been horrified when Hawker Hunter planes bombed the Chilean presidential palace on 11 September 1973. Thirty years later, the Chilean coup still aroused passionate divisions among British politicians. Speaking to the Labour Party conference in 1999, Tony Blair confessed that he found General Pinochet ‘unspeakable’, while Peter Mandelson, an architect of New Labour, which sought to eradicate naïve leftism from the party’s ideology, declared that it would be ‘gut-wrenching’ if the former Chilean dictator evaded extradition to Spain. 1 Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her ex-chancellor Norman Lamont, meanwhile, spoke out in defence of Pinochet as a ‘friend of Britain’.
The opening of the archives has also made it possible to investigate whether the British government had economic or strategic reasons for retaining sovereignty over the Falkland Islands —a longstanding debate between Argentine and British academics and politicians. While the documentary record suggests that fear of a domestic political outcry over ‘selling-out’ the Islanders was the primary reason British politicians failed to reach a sovereignty deal with Argentina in this period, the evidence presented here shows that the British government and British oil companies were very interested in exploiting the oil in the waters around the Islands and that whenever cabinet ministers discussed the Falklands dispute, securing Britain’s access to the hydrocarbon and other marine resources was part of the calculations. This book also presents exclusive evidence that, during the Falklands War, ministers feared that losing the Islands could set a precedent for Britain’s territorial claim in Antarctica .
But this is not a history of the Falklands dispute, nor is it simply an account of Britain’s relations with two South American dictatorships; it is an investigation into the making of foreign policy. Taking an inter-disciplinary approach, it assesses the factors that influence policy-makers and considers the role of private companies and banks, politicians and party ideology, and the media. It gauges the extent to which human right groups, solidarity campaigns and other social movements can have an impact on policy.
The attitudes of British diplomats and officials are also looked at closely. British diplomats welcomed the coups in both Chile and Argentina and sought to dissuade Labour ministers from taking any type of sanction against the military regimes. In this Cold War period, they were profoundly suspicious of radicalism both at home and abroad. British business leaders shared these attitudes and were critical of any policies that might ‘sour the atmosphere’ for those who wished to invest or trade with these dictatorships. This book examines the narrow social background of British officials and traces the informal social networks between diplomats, officials, business leaders, and other influential figures such as newspaper editors, peers and Conservative politicians. It argues that theoretical approaches to foreign policy-making should not ignore the social class of state officials nor the social context in which they operate. Similarly, when analysing how social movements can influence policy, it is important to consider the existing biases of policy-makers and their informal links to the private sector or other influential societal groups.
One of the central themes of this work is the extent to which elected politicians have the freedom to implement policy and how far they are constrained by external factors: the agency-structure debate. One of the main divisions among international relations theorists is between those who focus on relationships between states and those who think it important to look at how decisions are made within states. Informed by foreign policy analysts who seek to ‘open the black box’ of the decision-making process, this study looks closely at how policy is made. 2 While acknowledging that policy-makers may be constrained by systemic factors, it accepts that there is, in Christopher Hill’s words, a ‘decisional space’ in which politicians can choose between different policy options or, as Gaskarth has put it: ‘The British government retains the capacity to make political choices and these decisions have important effects.’ 3 It accepts too, as Carlsnaes notes, that neither the individual (the national politician) nor the structure (the international area) is an immutable separate entity: each continually influences and shapes the other. 4 The book is based on the premise that the state remains a legitimate focus of study for understanding international relations, despite the growth of transnational organisations, such as multinational corporations or international non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Certainly, during the period under study—the 1970s and 1980s—and to a large extent today, nation states retain a capacity to shape the rules of the international game, formulating policies on key areas such as trade, tax and immigration. 5
A politician may have the freedom to make foreign-policy choices within the constraints of international circumstances, but there is another aspect of the agency-structure debate that is looked at more closely in these pages and that is the extent to which a politician is able to pursue his or her chosen policies in the face of bureaucratic opposition from the civil service. Or to put it another way, it asks who makes policy: the democratically-elected politician or the appointed official? David Vital, for example, once suggested that the very excellence of the Foreign Office bureaucratic machine, its efficiency and its competence, made its influence so formidable that the role of any Cabinet or Foreign Secretary could become marginal. 6 The question has been of particular interest to the left wing of the Labour party which, from Harold Laski and Stafford Cripps in the 1930s to Richard Crossman and Tony Benn in the 1960s and 1970s, has long held the suspicion that a conservative civil service will seek to undermine left-wing governments. 7 Crossman’s diaries were one of the sources of the BBC TV comedy Yes Minister, which portrayed Machiavellian civil servants as the real power behind the throne.
Foreign Office documents show that Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) officials welcomed the overthrow of the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, and were critical of British activists and Labour politicians who campaigned against the coup. Thus, the election of a Labour government determined to take radical measures against the Pinochet regime provides an opportunity...