By the same token, Thatcher’s standing took on a new national dimension and she dominated the political stage by the war’s end. The Conservatives began to harp on the enduring, long-term need for the ‘spirit of the South Atlantic’. Nigel Lawson, one of the outstanding advocates of Thatcher’s economic strategy, declared that ‘the profound importance of this event cannot be overemphasized’. He was not referring to the EEC’s decision to override British wishes on food prices, at once a major and humbling blow to the national ‘sovereignty’ and to the Government’s anti-inflation drive. It was instead the South Atlantic that had captured Lawson’s attention:
The long years of retreat and self-doubt are over. A new self-respect, a new self-confidence, and a new sense of pride in ourselves has been born. It is the rebirth of Britain.1
The virtues of born-again nationalism will surely be sung to the next election if not beyond. In her Cheltenham attack on the train drivers’ union and the hospital workers, Thatcher emphasized,
We have to see that the spirit of the South Atlantic, the real spirit of Britain, is kindled not only by the war but can now be fired by peace.
Her partisan and class purpose are evident, but caution is needed before denying her claim. If the Falklands did not bring out the real spirit of Britain, the war certainly revealed a spirit of nationalism. Should we dismiss the Falklands adventure as an escapist interruption of what is actually British? Nigel Lawson’s economic theories were in the process of erosion as they clashed with the stubborn noncompliance of British society. The true passion of the Falklands for him was almost certainly its contrasting decisiveness. Which was also what attracted Thatcher into battle in the first place. Just as it was the failure of Britain’s industrial economy that propelled Thatcher into office, so the economic and political frustration she experienced, in turn, drove her to action rather than negotiation in the South Atlantic. The long relative economic decline and party political crisis of the UK determined the military diversion and remains its ‘underlying’ cause. That is why the war should not be seen as some kind of excrescence or interference in the normal run of things. If it was a minor ‘accident’, it was also part of the more general breakdown. Why bother with the ‘form’ of the crisis, when what we should be concerned about is its ‘real’ content? The short answer is simply, that content only appears in one form or another.
The longer answer concerns the need to project with plausibility a society different from Parliament’s idea of Britain. For it must be emphasized again that while she exploited the opportunity it presented, the Falklands conflict was not just Thatcher’s war. On the one hand, this means that her attempt to utilize the war for political purposes—to expropriate it as her demonstration of fortitude—may yet rebound to her discredit. On the other hand, it means that the left especially should not forget the powerful feelings of nostalgia and solidarity that the fighting engendered, sentiments that apparently engulfed a majority in all social classes.
The surprise was part of the trick in gaining their endorsement. For the dispatch of the fleet was not the result of any argued majority, let alone consensus, within the public domain. The crudity of the House of Commons had already done its work: before any discussion could begin the task force was a fact sailing over the horizon. Once force was deployed and secret ‘negotiations’ were underway, loyalty and trust was the first response. Once servicemen began to die, to say that they should not seemed to many at that moment like a gratuitous kick against those who had already paid the ultimate sacrifice. Their lives then remained as a testimony to the ‘justice’ of the cause, until victory itself smothered the sudden increase of British fatalities from 150 to 250 in its glorious winding sheet. Now that the war is over it remains difficult to point to the sheer fatuousness of spending upwards of £2,000 million to secure the Falklands, when successive governments have long said that they do not want the islands, and when £200 million would have brought the Kelpers much closer to a ‘marvellous’ and ‘British’ way of life, as Thatcher put it, than they have ever experienced or ever will. And that difficulty still comes from the deaths and the clash of sovereignty that have been involved.
So far as the dead are concerned, there stands the comment made by the mother of Mark Sambles, who was killed on HMS Glamorgan:
I am proud of my son—but not proud of the fact that he died for his country in a war which was not necessary. I accept that it’s a serviceman’s duty to fight. But in a futile situation like this, I think it’s evil to put men’s lives at risk when negotiations around a table can save so much heartbreak.2
For Mrs Sambles it is ‘evil’ to put men’s lives at risk when so much heartbreak could have been saved by negotiations around a table. Here—in contrast to its use by The Times—the word carries its full and proper meaning, stripped of incanted mysticism. And here too we can pause to consider the larger questions of sovereignty raised by any warlike engagement. For what is also remarkable about the comment of Mrs Sambles is that it could equally be applied to a larger international war of the great powers, if only because any nuclear exchange would also be futile, infinitely more so through its sheer destructive consequence.
We have seen in the Falklands an example of the logic of war. On the British side, the government was able not only to escalate but also deliberately and successfully, to induct the population into endorsing a mounting cost in ships and lives. Quite a lot has now been written about this in the greater scale, Edward Thompson especially has stressed the fearsome logic of nuclear weaponry. The Falklands War allows us to see rather clearly that there is another preliminary and constitutive force in addition to the intrinsic fatality of modern weapons, with their built-in timing and guidance systems. This is the ‘logic’ of national sovereignty itself.
Perhaps the best way to focus upon this is by reference to Jonathan Schell’s recent book, The Fate of the Earth. He describes soberly and carefully, and thus with almost intolerable force, the way a nuclear exchange would probably destroy life on earth as the ecosphere was ripped apart. In his third and concluding section, he suggests that the only way to ensure that we can avoid this catastrophe is through the abandonment of the nation-state as the major organizing form of human society. From Time magazine downwards the grim exactitude of Schell’s description of the fate which awaits us had been heralded. It is a ‘must’ for everyone to read. But his conclusions have been derided as somehow the unpractical musings of an author carried away by the pains of his imagination. How good of him to describe what might happen if the bombs went off; this is the fear the population has got to learn to live with. Yet how foolish of him to think that they could do without us, sovereign leaders—chosen of course—for their protection. Schell was not so naive as to fail to see that this would be the response:
National sovereignty lies at the very core of the political issues that the peril of extinction forces upon us. Sovereignty is the ‘reality’ that the ‘realists’ counsel us to accept as inevitable, referring to any alternative as ‘unrealistic’ or ‘utopian’.3
Is it in fact wrong to argue, as Schell does, that the choice is either ‘utopia’ or death?
Schell argues that ‘nuclear powers put a higher value on national sovereignty than they do on human survival’. He also suggests that one of the factors that might drive the leaders of a nuclear power to retaliate against a first strike would be revenge. However futile and catastrophic the gesture, the desire for vengeance may override any ‘statesmanlike’ sobriety. Perhaps that ‘gut instinct’ is an essential attribute for ‘statesmen’, a measure of leadership quality. In March such an argument would have been dismissed as alarmist by commentators, who strive themselves for the judicious realism suitable to practical ‘men of the world’. In Britain, in particular, such tones, at once patronising and dismissive run easily from the tongue. How could anyone suggest in this, the ‘oldest’ and ‘most mature’ democracy, where the accretions of the ages and the wisdom of experience may be found in the tr
aditions of every establishment, that such a naked emotion as a mob desire for revenge might seize the upper classes?
Yet since Schell wrote, we have seen precisely a thuggish display of this sort. A second-rank but none the less nuclear power has sent its nuclear submarines and its ships almost certainly armed with tactical nuclear weapons into combat. (Peace News suggested that the Sheffield was sunk with nuclear depth charges on board.) What was the aim of this force? To wrest back sovereignty of an obscure and remote kind, and to salvage national pride, both of which were clearly ranked above the lives of the people directly concerned. Revenge was indeed the decisive passion.
Nor was this limited to mastodons from World War Two like ‘Bomber’ Harris. Encounter published two somewhat shamefaced reflections upon this emotion, neither by opponents of the war: one by Edward Pearce, the other by the magazine’s columnist ‘M’. This described how,
I felt the bile rising like a gusher: stand back—I may explode. And what was I really angry about? The use of force, the violation of the peace, the subjugation of 1,800 Britons who don’t want to be Argentines … beneath the expressions of outrage were much more powerful, atavistic feelings. It was intolerable that Britain should be so humiliated … Such was the immediate reaction—hardly less than dancing in the streets of Buenos Aires … Nor, of course, was I alone. Politicians of all classes were making similar noises.
‘M’ goes on to reflect upon this insane passion.
What worried me about my own primitive feelings—to say nothing of other people’s—was not only the danger of the Falkland Islands crisis, but the volatility of public opinion, likely to be just as fickle as fire.4
Now what is really interesting about this comment is that public opinion in Britain did not flare up with the same virulence. Perhaps twenty per cent of the population had a reaction like that of ‘M’, and doubtless the dinner parties he attended swilled with like sentiments. But it was not public demand for war that carried along reluctant and supposedly more far-sighted politicians. It was, on the contrary, the newspaper owners and MPs, the ‘political’ dons and military bureaucrats, who were most inflamed by the news. Why? Because for them their sovereignty, their world standing, their ‘credibility’ in the eyes of their equivalents abroad were at stake. This factor should not be underestimated as a pressure upon those for whom an international discourse is part of the daily routine of business. The idea that a Peruvian could smirk across the cocktails and make a joke about the ‘Malvinas’; the idea that a German might sidle up and inquire what the British Navy was really for, after an arms expenditure since 1945 of £110 billion; the idea that a Washington Post staffer might commiserate with the Telegraph editorialist—these are the kind of things that constitute a ‘national humiliation’. Our poor leaders experience such things personally.
At the beginning of this essay I considered at some length the conduct of Parliament on 3 April and glanced at every contribution made that day. What we saw was a record of collective irresponsibility. There was a general atmosphere of vindictiveness and revanchism in the Commons and those few who were prone to dissent were swiftly intimidated. Pearce vividly described it as a ‘Hate-In’. The Prime Minister was egged on by her confidants, especially those whom she most trusted and who had been responsible for her promotion to the leadership of the Conservative Party. She did not conduct a ‘madman’ theory of war along the lines that Nixon had once hoped would frighten the Vietnamese into capitulation. Rather she personified the entire asylum of Britain’s ‘representatives’.
Which is why the Falklands affair stands as an exemplary vindication—if a minor one—of the general argument in The Fate of the Earth. Three aspects may be discerned. First, sovereignty is the special passion of those who deem themselves to be the leaders of a nation. For those ‘at the top’ and those who swarm around them, questions of sovereignty matter more extremely than for the majority of their compatriots. Those to whom our destiny is ‘entrusted’ project themselves as personages of experience and balanced judgement. In fact they may prove to be the most prone to react with speed and venom and a hysteria as fickle as fire. Second, when a nation’s leaders have committed the state to ‘do something’, then the nation’s ‘credibility’ is put on the line. ‘Credibility’ is something peculiarly attached to sovereignty, especially in any conflict: it suddenly becomes a factor which seems to be ‘at risk’ or about to be ‘lost’, especially in ‘the eyes of others’. The word ‘credibility’ is American in its current geopolitical usage. In Britain the notion of ‘standing’ often takes its place. When people said that what was at stake in April was Britain’s ‘standing in the world’, this was equivalent to Americans saying US ‘credibility’ was involved in Vietnam or Iran. Credibility becomes even more significant once weapons systems are openly put on alert or deployed. Once sabres are rattled a climb-down is all the more ‘humiliating’, and a greater blow to one’s ‘credibility’. But once men and weapons go into any engagement, then their military logic becomes a massive pressure for further action in its own way. There were some sobering examples of this during the Falklands War. The most striking—often repeated just before the landing at San Carlos—was that the task force could not be kept indefinitely in the winter seas of the South Atlantic: it had either to attack or return. The spokesmen who said this may have desired a landing, but that did not prevent what they said from being technically and hence ‘neutrally’ correct. So those in the peace movement who have emphasized the terrible casuistry of ‘weapons-thought’ and the logic of exterminism may be congratulated.
Finally what we can see more clearly thanks to the Falklands dispute is the dangerous mix of high technology and the ‘sovereignty’ of nation-states in decline. The system of the latter primes the former and puts it into play. Those who wear the mantle of greater patriotism and bear the responsibility of personifying a country’s ‘place in the world’ may react almost instantaneously in a crisis, especially where their pride is at stake, where their opponents may strive to censure them and when they have been caught off guard. Their power and position then allows them to define the ‘national interest’ before any public review, let alone democratic argument, has been heard. The logic of sovereignty is overswift and has no place for second thoughts. Meanwhile, the technological and military ‘logic’ of nuclear weapons systems places a greater and greater premium on the same immediate reactions of those who control their use.
We do not yet know, nor have seen created, those forms of direct, popular self-determination that could displace the curse of sovereignty. Any overall critique of the present lacks practical bite because of this absence. The Falklands crisis in Britain may demonstrate the need to present a socialist alternative to the politics of Britain’s capitalist decline; if so, it also shows the need to transform the terms within which ‘the nation’ is itself conceived. The starting place for this is the House of Commons, because of the manifest decadence of its proceedings. Perhaps they make it too easy to mock. On the other hand they also reveal the complacency of the oft-heard defence of parliaments, that at least they are preferable to junta-like dictatorships. If that is their justification then such assemblies stand condemned: they are merely better than the worst. For whom is this good enough?
Meanwhile, the national institutions in London and Buenos Aires—Parliament and Junta alike—are also creations of the same international state system of competing sovereignties. Churchillism itself helped to form this embattled and demagogic global environment in 1945. Its imperial influence lives on. Thatcher justified the Falklands War by saying that the nation’s honour was at stake. Many may snigger, but no major political challenge was mounted to combat, centrally and explicitly, the feeling she enunciated. This was the major defeat of the Falklands war. So long as the institutions and passions of nationalist sovereignty retain their domination, in Britain as elsewhere, the world will continue to be ruled by those who are likely to ensure its destruction.
Notes
/> 1 Financial Times, 29 June 1982.
2 Bridport News, 18 June 1982, quoted in Tribune, 25 June 1982.
3 Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth, London 1982, p. 218.
4 Encounter, June-July 1982, p. 33.
Appendix
THE UNEXPURGA TED THATCHER
Many of the quotations which have appeared in this essay may have seemed incredible or eccentric. Surely they do not represent the views of those in high office—the people in whose hands are placed our day-to-day destiny and the fateful power of nuclear weapons? Perhaps they have been cited out of context: one can only judge for oneself. Hence this appendix. Here one can read in full Margaret Thatcher’s Cheltenham address, every word of it.
Conservative Central Office
NEWSSERVICE
Release time: 14.30 hours/SATURDAY, 3rd JULY, 1982
The Prime Minister
The Rt. Hon. Margaret Thatcher M.P.
(Barnet, Finchley)
SPEAKING TO A CONSERVATIVE RALLY AT CHELTENHAM RACE COURSE ON SATURDAY, 3rd JULY 1982
TODAY WE meet in the aftermath of the Falklands Battle. Our country has won a great victory and we are entitled to be proud. This nation had the resolution to do what it knew had to be done—to do what it knew was right.
Iron Britannia Page 25