Aaron Donaghy - The British Government and the Falkland Islands, 1974-79
Aaron Donaghy - The British Government and the Falkland Islands, 1974-79
Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. xiii + 270, ISBN 978-1-137-43250-6
To describe a book as a doctoral monograph too often signals that it is narrow and heavy. Aaron Donaghy merits congratulation for a well researched and cogently argued analysis of the handling of the Falklands issue by the 1974-79 Labour government. Noting that the pre-1982 first volume of The Official History of the Falklands Campaign by Sir Lawrence Freedman is considerably shorter than its sequel, on the conflict itself, Donaghy challenges several areas of omission and contests other interpretations.
Decolonisation in the remote South Atlantic ought to have been a minor footnote to the end of empire, but Britain found itself trapped between a failing community and a failed state. Donaghy traces the 1970s impasse to a disastrous ministerial visit to the Falkland Islands by Lord Chalfont in 1968, which revealed the depth of islander opposition to transfer to Argentine rule, and galvanised a Falklands lobby in London which regularly mobilised over 100 MPs against concessions. Thus, as former foreign secretary David Owen admitted in 1982, "the only way we could get a negotiated settlement was by squaring the Falkland Islanders, who would then square Parliament." (212) As an official recalled, the islanders "completely outsmarted the Foreign Office." (212) This was hardly statesmanship: two thousand people would not be permitted to block an urban motorway in London, and 1400 non-white people on Diego Garcia were no obstacle to the construction of an American air base. Indeed, the Falklanders (unlike today's vibrant population) barely deserved to be labelled a community. Almost three quarters of young adults were male, social problems and marital breakdown were endemic (which, incidentally, made unattractive cession to a jurisdiction which banned divorce). Unfortunately, the counterpart to the Falklands rock was an increasingly hard place, a collapsing Argentina, whose inflexibility worked against its own interests. Had Buenos Aires normalised relations, immigration would probably have tipped the balance towards union with the mainland.
While Argentina had no valid claim to the Falklands, there was no reason why the Islands should not be transferred as part of a general dismantling of empire. However, it was unthinkable to hand over the islanders themselves to such an increasingly unstable country. Robust policy-making needed to separate these two issues, by offering a resettlement scheme with the Machiavellian by-product of dividing the population. The idea was occasionally mooted but, it seems, never costed, probably because even a hypothetical £10,000 per capita hand-out pointed to a potential £20 million bill. With Britain in hock to the IMF, such an outlay was impossible. There would be no help from equally bust Argentina, which regarded the islanders as a "temporary population" who had no right to be there. (11) A faint glimmer of a solution perhaps appeared in 1976, when Argentine foreign minister Alberto Vignes floated a comprehensive agreement, involving hand-over of South Georgia and the Dependencies with a transitional leaseback of the Falklands to Britain, under Argentine sovereignty. Callaghan was attracted by the possibility of an "eventual package" (67), but Vignes was ousted soon after, and the military coup ended any prospect of a deal. Seven foreign ministers in Argentina and three in Britain ought to have made no difference where chancelleries embodied settled national interests, but absence of both urgency and strategy in Whitehall made changes in personnel damaging: Owen was not told for four months of an Argentine incursion on Southern Thule. Donaghy insists that the Wilson-Callaghan government should be regarded a discrete political entity, and not simply lumped in with the pre-1982 diplomatic minuets. But it inherited its sterile approach from the Heath administration, and it seems unlikely that its strategy of stringing Buenos Aires along ("We were just playing it long," Owen recalled, 206) would indefinitely have staved off the 1982 tragedy.
Faced with Argentine sabre rattling, in 1977 Callaghan and Owen quietly sent a naval force to the south Atlantic, an episode which Donaghy regards as "curiously overlooked". (2) Censured by Owen in 1982 for failing to take similar countermeasures, Tory ministers dismissed the initiative: if covert, it could not have deterred aggression. Two questions arise: did Argentina know in 1977, and could the British force have repelled an invasion? Donaghy's answers are No and Yes, but the reverse seems more likely. The Americans, who were pointedly not informed, would certainly have tracked the ships. Washington had no interest in confrontation between two allies and would surely have warned Argentina off. The task group itself comprised three warships. The nuclear-powered submarine on station could not have issued the graduated warnings specified in the rules of engagement. The two frigates were exercising over the horizon, thirty hours sailing from the Falklands. Neither the surface vessels nor the Islands themselves had air cover. Their positioning was a gesture of British resolve, not a serious counter-measure. Indeed, the symbolism invested for years in the retention in the South Atlantic of the icebreaker Endurance was an almost comical manifestation of post-imperial weakness.
Scholars who like their history gendered will observe that women appear only rarely and in stereotype roles in this masculine mess. By emigrating, Falklands women failed to provide breeding stock. Isabella Perón could not control rising levels of chaos (but could anybody have coped?). In 1976, Britain considered sending FCO junior minister Joan Lestor to Buenos Aires: Wilson argued that she "would deter anybody." (62)
The Falkland Islands Company (FIC) remains a shadowy and an unexplained influence against compromise. Donaghy labels the role of this dominant landowner and major operator of infrastructure as "feudal". (14) Yet, elsewhere in the empire, major corporations came to terms with decolonisation, and the FIC's opposition to transfer of power requires explanation. More to the point, was there no way that government could neutralise the pervasive veto of this middling size corporation, itself the wholly owned subsidiary of two successive investment houses?
One final reflection. The ultimate location of the Falklands problem lay in the toxic combination of Peronist posturing and comic-opera militarism that constituted Argentina's political culture. If Britain had found a formula to solve the Falklands dispute in the 1970s, its disengagement would have been greeted in Buenos Aires not as statesmanship but as defeat, a balm to the "sense of inadequacy" that Donaghy identifies. (196) The most likely sequel of perceived triumph would have been full-scale war with Chile. Remarkably, by 1977 Argentine invented grievances included complaints that Britain, notional arbitrator in the Beagle Channel dispute, had not stacked the award in their favour. Being branded as a colonialist whipping boy by the united voice of Latin America remains an irksome and tedious legacy of the Falklands dispute. But, on the sticks and stones principle, it is perhaps a burden worth bearing if it has substituted for a trans-Andean conflict that would have exploded seismic divisions across the continent. However, as Donaghy proves, a monograph does not have to be dull, but it has no duty to be counter-factual.
Ged Martin
National University of Ireland Galway