Introduction
State, national identity and power: a historical tour in search of the causes of the Falklands–Malvinas War

Guillermo Mira and Fernando Pedrosa

The state is a theoretical problem and an uncomfortable actor because often its voice is loudly amplified but not always clear or direct. This ambiguity in the actions and discourse of the state can cloud its presence, and filter its real interests and objectives. There, in unravelling that complex map of interests, actors, actions and strategies, lies the work of social scientists.

Most ideological traditions have issued warnings on this issue, foregrounding the problem of domination and the construction of the legitimacy that sustains the claim of state power. This is why it is striking that in most of the intellectual discussions in Argentina over recent decades, there is no explicit theoretical interest in the evident presence of the state, nor any methodological provision to warn of its attempts to impose a particular narrative.

The discourse about the past is a key arena in which the state can seek to consolidate its dominance. To do this, it has at its disposal an immense arsenal to influence discourse and identity narratives in civil society. It is where the ‘fight for history’ occurs, because it works as a basic tool in the construction of national identity.

In Argentina, the predominant strategies of those who have led the state – or tried to do so – are closer to the ideas of Carl Schmidt than to those of John Locke.¹ The influence of military thought, revisionism and populism have shaped a type of political and intellectual activity where the objective is not so much to question the state and its representations or identify its objectives and strategies, but rather to impose one’s own discourse and triumph over the voices that oppose it.

Paradoxically, the Argentine state (the same one that initiated the war and committed the disappearances) has managed to become the object of desire not only of political and economic corporations, and workers and trade unions, but also of academics, intellectuals and specialists who have moved between giving in to the temptation of emotions and ideologies – where nationalism played a key role – or maintaining the scientific criteria in academic production.

This topic is more pressing in societies whose identities have been created by the state, and when one addresses issues that imply the legitimising role of that domination device. Even more so in Argentina, where the state occupies a predominant place both ideologically and for its ability to mobilise material resources in social life.

This is where the issue of national identity, nationalism and socially shared values becomes more important than even the material or institutional resources. That is why nationalism should not be challenged as something abstract, but rather as the use of the nation’s symbols in the discourse, and in everyday concrete political practice (Guber, 2007).

Argentinity as an instrument of the state

We conceive the national identity of Argentina (the Argentinity, adopting García Fanlo’s proposal (2010)) as an artificial phenomenon, that is, created by the state, but at the same time it is dynamic, changes over time, and incorporates new actors and imaginaries to give renewed answers to the demands and challenges that it receives from civil society.

At the same time that it is changing, it also maintains nodal issues that are reiterated diachronically, and that historically define the identity of personality. Territorial nationalism, the homeland as a unit, and militarism occupy a crucial place in this network. Argentinity is then understood as a new identity that ensures the governability of society.

The Falklands–Malvinas War brought to its climax the possibility of appealing to nationalism to unite the population’s identity, in order to divert it from its internal conflicts and corporative struggles. But that story did not start there. Iglesias (2012) locates some of the causes of the 1982 Malvinas–Falklands War in the militarism that Argentine politics adopted from 1930, since both military and Peronist governments imposed different versions of nationalism as a substitute for citizenship.

In the words of Guber (2000, p. 8), in the Falklands storytelling, ‘the Argentines not only remember their rights but also they Argentinise the islands by Malvinising their Argentinity’. Thus, in 1982 the state managed (although briefly because of the defeat) to place society neatly in its orbit.

Below we offer a brief historicisation of this construction of Argentine national identity by focusing on the Falkland–Malvinas Islands. This answers to the fact that we consider the war and everything that surrounded it not as a problem just of recent history; on the contrary, it must be approached through contemporary Argentine history in a continuous way, from the same social and political processes that gave rise to the construction of the state and the nation in the mid 19th century.

Argentinity as a project of social governability

In Argentina, the state apparatus had proved to be very effective in tackling its multiple challenges – and challengers – during the second half of the 19th century. By that point, it had managed to build a national discourse in a sparsely inhabited and heterogeneous territory, predominantly by military action. The Sarmientine education (in reference to President Domingo F. Sarmiento), compulsory military service, the idea of ‘to govern is to populate’, and the conformation of a national army were some of the axes around which the national structuring of the state took place (García Fanlo, 2010).

Military action occupied a key role in this strategy because it was necessary to overcome provincial warlords and secure the borders against the Indians first and, after that, in the War of Paraguay. At the same time, the continuous and transcendent presence of the military in the process of emergence, independence and organisation had assured them a relevant place in the then-young country. In this narrative, glory was in the battlefields and betrayals were common between politicians and civilians.

Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, a huge social transformation was brewing as a result of the arrival of millions of foreign immigrants, a phenomenon that structurally remodelled Argentine society and the way in which it saw itself (Romero, 2017).²

The project of a country designed for ‘the Argentine desert’ (Halperín Donghi, 2005a) soon became out-dated and the state had to resort to new strategies.³ The debates and doubts about the celebrations of the centenary of independence, in 1910, showed a society full of uncertainties, concerned for the future and increasingly violent. But this had begun before the celebration.

In 1890 there were already two positions before that country in rapid transformation and the threat that loomed over the precarious ‘national being’. The first of them amalgamated various ideas that coincided with a more contractualistic vision, with a positive view of the foreigners; it trusted that their contributions to the identity and to the country would be better observed over time.

The opposite position – the one that finally triumphed – posed a nationalist view that demanded the urgency of policies to homogenise the immigrant population behind a conception of essentialist and exclusionary Argentinity (Bertoni, 1992). The triumph of nationalist thought (at the same time as the nationalist ideology triumphed in Europe) had very important implications because it focused on the past – an idealised past – instead of on the possibility of articulating a common future.

At this moment of change, the use of patriotic education and its efficient ‘Argentines-building machine’ is found. Confidence in education, a natural idea of positivism, resulted in an institutional effort of great magnitude that sought to generate a change in the newly arrived foreigners, i.e. to Argentinise them, thus producing a new Argentine subject from the ‘melting pot of races’ (García Fanlo, 2010, p. 28).

In addition to the new gaucho ideal (which claimed the figure of Martín Fierro as a model of the ‘Argentine’), other issues were reinforced as ingredients of Argentina: the struggle for independence, the military hero and father of the country, and the territory as the axis of the nation were some of the pillars that sustained this renewed nationalising ideal.

Compulsory military service also played a fundamental role in this strategy, since it established an entry point, as a rite of passage to the world of male adulthood ‘through the inculcation of a warrior moral and, at the same time … the configuration of the senses of belonging – and exclusion – to the Argentine nation’(Garaño, 2013, pp. 124, 125).

Argentina was built, then and since its inception, as a form of domination over a vibrant but heterogeneous society that had in its very formation the challenges that characterised the popular European sectors of the time (García Fanlo, 2010).

In 1916, Hipólito Yrigoyen, the first democratic president, assumed the presidency. He had legitimised his leadership using a programme based on the idea of ‘the national cause’, construed in absolute terms. This first government that emerged from unrestricted suffrage began a process of social inclusion of new sectors – the middle classes – through the control of the state. Although it opened up new perspectives and included modern visions, it was also based on conservative ideas, especially with regard to how nationality should be integrated. ‘Yrigoyen joined those who – setting a distance from the dominant cosmopolitanism – found that identity in the common Hispanic roots’ (Romero, 2017, p. 55).

In the context of the crisis of liberalism in the world, and the growing hysteria aroused by the communist threat, the ‘time of the sword’, as a way out of the disorder, had summoned various political groups such as socialists, fundamentalist Catholics and nationalists. All of them came together in criticism of liberal democracy and formed a common space where it was difficult to distinguish between left and right.

These circumstances stimulated the appearance of the first revisionist authors, whose common position resulted in the historical recovery of the figure of Juan Manuel de Rosas.⁴ However, this first group of intellectuals (which included, among others, Adolfo Saldías and Ernesto Quesada) was more linked to historiography than to politics.

On 6 September 1930, the first coup in Argentina’s history took place, and ended the second government of Yrigoyen (1928–30). The military officers who assumed power were strongly influenced by the model of the German army of the time, and built an image of the armed forces that transcended the brief presidency of General José Uriburu (1930–2). In this regard, it is important to underline two main aspects. The first is the return to militarism (which had already begun in the previous period) as a positive value against democratic ‘disorder’.⁵ The second came with the legalisation of the coup d’état by the Supreme Court, which legitimised the claim of the military that the country, and the national cause, were above the law.

The opposition to liberalism occurred in a framework of Hispanic vindication and strong criticism of the United States, in response to its expansionism after the war of 1898 against Spain. In this scenario, the rejection of the British occupation of the Falklands–Malvinas was common ground for groups that shared no other cause, as illustrated by books published in 1934 by the socialist leader Alfredo Palacios and the nationalists Julio and Rodolfo Irazusta.

Perhaps the most important innovation of these revisionists proved to be the connection between history and politics that, according to Halperín Donghi (2005b), was the key to their success in broad sectors of public opinion. The presence of anti-liberalism and the heterogeneity of the intellectual groups within the various political parties characterised the political debate until the mid 20th century, but mainly on the issue of what position should be taken in the Second World War.

This issue was a crucial boost for the second coup, which occurred in 1943 and rested upon the decision of the armed forces not to declare war on Germany. The country declared war only a few moments before the end of the conflict. The nationalist stream and Catholic fundamentalism marked the tone: ‘authoritarian, anti-liberal and messianic, obsessed with the foundation of a new social order and avoiding the chaos of communism’ (Romero, 2017, p. 137). It was from then that Juan Domingo Perón started to take his first political positions, up until his triumph in the presidential race of 1946.

With the democratic arrival of Perón to the government in 1946, changes and continuities occurred in the idea of ‘the national’. Continuity is visible, in the first place, in that the military leadership was maintained, although renewed, and now embodied in the figure of the new president. Second, the intellectual presence of nationalism and Catholicism continued as agglutinating axes of the state discourse. Third, the United Kingdom, along with the United States, continued to occupy a central place in the nationalist rhetoric’s criticism. Fourth, the process of social inclusion was executed, as before with Yrigoyen and the middle classes, with the control of the state and with a strong appeal to the idea of ‘the national’.

There were other relevant changes too. Peronism led to a mutation in the idea of Argentinity. The first thing that should be stressed is the appeal to the people and the state as a single element. The image of the leader on the balcony and the people in the square as the staging of that act became iconic of 20th-century Argentine politics and, not coincidentally, was present on 2 April 1982.

The people as a key actor have two facets. First, the real one: mobilised and organised from the workers’ unions and state leadership. The people in the square are the protagonist of the story, as a complement and sustenance of the leader on the balcony of the government house. In the second facet, the people are also a rhetorical element: the continuity of the Yrigoyenist idea of the nation embodied in the popular will. Thus, democracy became a mere plebiscitary action of the leader, that together with popular mobilisation, replaced the republican elements of the political regime (Romero, 2017).

The law lies below the will of a homogeneous people that, at the same time, embody the homeland. With this operation, Peronism turned the people into the axis of sovereignty and nationalism detached itself from the merely territorial. Although the Falklands–Malvinas do not occupy a central place in this story, they are integrated into the nationalist discourse because they are functional to it with the idea of usurpation.

This lack of centrality of the Falklands–Malvinas in the nationalism of the first stage of Peronism stimulated a dialogue around the Islands. Then the Argentine government put forward their only Argentine proposal outside the diplomatic claim in place since 1883. In 1953, on the occasion of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the Peronist government sent a mission headed by the senate president (who later became the nation’s vice-president), Alberto Tesaire, in order to offer to buy the Falkland Islands from the United Kingdom as the state had done with the railroads.

After conversations at the highest level, the Argentine proposal was rejected by Winston Churchill’s government (Bosoer, 2013). The decision took into account the negative repercussions that it would bring to the then prime minister. The British argument was based on the fact that the inhabitants of the Islands were British, which shows that from that moment this issue was already a central axis of British policy towards the Islands.

In 1955 there was another coup in Argentina that ended the Peronist experiment, but that could not resolve the real and latent conflicts in the country. The years after the fall of Perón’s government were unstable, confusing, lacking an agreed political path and, above all, with a growing increase in political violence. Portantiero (1973) called these years between 1955 and 1966 ‘a hegemonic draw’. He did so taking into account the number of governments and economic projects that took place in this period, the conflicts between groups and the constant changes in state policies.

Even the democratic governments were unable to generate long-term political agreements, as was seen with the weak radical presidents Arturo Frondizi (1958–62) and Arturo Illia (1963–6). In terms of the conflict over the Islands, these governments maintained an ambiguous nationalist republicanism that did not change the dominant trends.

Internationally there was some movement. By the mid 1960s, the United Nations General Assembly was very active in matters of decolonisation, approving Resolution 1514 of 1960 with a more global meaning, and Resolution 2065 of 1965, specifically dedicated to the Falklands–Malvinas issue. This was read by the Argentine governments (and is still considered today) as a diplomatic victory although, in short, it summoned both parties to enter into rapid negotiations.

In Argentina, the second half of the 1960s marked a resurgence of political violence in the context of a zeitgeist that fed on the strong hegemonic crisis affecting the United States (Halliday, 1986). At the same time, an explosion of social challenges of varying importance and form made its way around the world. The Vietnam War and the communist overturning of the Cuban revolution led Latin American armed forces to consolidate a repressive scheme in their links with society. In that context, the first guerrilla groups appeared in Argentina.

This coincided with a change in military doctrine, that went from being linked to national autonomy and the external enemy, to what is known as the ‘national security doctrine’ (Leal Buitrago, 2003). The new military objective was to guarantee security within the country’s borders and, therefore, the ‘anti-subversive war’ became the new problematic axis pointed to by the Latin American armed forces (Portantiero, 1973). With the military in power, sovereignty was once again linked to territory and, therefore, the Falklands– Malvinas issue occupied a much more important place in public discourse. ‘Malvinas’ (in military governments) and ‘people’ (with Peronism), each one as a substitute for the other, were alternately occupying the centre of the state’s nationalist discourse, stimulated by the cyclical instability of the country’s political regime.

During those years, the so-called ‘Operativo Cóndor’ was carried out, whereby about twenty Peronist militants hijacked a plane of Aerolíneas Argentinas in flight and diverted it to the Falkland–Malvinas Islands. Once there, they raised a series of Argentine flags and took the chief of police of the Islands and the head of the English Infantry hostage before surrendering to the British authorities. The members of the group came from nationalist factions of Peronism that, over the course of the 1970s, were incorporated indistinctly to the different left and right groups into which the Peronism of the time was divided.

Radicalised groups, including armed factions within Peronism, resumed the Falklands–Malvinas issue, which they approached from the same logic of territorialistic nationalism, but also from anti-imperialism. In this context, a violent action to recover what historically ‘belonged to us’ did not seem so outrageous. This notion reached its paroxysm in 1982, when during the war against the United Kingdom, the Montoneros (an armed organisation with Peronist roots), even having been decimated by the illegal repression and exile, offered the military government a truce to go fight together with their executioners in the Islands.

As a sign of the contradictions of the state in general, and Argentina in particular, in 1971, while Argentine nationalism was ‘remalvinised’, Argentina and Chile agreed to the United Kingdom’s being the arbitrator in the dispute over the Beagle Channel that had been dragging on since the late 19th century (Infante, 1979).

During the 1970s, Argentine society experienced, in different ways, a climate of permanent violence and confrontation. This was not only because of the state repression already present under the Peronist government (Franco, 2012), or the clashes between military, paramilitary and guerrilla groups. Violence as an instrument had been naturalised in the everyday relations of a majority of the population, which did not participate in political activism, and much less in ideological extremism (Carassai, 2013).

This contributed to the creation of conditions for the revaluation of the discourse of order (also associated with violence) proposed by the 1976 military coup (Romero, 2017). The bellicosity of the military turned to the internal level, but also to the external one. In 1978, the dictatorship led the country to the brink of war with Chile by rejecting the arbitration convened in 1971 and delivered to the parties in 1977. As already mentioned, the arbitral task had been assigned to the United Kingdom, although the final opinion was drafted by an international tribunal. The mediation of Pope John Paul II managed to prevent direct confrontation.

In the conflict with Chile, it was already observed that much of the problem on the Argentine side was the bureaucratic and complex way that the Argentine military junta made its decisions (Villar, 2014). As claimed above, the field of recent history found certain limits to progress on these roads because it turned sharply towards memory studies and generally had no major dialogues with international relations or political science (Mira and Pedrosa, 2016).

The ‘war that was not’ is an indispensable step towards understanding the war that did take place. And possibly at this point the works of historians on the Falklands–Malvinas require greater dialogue with other disciplines that have analysed this subject more extensively.⁶

In 1982, war itself unfolded, with the consequences we all know. The Argentine military defeat caused the regime to fall, and later the dissemination of the backroom of the organisation of the war and the issue of human rights violations became the centre of the political scene. Defeat in the war caused the conflict around the Falklands–Malvinas to rise to the level of an irreversible and permanent cause. With the arrival of a new democratic shift, new and diverse voices of civil society began to take the floor.

The post-war years

The arrival of Raúl Alfonsín of the Radical Civic Union to the presidency in 1983 was a moment of rupture with the past but also, as happens in any historical process, of continuities with what had come before. Alfonsín decided to subsume the Falklands–Malvinas policies to the general strategy of diminishing military power. In that field, he had to be guided by the relations of forces that he maintained at each juncture. Alfonsín took advantage of the discrediting of territorialistic nationalism to confront it and deactivate through a referendum one of the urgent problems that kept the military in a warring state: the dispute with Chile over the Beagle Channel that had almost led both countries to war in 1978 (Miguez, 2018).

However, the task was not unambiguous, and abroad the radical government issued confusing signals. Alfonsín did not declare the cessation of hostilities in the Falklands–Malvinas, and that implied – at least theoretically, and as a warning to the British – that the conflict over the Islands could be restarted. In that context, Alfonsín did not yield to the pressure of the western powers and refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, known as the Tlatelolco Treaty. At the same time, the Cóndor II programme continued (it had been initiated immediately after the defeat by the military government) for the development of a missile capable of reaching the Islands. The air force (like many others) did not feel defeated and raised the old military autarchy principle for possible future war events.

Alfonsín did not maintain good relations with the United States or the United Kingdom. This ended up feeding the image of distrust that already existed among the Western powers about the country as an international actor. This could not be read in any other way than under the lens of the Falklands– Malvinas War.

In 1989, the first constitutional handover under normal conditions since 1928 took place. The new president, the Peronist Carlos Menem, enacted neoliberal policies and established an alliance with the United States. The normalisation of relations with the Western powers was one of the key points in the change of government (Romero, 2017).

Menem decreed the cessation of hostilities (seven years after the surrender of the Argentine authorities in the Falklands–Malvinas) and re-established the diplomatic relationship with the United Kingdom. In this context, a ‘sovereignty safeguard clause’ was agreed (known as the umbrella clause), to separate issues relating to the sovereignty of others which both countries intended to move forward, such as fishing and oil extraction. For the first time, government policy was to try to improve relations between Argentines with the people who were one of the main sources of contention after 1982 (Palermo, 2007; Niebieskikwiat, 2014). In 1995, Argentina finally signed the accession to the Tlatelolco treaty and abandoned its membership in the group of non-aligned countries. For all this, it was accepted as an extra-NATO ally, which incorporated the country into a defensive alliance of a military type that also included the United Kingdom.

Nostalgic sectors of the military regime accused the governments of the transition as having a policy of ‘demalvinisation’ – a synonym for demilitarisation – and that they were using it to survive (in the case of the Alfonsín government) and to consolidate their leadership (in the case of Carlos Menem). However, together with the differences maintained by the governments of Alfonsín and Menem, nationalist and territorialistic views continued to dominate public policy, especially in the field of education and culture, with the addition that the political and social elites had not yet accepted responsibility for the war.

Although there is still debate about whether it is possible to separate the military dictatorship from the Falklands–Malvinas War, that discussion made no sense for Alfonsín and Menem, since the armed forces, the dictatorship, human rights and the war were all part of an indissoluble whole, and a problem to solve if the new political regime was to be consolidated.

At the end of his term in 1999, Menem was replaced by the radical Fernando De la Rúa, who led a government characterised by weakness and lack of leadership. With regard to the Falklands–Malvinas, De la Rúa contributed little, but due to pressures from different directions (the armed forces and the veterans, among them), 2 April was re-enacted as a national holiday, when the country commemorates the capture of the Islands, quite the opposite of what Alfonsín had sought when he repealed the same holiday imposed by the military government.

The 2001 crisis marked a before and after in Argentina; the state seemed to have lost control of the situation, but the interim government of Peronist Eduardo Duhalde (2002–3) generated the necessary conditions that led to a certain institutional normalisation. His chosen successor, Néstor Kirchner (2003–7), benefited from an economic recovery that brought an unexpected and immense boom in the price of agricultural commodities. However, he had to gain his own political power, which he built by strongly appealing to a particular narrative about the recent past (Romero, 2017).

The Kirchnerist state and its historical discourse

Almost two decades after the 1982 war, a decade of thawing Anglo–Argentine relations, and the end of an economic and political crisis, the Falkland– Malvinas Islands were not on the list of priorities of Argentine society or its ruling class. However, they were still an effective instrument in the hands of the state, as a device of unification and mobilisation of society, especially at a time when it had to rebuild its political legitimacy and had the material resources to carry this out.

The Kirchnerista governments looked back to the 1960s and 1970s to present themselves as those who had brought about the process of social change that took place in those years (Bermúdez, 2015). That is why Néstor Kirchner’s government included the Falklands–Malvinas War in its narrative about human rights violations committed in the years of the military government. This policy continued and was accentuated by the governments of his wife, Cristina Fernández (2007–15).

Kirchnerismo inaugurated a new stage that took the old historical claim of war as heroic deed, but tried to separate it from the dictatorship.⁷ To this end, it threw the full weight of the state behind the creation of spaces dedicated to speeches, images and content about the war. In addition, it found in the nationalist appeal of the bicentennial of the May Revolution of 1810 an event that once again united the right and left behind the national flag.

The Argentine state acted decisively to position this new narrative, and it did so with an important range of economic, media and institutional resources. Thus, an alliance was consolidated between important academic and cultural sectors and the generous system of state financing, which produced a boom in productions of all kinds on the subject of the memory of what happened in the years prior to 1983, and immediately after.

The new interpretation of the Falklands–Malvinas heroic deed suggested that, although the war had meant continuity with the repressive model of the state since 1976, at the same time there was a historical imperative that led to the separation of the issue of sovereignty from those who had initiated the war. At the same time, there was an association between the soldiers conscripted with the young victims of the repression of the dictatorship.

The historiographical operation was once again supported by familiar reference points of nationalist discourse: Argentina’s indisputable sovereignty, her victimisation by imperial powers, the betrayal of the military, and appeals to what the war could have been in other political circumstances. Argentina repeated its history once more.

In the next section we propose to read the academic and cultural production about the Falklands–Malvinas that tries to build an identity discourse whose purpose is to consolidate and legitimise a powerful device of state domination.

The post-war period and the social sciences

There are a large number of academic and cultural productions on the war that began on 2 April 1982, bolstered by state initiatives that promoted the subject from 2003 onwards and, even more importantly, the thirtieth anniversary of the war in 2012.

This happened not only in the academic sphere, but in other areas too, such as biography, journalism, essays, military technology and of course the fictional record in its various written or audio-visual formats. This large corpus includes all kinds of approaches, methods, devices and speeches. The need to give order to them led specialists to propose different clusters that would allow for some preliminary conclusions on what was produced, and evaluate trends.

Federico Lorenz (2011) divides this corpus into four groups, while pointing out that they not only oppose each other, but also overlap. The first of these is the ‘patriotic group’, which foregrounds the national cause, the unity of the Argentine people and does not consider the characteristics of the military government that carried out the war as being important. The second is the ‘victimising narrative’, which is placed at the time of the democratic transition, and which is read as being part of ‘the self-exculpatory vision that society sought to build on itself ’ (Lorenz, 2011, p. 51). The third group incorporates the speeches produced from the redefinition of the role of the combatant made by the first associations of veterans, as well as from the characterisation of the war as part of the Latin American anti-imperialist struggle. Finally, the fourth group brings together works dedicated to military history, whether technical or linked to diplomacy and the explanation and description of war chronicles.

Another of the specialists recognised in the subject, Rosana Guber (2017), reduces the corpus to three different groups. The first is based on what she calls the political and military history of the archipelago; the second concerns those who address the impact of the Falklands–Malvinas issue in relation to national culture and politics; and the third, and most recent, is based on the studies of human action on nature in the South Atlantic.

Another original classification proposal is that offered by María Elena Molina (2008), who groups the production on the Falklands–Malvinas into two sets, the triumphant version and the mournful version. She states, as Lorenz does, that these two modes do not necessarily oppose each other, but intersect. Molina then proposes the space of literature and fiction as the one that truly manages to speak, ask questions and self-criticise about the facts surrounding the 1982 war.

To raise a discussion that addresses the role of the state as a producer of social discourse, we propose to group the written production into three large and heterogeneous groups.

The statist set

The first of these is the ‘statist’ one, which includes the productions that fluidly accompanied the voice of the state throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Given the abundance of existing texts in that sense, we can subdivide it into two large streams: the sovereigntist one, and that of the new epic.

The sovereigntist stream describes the works that are directly or indirectly vehicles of reaffirmation of the assumptions that historically sustained the Argentine claims. This is a heterogeneous subgroup but not necessarily militaristic or supportive of the government that produced the war. It includes traditional views, those of the technocrats, diplomats, journalists and academics that, in different ways, see the issue of sovereignty and the Argentine claim as central axes (e.g. Kohen and Rodríguez, 2015).

The new epic can be identified from the late 20th century onwards, with approaches, methods and problems linked to the social sciences, including issues going beyond mere sovereignty over the Islands. The predominant trends in this group go hand in hand with the official voice of each moment. In the 1980s, these productions were linked, for example, to the victimisation of conscripts, and since 2003, they have been directly related to the attempts to remove the military government from the scene of the war, in order to renew the identity pact of Argentinity with the Falklands–Malvinas issue.

Unlike the first subgroup, these works do not provide a detailed exploration of matters related to sovereignty. However, a strong Argentine claim is made relating to an anti-imperialist or anti-colonial discourse. Another contrast is observed with the classic revisionist studies, since these place the conflict over the Falklands–Malvinas in a timeline that extends from the 19th century onwards. For the statist studies linked to the more current visions in the social sciences, the war is included in the mainstream of recent history, and inside the issue of human rights violations and state terrorism.

The emphasis is on the protagonists, their memories, biographies and an analysis that recreates an epic story without crediting the military. Lorenz is the historian who expresses this position most fully.⁸ Author of an extensive and varied body of work, Lorenz removes the assumptions of sovereigntist literature, while reinforcing (even in his role as a novelist) the Argentine government’s central axes of speech since 2003, that is, communicating a connection to the political situation and the political actors of the 1970s.

The characterisation proposed by this typology is somewhat broad given the diversity of productions that are grouped together – approaches which range from military studies to work that assimilates conscripts with those disappeared under military repression. However these approaches are historicised in the long term (and not in the chronological limits of recent history), a common matrix can be identified. All occupy the space enabled, and also limited by, the state itself and society. They are ‘acceptable’ modes of speech, which have conditions of social audibility, in an arena where being heard is difficult. For this reason, it is important to highlight those discourses that challenge the official versions of events.

The challengers

The second group in which we propose to organise cultural production on the Falklands–Malvinas and the war is the smallest: the works that oppose the state’s discourse and question the core of the nationalist narrative in all its forms and stages. This heterogeneous group includes contemporary anti-war activism from exile, such as that carried out by Néstor Perlonger and León Rozitchner.⁹ It also includes the work of critics such as Beatriz Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano, writing in the magazine Punto de Vista. There are also the works or public interventions of those who manifested their opposition as best they could from within the country, such as Juan José Sebreli or Jorge Luis Borges, who allegedly called for the Islands to be given to Bolivia ‘so it has access to the sea’.

Perlongher may have been the first, at the time the war was taking place, to express lucidly that behind the military adventure was the state and a nationalist call that neither the right nor the left – he admitted bitterly – could ignore. At the same time, he belittled the disputed Islands as ‘unhealthy islets’ (1982) and lamented that the military had carried to the Islands the state of exception of the Continent. Perlongher, finally, decides to do what a national cause hates most: ridicule it.

By the post-war period and with elaborate arguments and a systematic study, the work of Vicente Palermo (2007) is the biggest challenge to the ‘Malvinising’ discourse of the Argentine state, and to the construction of its nationalist appeal linked to the territory. According to Palermo, ‘Malvinas’ is included in this discursive configuration, which includes a national identity linked to loss, victimhood, a ‘meek and calm’ nature, and a wait that ends when the patience of the ‘noble Argentine people’ runs out.

The war, then, would be the direct result of this territorial configuration of national identity rather than ambition or a whim. Palermo is possibly the Argentine intellectual who has most reflected on the subject, and who has done so regularly over time, discussing the most widespread assumptions about the ‘Falklands/Malvinas cause’, whether factual (the relationship with the Islanders) or counterfactual (‘if it were not for the war the Falklands/Malvinas would be Argentine’).

Rosana Guber, another recognised researcher in this field, has also challenged the nationalist discourse of the 1980s and 1990s (Guber, 2000), but at the same time, and unlike the authors of the statist group, she has carried out investigations that call into question the versions proposed by the Argentine state from 2003 onwards. In her study of air force pilots in the war, Guber challenges the notions of the ‘repressive military’ or ‘Falklands–Malvinas hero’:

Guber (2013) also advanced the theme of camaraderie between British and Argentine soldiers, an issue that breaks the first line of division of perpetual combat between essential enemies. But the most challenging aspect of Guber’s work is her refusal to assimilate the situation on the Islands with the state terrorism that had been applied in the country since 1976:

Following a similar line, the book by Fernando Iglesias (2012) is heir to the thoughts of David Held and Ulrich Beck. Iglesias is categorical: the idea that ‘the Falklands/Malvinas are Argentine’ is inapplicable without violating the basic principle on which Argentina was founded: the self-determination of the people. Iglesias goes so far as to question whether the national goal of recovering the Falklands–Malvinas is compatible with international law and human rights, in open reference to the situation of the thousands of people that live there. At the same time, his work may be considered one of the few questioning perspectives, deriving as it does from a sociology of globalization, which indicates the folly of nationalism and the use of the Falklands–Malvinas by the powers that be to ‘deploy a huge smokescreen – a fog blanket – usable at any time’ (Iglesias, 2012, p. 127).

The journalist Natasha Niebieskikwiat’s book (2014) can also be included in the group of texts and interventions that challenge the state narrative. She offered the first study of life on the Islands, which she prepared after her many trips there. The inhabitants of the Islands themselves have often been neglected in the literature, as if they were absent or irrelevant to the conflict or the future of the archipelago. Indeed, they are still referred to by the derogatory term ‘Kelpers’.¹² By contrast, Niebieskikwiat’s approach sees them as protagonists and incorporates them into the historical narrative, humanising them. This breaks with the idea that the Islanders exist only as a direct consequence of the British presence, and argues that the works included in the statist group, in its two variants, have maintained a stereotyped and ignorant perspective.

This group of works on Malvinas should also include the document presented in 2012 by a group of well-known intellectuals, academics and journalists, entitled Malvinas, una visión alternativa [Malvinas, an alternative vision], which engaged with debates held during the commemoration of 30 years since the 1982 confrontation.¹³ It was the first time that a group of prominent citizens had called openly for a reconsideration of the degree to which society as a whole was linked to the Islands, and had raised challenging alternatives to those traditional views that were based on some kind of epic. In publishing their piece, they were entering into a discourse that had until then been occupied exclusively by the revisionists or by the official post-2003 discourses mentioned above.

The signatories carried (and still carry) a lot of weight in the social and intellectual life of Argentina. This gave the manifesto a qualitatively different dimension and impact from those of other interventions. And by examining the link between the Islanders and Argentine society, they were addressing how to begin to solve the dispute, and to change the political culture on the issue that had predominated since the 19th century. Their provocative proposal opened up the conversation to the inhabitants of the Islands, accepting their right to self-determination.

Crucially, the document underlined the repeated tendency in the different statist visions to minimise the importance of Argentina’s having initiated the invasion and then, later, having misunderstood the consequences of the invasion, especially internationally. It also criticised the Kirchnerista government for its contradictory demand to open a negotiation that included the issue of sovereignty while announcing that Argentine sovereignty was non-negotiable.¹⁴

This document was heavily criticised, by right and left, and even by senior government officials of the time. It could not have been otherwise. The argument that there ought to be a reassessment of the Islanders’ situation, and that they ought to be granted the right to self-determination, was put down to a ‘lack of patriotism’. This period saw the peak of the debate, but it is reasonable to assume that the 40th anniversary will revive the discussion.

Audio-visual and literary discourse

In addition to written texts, cultural production in other languages and formats should be noted. Audio-visual or literary discourse represents the possibility of saying what cannot be expressed otherwise, although even in that arena the state can set limits on what can be said. These texts we consider loosely to be a third group, which might include fiction or audio-visual work that appeared after the war. It is an area that has received plenty of academic attention (e.g., López and Rodríguez, 2009; Vitullo, 2012; Varela, 2016; Molina, 2018; Fernández Ameghino, 2019) and it is not our intention to make an exhaustive review, nor delve too deeply into the content of the work.¹⁵

Because this type of work is produced in a variety of languages, it is not as easily grouped into a single category, as we have been proposing for the previous types. Nonetheless, it is possible to analyse some aspects of these works and then characterise them according to what kind of discourse they offer, and in what part of the debate they can be incorporated. In some cases, the relationship they maintain with the state and social conditions of audibility are key.

Post-2003, when the Néstor Kirchner government came to power, it had to renew the type of discourse that sustained its leadership claims, and this change extended to art and culture. While there were still links to the old nationalist and/or warlike paradigms,¹⁶ cultural production relating to the Falklands–Malvinas now also confronted the traditional nationalist view from an anti-military perspective:

The new state storytelling of the Falklands–Malvinas stimulated cultural and artistic production to expand enthusiastically, but conservatively, because it was engaged in dismantling a discursive paradigm that had changed little for centuries.

Writers such as Martín Kohan, Patricia Ratto, Fabiana Daversa, Patricio Pron or Federico Lorenz,¹⁷ among others, questioned and disarticulated the official story – one that was simply anachronistic and no longer had coercive power or great social legitimacy.¹⁸ At the same time, they legitimised the new state narrative, which was recharged with nationalist rhetoric, although in a different sense from the previously.¹⁹

Reiterating the statement at the beginning of this section, the corpus to be covered is very broad, and it is not our intention to make a complete study, but rather, by mediating through the selection of some examples, set trends that allow some reflection.

Uncomfortable fiction

There are works that have managed to take the war and its protagonists to places where it has been difficult for non-fiction to go. The ‘deserters, rogues, imposters’ appear (Souto, 2018, p. 129), as do the inhabitants of the islands and human rights abuses.

Los pichiciegos [Malvinas Requiem] by Rodolfo Fogwill; Las islas [The Islands] by Carlos Gamerro; the work of Rodrigo Fresán; some works by Daniel Guebel; La construcción [The Construction] by Carlos Godoy; and Kelper, by Raúl Vieytes, approach the issue from a range of different perspectives.²⁰ El desertor [The Deserter] by Marcelo Eckhardt and Latas de cerveza en el Río de la Plata [Beer Cans in the Rio de la Plata] by Jorge Stamadianos must also be mentioned, since they deal with a figure that is not well-drawn in the non-fiction – that of the deserter. This is important to the particular discussion in this book since as Vitullo (2006, p. 34) states, the deserter refuses to be subjected to the biopolitical control of the state and rejects its paternalistic dominance.

Possibly the most important weapon in these works has been to strip the Falklands–Malvinas War of its solemnity and, through this simple operation, desacralise ‘Argentinity’, and uncover it as a farce of power. To leave the king naked. To leave the king without his heroic deed.

Cinematographic language

This dichotomy between legitimising views of the state narrative, and those that open alternative paths, is much more complex to observe in the cinema, where we find a great diversity of possibilities associated with the characteristics of cinematic language. On the other hand, not all cinematic contributions can be considered part of the fiction genre, as some works have a documentary style based on research and interviews and maintain the truth of what they postulate.²¹

A certain continuity can be seen between some key cinematic works and the official state discourse of the period. Los chicos de la guerra [The Boys who went to War] by Bebe Kamín (1984) is undoubtedly the most iconic representation of the narrative at the time of the transition to democracy, along with the minutes he dedicates to the Falklands–Malvinas issue in La República perdida 2 [The Lost Republic 2], directed by Miguel Pérez (1986), and La deuda interna [The Internal Debt], by Miguel Pereira (1988). In this line, there are many other productions, for example Guarisove, los olvidados [Guarisove, the Forgotten Ones] by Bruno Stagnaro, Hundan al Belgrano [Sink the Belgrano] by Federico Urioste (1996), and El visitante [The Visitor] by Javier Olivera (1998).

But there are other films that do not coincide exactly with the predominant post-1983 discourse. Examples are: Malvinas, historia de traiciones [Malvinas, a Story of Betrayal] by Jorge Denti (1984), which is located in the classic revisionist discourse of anti-colonialism, and Malvinas, Alerta Roja [Malvinas, Red Alert] by Eduardo Alertondo, a film that premiered in 1985 with a strikingly military tone, in an era when, although some solidarity with the military persisted, the majoritarian discourse adhered to anti-military views.

The most recent official discourse was observed in the successful film IIluminados por el fuego [Illuminated by Fire], released in 2005, and financed by an important series of Argentine public institutions. Its director was a senior government official. Another film, Desobediencia debida [Due Disobedience], a documentary by Victoria Reale (2010), could be placed in the same category. Its main character is the only British prisoner of the Argentine troops, it is clearly located in the state discourse of the time, and was also state-funded.²² Through the metaphor, the director discusses the law of ‘due obedience’ that sought to limit military responsibility in the illegal repressions (Romero, 2017).

From another perspective, Cartas a Malvinas [Letters to Malvinas] (2006) and Soldado argentino solo conocido por Dios [Argentine Soldier Known Only by God] (2016) by Rodrigo Fernández Engler, sit in opposition to official discourse but closer to traditional nationalist visions. They go against the narrative according to which the young soldiers are seen as victims of the Argentine military:

Other films have repeated the aforementioned strategy of stripping away solemnity from the matter, or shining a light on other behaviours and actors as a way of leaving room for critical reflection. For example, we could mention the almost avant-garde experimentation of Teatro de Guerra [Theatre of War], by Lola Arias, the brutal political incorrectness of Fuckland by José Luis Márquez, or the film that embodies the humanity of pain in Argentines and islanders alike – La forma exacta de las islas [The Exact Shape of the Islands] by Daniel Casabé and Edgardo Dieleke.

Those issues that have been explored in some detail in the public sphere and civil society seem to have less room to develop in fiction. For example, the human rights violations perpetrated by the dictatorship after 1976 have had few portrayals in fiction, perhaps because it has been more difficult to place the topic on the plane of the absurd, of the critical or satirical gaze.²⁴

This snapshot reviews issues not explored widely until now, for example, the extent of state influence in different genres, seen in the fact that there are more works challenging the state narrative in the field of cultural production than in essays or academic works. This could be due to the fact that the state set the limits (conditions of audibility) on what could be discussed in public sphere. If this were so, culture would be an overlapping way of treating these issues, by escaping formal and informal coercions. Cultural production would be staking a claim to be the space where civil society examines issues that are occluded by the state, and the works produced can open up conversation and reflection on what is less easy to present in all its crude reality.

Falklands–Malvinas, an experience without learning?

Victory and defeat are circumstantial.

The essential and atrocious is war.

Jorge Luis Borges

A diachronic review of Argentine history based on the contention around the Falklands–Malvinas offers a variety of perspectives for a critical analysis of the future of this issue. But a systematic approach from the social sciences must resist the temptation to blame only the enemy of the day, avoid empathy with the immediate interests of the state, and place itself in the uncomfortable position of speaking truth to power. This is why we must examine the Falklands–Malvinas issue from beginning of the national narrative onwards if we are to address a broader context than that of the war. The war was the result of that process, not its genesis.

That is why our first strategy was to offer a concise historicisation exceeding the limits of the field of recent history. We did this without putting the focus on the war or dictatorship, because this would reduce ‘history’ merely to what happened during the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, we took the methodological decision to broaden the spectrum of analysis: to examine the war in the context of the sustained actions of the Argentine state since its consolidation as such.

This meant studying the Falklands–Malvinas as more than a mere diplomatic conflict, but rather as part of a state strategy to sustain a narrative of national identity. In various ways, and particularly during the war of 1982, the idea of a national identity for Argentina served as a useful device against a heterogeneous society that had traditionally reacted against attempts at discipline.

This mechanism worked in its territorial form (typical of military governments) or in its national and popular form, embodied in the sovereignty of a uniform people led by the state (characteristic of Peronist governments). Both tactics placed the state and the country above the law. Both versions rejected the pluralistic and heterogeneous society articulated by respect and obedience to the National Constitution. Both traditions militarised the public account and turned Argentina into a victim of external threats and looting, sometimes by foreigners (the British or the Communists), and sometimes by their ‘perfidious local agents’.

The Falklands–Malvinas Islands, especially since the mid 1930s, were, for one side as well as for the other, the empirical proof of that story. A misadventure along with others, such as the defeat in the Battle of Vuelta de Obligado, the deaths of Manuel Dorrego and Facundo Quiroga, the betrayal that expelled Rosas from the government and sent him into exile, the Roca-Runciman Agreement, the coups against popular leaders, or the handover of oil to foreign capital during the Arturo Frondizi government.

But the Falklands–Malvinas, unlike the aforementioned episodes, was the only cause that remained stable in the centre of the national narrative. The ‘fact’ of the ‘usurpation’ of the homeland taught to children in school was reinforced in adulthood by governmental, political and cultural appeals of different kinds. A large part of the problem lies within this process: how we, as Argentines, believe that we act, and how the rest of the world interprets our actions.

The traditional nationalist narrative presented Argentines as responding to the ‘usurpation’ in a patient, peaceful and patriotic way. In spite of ongoing political conflict, Argentines could put aside their internal differences when defending the interests of the homeland. However, if they failed in their objective of incorporating the unredeemed territory into the national soil – and in the face of humiliation upon humiliation – Argentines would lose patience. And if that happened, their reaction would be fully justified. That day arrived on 2 April 1982.

Precisely because of this, after 1982, in some quarters the war was considered a minor event that followed activity to solve the problem, and ‘so much pacifism and patience’. Argentina acted as though the enemy had begun the fight. Nothing would be an obstacle to the national cause – not even international law.

However, as observed in this chapter, Argentine state policy was far from pacifist. In addition, the succession of contrasting strategies in different political cycles (and incidents such as ‘Operativo Cóndor’ in the 1960s) prevented Argentina from cultivating a reputation as a reliable interlocutor. These factors also undermined any attempt to solve the problem through the kind of dialogue which might offer or demand long-term commitments.

Explanations for the war range from the anecdotal (‘the drunken general’); the counterfactual (‘what would have happened if ...’); to those that blame international betrayal (by the United Nations or the United States); those that hold society responsible; and those that place the war in the context of a game of political survival or the poor decisions of the military government. But all we can do is unravel the historical conditions that allowed the events to occur. A critical study allows us to question and understand these conditions to try to circumvent the possibility of history repeating itself.

After the war, the tone of most reflections on the Falklands–Malvinas did not change, although the Argentine defeat ended some of the approaches conceived before 1982. In particular, it severely damaged the narrative of the national militarist epic. Meanwhile, the state concentrated on the renewal of the integrative capacity of the Falklands–Malvinas myth, and the voices engaging with the issue once again fell into line with state interests, and with the recreation of the damaged idea of Argentinity. Few chose to deviate from this. The adverse outcome of the war was key to the (re)construction of the narrative. Indeed, a victory could not have aided the process of recycling and maintaining a self-image based on the melancholic idea of defeated moral champions.

Faced with this, Vicente Palermo (a challenger to the dominant discourse), called the post-war period a lost opportunity – as was the case in post-war Europe – to renounce territorialistic nationalism and replace it with a republican patriotism that would allow the construction of a different path from the one chosen by the state since the 19th century.

Meanwhile, Federico Lorenz (in line with the renewed official discourse) preferred to believe that the discomfort of society in the post-war period was not attributable to military defeat, but to a sudden awareness of the dictatorship and its illegal repression. This intellectual operation is what enabled the state’s strategy after 2003 to separate one from the other, to incorporate ‘the heroic deed’ into the new historical narrative without paying the price of being associated with the military that carried it out. But this manoeuvre obscures the fact society’s reaction was exactly the opposite: it was defeat, more than anything else, that was intolerable. The unforgivable thing was losing the war.

This chapter argues that Palermo’s ‘lost opportunity’ would be better located after 1990 or around 2001, rather than in the years of the Alfonsinist transition. The Falklands–Malvinas in the immediate post-war period were at the centre of the political situation, whether the Alfonsín government liked it or not. ‘Malvinas’ had been a synonym for war since 1982, and when Alfonsín assumed the presidency, not two years had gone by since the surrender of the Argentine troops.

By 1983, the Falklands–Malvinas were more than the centre of a state strategy to provoke nationalist feeling in society. They were a symbol of the dead, the ex-combatants, the military defending itself, the attack on democracy, the political elites that made the military a constant in the state apparatus, the stories of mistreatment and heroism, the demands of society for punishment, and the presence of nationalism in education and, of course, in popular culture. ‘Malvinas’ was the football game against England in the 1986 World Cup, the counter-facts at family tables and bars, and in film and literature. The war carried on in other ways, in order to achieve, even in fiction or sport, a restoration of a certain balance and national pride in the face of unexpected and dishonourable defeat.

Within the framework of the structural weakness of the Radical government led by Alfonsín, standing alone politically, and facing many challenges, it was not possible to do anything as profound as changing the course of the country’s sense of self. Neither was there in the Radical party any deep conviction about what to do about the issue. Alfonsín’s policies were ambiguous and subject to his bargaining power with the military establishment and opposition politics.

The political and economic conditions to produce changes were present from 1990 (especially in 1994, during the constitutional reform process). However, Menem’s policy (especially in his second term) also remained ambiguous, despite efforts by his foreign minister to improve the country’s image in the eyes of the islanders and the ‘carnal alliance’ with the United States. Once Menem consolidated his power, what prevailed were the strategies that sustained his leadership above anything else and then, a tendency to systemic corruption.

In 2003, Peronism had another opportunity. The 2001 crisis allowed Néstor Kirchner’s government, mounted on economic recovery and a progressive discourse, to generate long-lasting changes in the state discourse. But he chose to repeat the existing path. What had to be avoided was not the recreation of the conditions that could reiterate the deceptive act, but the prevention of the political adversary handling the state. Even the Falklands–Malvinas War was to be justified, as if it were the ‘good’ people who carried it out. The important thing was to take the state, not to change its strategy. Thus, it was possible to separate the heroic deed from those who had led the war.

Despite these measures, resources and the intellectual and cultural support that the state received, its objective was difficult to achieve. It was not possible to separate the dictatorship from ‘the heroic deed’. The only way is to give up the idea of the heroic deed. But without that, there is nothing left but a dictatorship acting desperately, steeped in decades of nationalist rhetoric.

Conclusions and points for further reflection

The British bombing of Buenos Aires in 1982 exists only in the imagination and in the famous songs of popular musicians. The real ‘bombs’ arrived in the 1990s, dropped by international terrorism, enlarging the list of deaths. Argentina was once again participating in a war, but this time following the United States’ lead against Iraq.

In 1982 the Argentine government did not understand the cost of splitting from the Western world and confronting its two largest pillars. In 1990, another Argentine government did not understand the costs of getting involved in a distant war, following an automatic alignment with the same powers that it had challenged in 1982. Both contradictory moments are united by a misunderstanding of the global reality, and by an intellectual deficiency of the elites to understand the contemporary development of the world.

In the case of the Falklands–Malvinas, this misunderstanding grew out of a false and repeated image, and one which was only accepted within Argentina: the idea of a patient, continuous and peaceful claim. The islanders themselves, or ‘Kelpers’, as the Argentines persist in calling them, are subjects who do not count or matter. While much of the British diplomatic triumph was based on questioning the future of the islands’ population, for the Argentine state, that population simply did not exist. Or, in the words of the highest authority in the country, ‘they are squatters’.²⁵

This was the case for the academic and cultural world, too. Even from the 1990s, when the discourse of otherness was established in the social sciences, academia preferred to build an other acceptable for the narrative or for the reality that the country was living in. The other was linked to gender issues, the native peoples and economic outsiders. These were acceptable others. But the islanders were, possibly, the true other, the other that calls into question our own identity.

The war changed everything. It brought about the end of the dictatorship; there was a public outcry over human rights violations, and an economic and social crisis that obscured the ways in which the armed forces had tried to legitimise their intervention in politics. From 1983, it was clear that the army could no longer claim to rule, impose order, or even defend the homeland. Thus the longest and most unprecedented period of democracy in the country’s history was inaugurated. Everything changed with the war. Everything changed, except for the conditions that led us to it.

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— (2012) Islas imaginadas: La Guerra de Malvinas en la literatura y el cine argentinos (Buenos Aires: Corregidor).

Varela, M. and M. Metsman (2016) Masas, Pueblo y Multitud en Cine y TV (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA).

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1 Possibly the most appropriate term is that of ‘Neoschmittianism’ (Paredes Goicochea, 2018).

2 ‘The transplant had been successful, but the transplanted subjects did not seem to favour the regeneration of the Argentine race or adapt docilely, as a work force, to the conditions of the Argentine capitalism. The immigrants were not the expected Anglo-Saxons ... and, at the same time, they introduced in the country ideologies strange to the national being, and contrary to the capitalist social order; they were not laborious, docile and liberal masses, but revolutionary anarchists’ (García Fanlo, 2010, p. 18).

3 ‘The 1.8 million inhabitants of 1869 became 7.8 million in 1914 … Two out of every three inhabitants of the city were foreigners in 1895, and in 1914 … still half of the city population was foreign’ (Romero, 2017, p. 31).

4 Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877) was the governor of the province of Buenos Aires from 1829 to 1832 and from 1835 to 1852, before the national state could establish its rule over the territory now known as Argentina. From there he built an anti-liberal and nationalist image – that was subsequently amplified by the different revisionisms – starting with an armed confrontation with France and the United Kingdom. His adversaries made of him the model of a tyrant because he concentrated all the power in his hands, and used the para-police to attack his political rivals.

5 ‘[The soldiers] are the only ones who put the defense of the country and nationality above all things, including the law and military regulations … The soldiers are the only ones able to objectively define when, how and why the country is in danger, and ... they can save it. The armed forces are healthy, immaculate, incorruptible, unable to do anything contrary to the national interest’ (García Fanlo, 2007, p. 4).

6 It would be interesting to include in the research agenda the different social and political repercussions of the conflicts around the Falklands–Malvinas and the Beagle Channel. The dispute with Chile over the issue of the Beagle was not recurrent in the intellectual or political environments; neither had it had much social impact, despite the constant disputes originated in the area in which both countries were involved (Valenzuela Ugarte and García Toso, 2008).

7 To deepen awareness of the policies on the Falklands–Malvinas at this stage, see Perochena (2016).

8 Although their approaches sometimes dabble in classical nationalist discourse, e.g. ‘10 questions to explain Malvinas to children’, Supplement 12, Diario Página 12, 3 April 2009.

9 See Rozitchner (2015). To reconstruct some of the debates on Perlongher’s ideas, see Svetliza (2017). To delve into issues of exile and debates about war, see Silvina Jensen’s chapter in this book.

10 Interview with Rosana Guber, 13 April 2014, http://www.infonews.com.

11 Interview with Rosana Guber, 13 April 2014, http://www.infonews.com.

12 ‘The name kelper refers to the algae that grow on the Falklands/Malvinas coast (kelp), which are useless and annoying. For that reason, ‘kelper’ connotes a devalued identity’ (Ehrmantraut, 2012, p. 7).

13 Among the signatories are Beatriz Sarlo, Santiago Kovadloff, Manuel Antín, Juan José Sebreli, Marcos Aguinis, Jorge Lanata, Graciela Fernández Meijide, Fernando Iglesias, Emilio de Ípola, Pepe Eliaschev, Roberto Gargarella, Marcos Novaro, Vicente Palermo, Luis Alberto Romero, Jorge E. Torlasco, Hugo Vezzetti and Osvaldo Guariglia, among others.

14 The constitution says ‘respect [the Islanders’] way of life’, and that they should not be subjected to ‘a sovereignty, a citizenship and a government they do not want’, which was used to support demands for the withdrawal of the United Kingdom and its military base, while all the time asserting the sovereignty of Argentina.

15 The work of Luz Souto (2018) could also be included in this list, since it proposed a categorisation of literary production based on generations of authors. It is related to one of the issues (post-memory) we tackle in our previous book (Mira and Pedrosa, 2016).

16 E.g., García Quiroga (2010).

17 In the case of Lorenz (2012), his fiction completes a complex historical operation that unites the political violence of the 1970s with the Falklands–Malvinas story. Even in his 2017 novel which was not specifically dedicated to the Falklands–Malvinas issue, he takes a condescending look at the armed struggle.

18 Pron refers to his work as ‘a symbolic continuation of the Falklands/Malvinas War’. This ‘untimely’ critic sought to desecrate a war that, by the time he was editing his novel, had already been re-sacralised in other arenas (interview with Patricio Pron, Infobae newspaper, 8 February 2015).

19 This includes children’s literature. A book by Claudio Javier Garbolino and Antonella Garbolino Mejía (2013) was marketed as the first children’s story about the Falklands– Malvinas conflict.

20 On the Pichiciegos see Bruña (2016). On the work of Gamerro, see Lardone (2012). On Guebel, see Ehrmantraut (2016). On Eckhardt, see Vitullo (2006).

21 There are documentaries such as Crazy about the Flag (2005), by Julio Cardoso, which demonstrates the breakdown of the famed Argentine national unity on the subject of the Falklands–Malvinas, although it was not what the film set out to show.

22 There are several studies of the British in Argentine cinema on the Falklands–Malvinas (Fernández Ameghino, 2018).

23 La Voz (Córdoba), 7 June 2016.

24 ‘Julieta Vitullo, on the other hand, affirms that “Malvinas is a malaise in the national conscience, that seems to be unable to be faced by the political discourse, but literature does”’ (Souto, 2018, p. 110).

25 Interviews with LMNeuquen.com, March 13, 2013. Extracted from the LMNeuquen.com website.