The Malvinas as a Factor in Argentine Politics

Abstract

The ‘Falklands Factor’ in the UK has a single, clearly defined meaning. It refers to the electoral advantage believed to have been given to Mrs Thatcher and to the Conservative Party by their response to the outbreak of war in the South Atlantic. There is no precise parallel to this in Argentina’s more overtly nationalistic politics. The islands have meant different things to different groups at different times and there is no evidence that they have, as a specific issue, had significant electoral consequences at the national level. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the significance of the issue at various times before and since 1982. It is not its purpose to discuss the history of the claims and counterclaims to sovereignty over the South Atlantic islands. These are reviewed by Peter Beck in Chapter 1 and have previously been analysed both by him and by the present author elsewhere.² Here it is only necessary to recall that the origins of the Falklands/Malvinas issue, as seen by Argentina, by now have only a distant relation to the known historical facts. The assertion of sovereignty over the islands by Britain in 1833 certainly brought an immediate diplomatic protest from the government at Buenos Aires, but we can legitimately doubt if it remained for long a serious issue in Argentine politics, given that in 1838 the government of General Juan Manuel de Rosas opened negotiations to ask the United Kingdom to buy Argentina’s interest in the islands, an offer which unfortunately the British government of the day turned down.³