Iron Britannia

by Anthony Barnett

  Nonetheless, one could still argue that if Britain had not used force and had agreed to concede sovereignty over the Falklands to Argentina after 2 April, while seeking only to safeguard the life of the inhabitants and offer them compensation, then this also would have made it seem that ‘might is right’. Argentina had gained something by force—wouldn’t this show that aggression pays? There are two kinds of answers to such a question. The first is in terms of the dispute itself. The kind of resolution to the conflict which has been suggested and which may well be implemented in the future is one that provides for local government under nominal Argentine sovereignty. The idea is obvious enough, as Newsweek put it,

  The trick is to recognize Argentine sovereignty over the islands while preserving the islanders’ right to govern themselves. The possible compromise: make the Falklands an autonomous region of Argentina…. Argentina would have to give up posting its troops, teachers and policemen on the islands and guarantee the islanders’ right to self-government…. Under such a scheme, the Argentines could claim to have vindicated their ancient claim to the islands. The British could be satisfied that London had honoured its promise to protect the islanders from dictators.26

  Such an arrangement would not have ‘rewarded’ the Junta if international supervision had been imposed. What kind of advertisement would it have been to their own people, if the UN were deployed to ensure that part of the local population retains its rights to free speech and assembly? If the Malvinas can have ‘democracy’, the Argentinian people might have argued, why can’t we? By insisting upon the withdrawal of the Junta’s troops (which was conceded in the negotiations), and granting sovereignty to the country of Argentina, Britain (and the UN) could have demonstrated how negotiation and consent are preferable to the use of force.

  But the second and larger answer to this question must be to challenge the pretentions that underlie the way it is posed. Iraq launched an unprovoked attack on Iran in 1980, and by the beginning of 1982 it was obvious to the whole world that—in a massive way—it had been shown that ‘aggression did not pay’. Yet this did not deflect the Argentinian Junta. Indeed, it shows just how obtuse the world is in this respect that when Thatcher went to the United Nations to speak at its special disarmament session, it was generally felt that she was a female Begin. US interviewers questioned her along these lines but she rebutted the comparison. He was gulty of aggression (though it seemed to be ‘paying’), while Britain had been acting in ‘self-defence’.

  The questioners were right. What lies behind Thatcher’s strictures against aggression is an imperial notation that favours it. Parkinson argued,

  Each success for the dictators sucks life from the democracies. Allow Argentina to make a colony of the Falklands and you make a potential prey of every little nation on earth.

  Thus the democracies, of whom there are so few, must protect all the little nations, of whom there are so many. This is really an argument for the West’s global dominion, albeit quietly put. A similar, subtle argument was put by the historian Trevor-Roper. He drew a comparison with 1770 when the Spanish Governor of Buenos Aires occupied the Falklands. According to Trevor-Roper, this action, which had the surreptitious encouragement of the French, threatened to upset the Treaty of Paris (1763), a Treaty which he regards as having ‘settled the world’ and as establishing the Pax Britannica. The British assembled a great fleet. The Spanish then relinquished the Falklands without a fight, but they did not renounce their claim to the sovereignty of the islands, which is why, apparently, they remain contested to this day. Trevor-Roper also argues that the British Government in 1770 (and Dr Johnson on its behalf) were right to resist demands that there had to be a war with Spain merely because it refused to endorse British claims on the Falklands. What was involved was the general ‘principle’ of the matter and the same is true today:

  The essential issue is the same…. That issue is not the possession of the islands … nor the wishes of the islanders …; it is the maintenance of real peace in the world…. If Spain had kepts its spoil in 1770 the signal would have been clear; the settlement of 1763 would have been everywhere at risk. Similarly, if Argentina had kept its spoil today, the rule of law would have been replaced by that of force and no undefended island would have been secure.27

  Trevor-Roper lends all his distinction to what is evidently an imperialist world-view: behind the ‘principle’ that aggression shall not pay is a definition of peace-Pax Britannica—which was once the incarnation of global expansionism.

  Hence also the foolishness of Michael Foot when he launched this argument in the first place in the House of Commons; that British ‘deeds’ were needed in the South Atlantic, ‘to ensure that a foul and brutal aggression does not succeed in our world. For if it does, there will be a danger not merely [a choice formulation] to the Falkland Islands, but to people all over this dangerous planet.’ In the same speech Foot also dismissed the idea that there is a ‘colonial dependence or anything of the sort’ involved in the Falklands. Yet any expedition by the UK to ‘put matters straight’ 7,000 miles away, necessarily reproduces some sort of colonial-style posture. Edward Thompson drew upon the real skills of a historian to see this truth about his own time and wrote soon after it began:

  The Falkland’s war is not about the islanders. It is about ‘face’. It is about domestic politics. It is about what happens when you twist a lion’s tail … [it is] a moment of imperial atavism, drenched with the nostalgias of those now in their later middle-age….28

  Even nostalgia, it transpires, is capable of renovation. What has surprised many is the vigour and ‘professionalism’ with which the Thatcherites have pursued their transports into the past. Britain covered its tracks towards the military demarche with a plethora of diplomatic notes and concessions as the Government humoured those who desired a peaceful settlement. Manoeuvres by General Haig and at the UN seem to have been followed with alarm rather than desire by the War Cabinet. For example, after the landing at San Carlos, ‘their fear of a ceasefire imposed by the UN appears to have led cabinet ministers to demand a premature push out from the beachhead…’.29

  Above all, the attack on the General Belgrano remains to be explained. It was sunk on 2 May by the British nuclear powered ‘hunter-killer’ submarine, the Conqueror. After the Conqueror sailed back into the Clyde on 3 July, flying the skull and crossbones traditional for a submarine that has just made a ‘kill’, its commander confirmed that the General Belgrano had been attacked thirty miles outside the British-declared ‘total exclusion zone’, apparently without a warning and under direct orders from Fleet headquarters in the UK. Not only had he been in constant touch with the Fleet Commander in Britain, but the final order to attack was confirmed by London. Over three hundred of Argentina’s sailors died as the second ship in its fleet went down in 40 minutes, under the impact of two conventional torpedoes. Questioned by Healey, Nott admitted in Parliament that the Belgrano had been some hundreds of miles away from the British task force. It thus posed no immediate threat. Why, then, was it sunk? An interview given by the President of Peru sheds an interesting light, as he was very active in the peace negotiations and had come up with an intiative that the British had apparently been obliged to accept and which he felt Argentina was on the verge of agreeing to. The President thought that ‘on 2 May we were very close to a settlement, which was frustrated with the sinking of the Belgrano.’ And he continued:

  What was unfortunate was that violence impeded the accord. The very unfortunate sinking of the Belgrano at that very point also sank all the peace proposals we had made. This didn’t have any justification. This was an act committed outside the area proscribed by Great Britain. And this created a very disagreeable climate. I still cannot console myself that the proposal I made wasn’t approved the morning of May 2. With it we would have avoided the loss of the Belgrano, the loss of almost 400 young lives (on the ship) and the loss of the Sheffield and all the destruction that has come afterwards.30

/>   Until the Belgrano went down, the conflict had been virtually bloodless—the only loss of life involved a small number of Argentinian commandos during the assaults on Port Stanley and South Georgia. The sinking of Argentina’s cruiser was the real start of the fighting war, not the brief skirmishes a month before. It was, furthermore, illegal. After interviewing a member of the cabinet, Hugo Young concluded,

  The purpose of the war cabinet’s apparently intense search for peace had been … to make the British understand why they had to go to war; in other words, to maximize the chances that they would face and tolerate the casualties that were sure to come. From this it is hard to avoid the conclusions that the peace efforts were in part a charade….31

  Undoubtedly the Junta should have accepted the final UK peace proposal, even though it was drawn up to cast London in the best possible light and even though it was hard to swallow after the huge loss of life on the Belgrano.32 But the British finely calculated that Galtieri was enough of a diplomatic pigmy to be out-manoeuvred, and he was. Nonetheless, Argentina only attacked because it did not believe that there would be a war. When the Thatcher government determined on a riposte, the Junta made concessions and offered to withdraw its forces. In response the British ordered the militarily needless and illegal—might we say aggressive?—sinking of the Belgrano, which ensured that a war did indeed take place. It was a crime even though the cruiser was a military target.

  Since the end of the conflict in June various arguments in defence of the sinking of the Belgrano have been proposed. One is that it had Exocet missiles on board. But the cruiser and its escorts were hours away from the British task force and were not apparently heading towards it. Another claim is that after the Belgrano was sunk, the Argentinian navy was intimidated into staying in port, which was very helpful in the subsequent battle. This argument overlooks the obvious fact, however, that had the Belgrano not been destroyed there might not have been a full-scale military clash at all.

  In her Cheltenham address, Thatcher claimed ‘We fought to show that aggression does not pay and that the robber cannot be allowed to get away with his swag’. She likes a homely phrase and a simple moral to get the popular virtues of her politics across. To answer in kind—as far as her South Atlantic adventure is concerned—we may conclude by saying that two wrongs do not make a right.

  At the End of the Day

  On 20 May the House of Commons discussed the Falklands question on the eve of the landings. Thatcher opened the debate in trenchant style and concluded her speech with the following, which was presumably a carefully drafted final statement of her war aims, prior to the decisive fighting on the ground.

  The principles that we are defending are fundamental to everything that this Parliament and this country stand for. They are the principles of democracy and the rule of law. Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in violation of the rights of peoples to determine by whom and in what way they are governed. Its aggression was committed against a people who are used to enjoying full human rights and freedom. It was executed by a Government with a notorious record in suspending and violating those same rights. Britain has a responsibility towards the Islanders to restore their democratic way of life. She has a duty to the whole world to show that aggression will not succeed and to uphold the cause of freedom.

  We are now in a position to examine, clause by clause, this cardinal justification of the British military action.

  (1) Britain must defend ‘the principles of democracy and the rule of law’. The sinking of the General Belgrano was illegal and therefore criminal. It led to the collapse of the major peace talks. It was an action committed on the British side, almost certainly at Thatcher’s orders. For democracy see below.

  (2) ‘Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in violation of the rights of peoples to determine by whom and in what way they were governed.’ It did so, but Argentina’s claim to territorial sovereignty is good, while a people do not have an absolute right to determine that they should be ruled by a distant, expecially by a non-contiguous state. As we have seen from a glance at the Munich agreement of 1938, this fact—that the right of self-determination of peoples subject to overlapping territorial claims is not a decisive guide for policy—was established at a mighty cost in world war. While the rights of the Falklanders to the choice of their sovereignty was summarily ‘violated’, their right is not an absolute one (and none of them was killed).

  (3) ‘Argentina’s aggression was committed against a people who are used to enjoying the full human rights and freedom.’ This is a farcical description of the actual conditions in the British colony.

  (4) ‘It was executed by a Government with a notorious record in suspending and violating those same human rights.’ Correct.

  (5) ‘Britain has a responsibility towards the Islanders to restore their democratic way of life.’ In so far as they had such a life it was not immediately destroyed by Argentina’s takeover. The dismissal of the Colonial executive was not a huge blow against local democracy. The local self-government of the islanders could and should have been improved and increased by the establishment of an autonomous, local administration, that could and should have been obtained under Argentina’s sovereignty. That was the full extent of Britain’s responsibility after the Junta’s invasion—to ensure nonviolently the preservation of local self-government.

  (6) Britain ‘has a duty to the whole world to show that aggression will not succeed and to uphold the cause of freedom’. The ‘whole world’ will come to its own conclusion about the British action and London’s attitude towards aggression, one that is unlikely to accord with Thatcher’s rhetoric about her desire for ‘freedom’.

  This leaves one last claim in Thatcher’s statement of Britain’s war aims in the Falklands: ‘The principles that we are defending are fundamental to everything that this Parliament and this country stand for.’ In so far as she describes the will and character of Parliament, we can do nothing but agree. But do the politics of Thatcher and Parliament represent what Britain stands for? Is their kind of sovereignty the one which its peoples will stand for now and forever? The answer will be contested.

  Notes

  1 See Nigel Williamson, Tribune, 25 June 1982, for a useful summary of this episode. Also, John Madely, ‘Diego Garcia: a contrast to the Falklands’, Minority Rights Group, Report 54 (36 Craven St., London WC2; £1.20).

  2 See A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1918-1945, Oxford 1965, p. 426, who notes that the New Statesman took a similar stand.

  3 Keith Middlemas, Diplomacy of Illusion, London 1972, pp. 346 and 375.

  4 London, 1982, pp. 51 and 53.

  5 Middlemas, as cited, p. 341.

  6 15 April 1982.

  7 Lord Shackleton and others, Economic Survery of the Falkland Islands, London 1976.

  8 Guardian, 30 April 1982.

  9 The Times, 29 April 1982.

  10 Latin American Bureau, The Falklands — Malvinas, Whose Crisis? (forthcoming).

  11 The Times, 3 June 1982.

  12 Patrick Bishop, Observer, 20 June, 1982.

  13 Gareth Parry, Guardian, 3 July 1982.

  14 John Witherow, The Times, 29 June 1982.

  15 9 August 1982.

  16 Sunday Times, 1 August 1982. Winchester’s report was especially notable for its lack of sentimentality as he was jailed in Argentina for most of the war.

  17 Robin Fox, Listener, 15 July 1982.

  18 Listener, 8 July 1982. Could it have been that the ‘2 Para’ knew, as Fox did not, that they were if anything the Persians at Thermopylae….

  19 Anthony Arblaster, The Falklands. Thatcher’s War, Labour’s Guilt, a spirited Socialist Society pamphlet (available from 7 Carlisle Street, London W.1., £1).

  20 The list is taken from a Sunday Times’ sketch of the War Cabinet, 30 May 1982. In addition, Clive Whitmore, Thatcher’s principal private secretary, attended most War Cabinet Meetings; see Guardian, 23 July 1982.

  21 Sunday Telegraph, 4 July 1982.r />
  22 The Times, 7 May 1982.

  23 Speech to the Welsh Conservative Conference, Guardian, 14 June 1982.

  24 Guardian, 12 June 1982, in the Terry Coleman interview.

  25 Sunday Times, 13 June 1982

  26 John Walcott, Newsweek, 24 May 1982.

  27 Hugh Trevor-Roper, Daily Telegraph, 28 May 1982.

  28 The Times, 29 April 1982, reproduced in Zero Option, London 1982.

  29 John Shirley, Sunday Times, 20 June 1982.

  30 Interview with President of Peru, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, Newsweek, 7 June 1982.

  31 Sunday Times, 4 July 1982.

  32 For the full text of the ‘final’ British position, The Times, 21 May 1982.

  8 The Logic of Sovereignty

  THE SWIFT conclusion of the Falklands conflict has added to the unreality that surrounded the affair. The issue of the islands themselves will hardly disappear while the UK and Argentina remain in contention over them. But there is already a sense in which the intense battle of April to June 1982 seems to be receding into Britain’s past. All the opposition parties, of course, have an obvious vested interest in shifting the media’s attention from Thatcher’s triumph. References to the Falklands Factor ‘wearing off’ can be heard with a stress that is clearly intended to hasten the process, as if the eruption of the war was merely an interference with the real politics of contemporary Britain. It is not hard to see why Michael Foot and his companions on the opposition front-bench (along with their Alliance counterparts) should feel this way. At the high point of his ‘splendid’ parliamentary challenge on 3 April, Foot must have felt that he would soon be walking through the door of No. 10, the new patriot summoned by the country in the moment of crisis. Instead, Thatcher drove home the sword he presented to her with his demand for ‘deeds’, and Foot’s popularity rating slumped to a historic low.