The Breakdown of the Status Quo

Abstract

‘I am firmly of the view that our best policy is to let sleeping dogs lie’. Such was the conclusion of a long despatch on the dispute by Sir George Middleton, the British ambassador to Buenos Aires, in November 1963. But the length and tone of the report indicated that ‘the most somnolent of sleeping dogs’ had already reawakened.¹ Indeed, less than a year later Argentina and Britain were embroiled in the first round of a bitter diplomatic encounter at the United Nations Decolonization Committee the culmination of the gradual revival of a conflict that had remained in obscurity for most of the hundred years that followed the British occupation of the archipelago in 1833. Most ‘northern’ scholars have blamed Argentine nationalism, and particularly its finest interlocutor, Juan Peron, for this revival. ‘It was the charismatic Peron’, writes Calvert, ‘in the days of his unquestioned power, who breathed new life into an old diplomatic grievance, and made the expansion of Argentina into the South Atlantic and the Antarctic regions a major part of his programme to get Argentina recognised as a Latin American and world power’.² Escude, Kinney, Dodds and Freedman agree,³ and this view also permeated a significant portion of the British and North American press coverage of the 1982 crisis, as shown by the frequent comparisons made between Peron and Galtieri in the wake of the Argentine landing.⁴