WHEN Adrian Mole, a fictional teenage diarist of the early 1980s, tells his father that the Falkland Islands have been invaded, Mr Mole shoots out of bed. He “thought the Falklands lay off the coast of Scotland”.
That Britain still had sovereignty over some islands in the South Atlantic seemed strange. Sending a naval task force 8,000 miles to fight for a thinly inhabited imperial relic seemed even stranger. In some ways the conflict has come to seem even stranger since 1982. However, the Falklands campaign still shapes the politics of Britain.
As Hew Strachan of Oxford University puts it, America’s experience in Vietnam had made war seem messy and unpredictable. Lady Thatcher’s victory suggested that war could achieve political ends quickly and efficiently. Britain’s armed forces came to seem noble and professional: the “best in the world”.
In retrospect, observes Mr Strachan, it was the first in a series of short, sharp, expeditionary wars that Britain fought: later came the first Gulf war, Kosovo and the intervention in Sierra Leone. Consciously or not, the triumph in the South Atlantic may have affected Britain’s appetite for those engagements.
It all ended in Afghanistan and Iraq—missions that have involved elusive opponents, changing rationales and disappointingly uncertain outco
mes. But the Falklands war—which was fought against a state, for a simple cause and ended in an absolute victory—still inspires pride and nostalgia in Britain.
Because of the war, the navy was protected from cuts. Today the government estimates the cost of its commitment to the islands, including its garrison and air and sea links to Britain, as £200m ($318m) a year.
Sir Lawrence Freedman, the war’s official historian, claims that Argentina does not want to repeat the war, which triggered the end of military dictatorship and the advent of democracy. Subsequent governments have, however, retained their country’s claim to what Argentines call “Las Malvinas”. Cristina Fernández, Argentina’s president, has energetically pressed the case by other means (in a bid, some argue, to distract voters’ attention from high inflation and other economic woes).
Recent steps by her administration have been designed to impede tourism along with fishing, and even Argentina’s overall trade with Britain.
“Everything they’ve done makes us deeply suspicious of everything they’ve offered us,” says Dick Sawle, a member of the Falklands’ legislative assembly.
Ms Fernández has tried to enlist other governments in the region to her campaign—likely to intensify if oil is produced in the islands’ waters. Rockhopper, an energy firm, found oil offshore in 2010, and says it expects to start production in 2016.
For its part, the British government says it is absolutely committed to the islanders’ right of self-determination. They overwhelmingly wish to stay British, a desire that is the basis of the British claim to sovereignty. Compromise would anyway be impossible while the war is a living memory: polls suggest that public opinion in mainland Britain is firmly against any concession.
Jeremy Browne, the Foreign Office minister responsible for Falklands policy, observes that tension over the Falklands is worse now than it was 15 years ago. The war’s impact on Argentina was much more dramatic. However, quietly and enduringly, it left its mark on Britain, too.
adapted from The Economist
