8. Flying the flag: Malvinas and questions of patriotism

Catriona McAllister

Galtieri stands on the balcony of the Casa Rosada, flanked by officials and smiling, his hands open in a gesture of victorious welcome. Below, flag-waving, cheering crowds greet him with deafening chants of ‘Argentina’. The crowd is euphoric, coming together in celebration to affirm a shared truth: ‘Las Malvinas son argentinas’.¹ Yet by the time the junta launched military action in the South Atlantic, denunciations of the regime’s human rights were widespread;² and it has become a truism to state that the invasion of the Islands was a last-ditch attempt to shore up the dictatorship’s crumbling power. The scenes on 2 April 1982, the military government and the people standing as one, attest to the power of the Malvinas cause in the Argentine national imaginary. The strength of this ‘guiding fiction’ was such that it led to widespread public support for a war waged by a repressive military regime: an uncomfortable fact to reconcile with the post-dictatorship discourses of memory and justice.

This chapter will therefore reflect on elements of the complex symbolic territory surrounding the Malvinas in discourses of national identity, focusing on the relationship between the military and patriotic celebration both before the dictatorship and beyond. These questions receive critical treatment in Martín Kohan’s novel Ciencias morales (2007), which provides a meditation on patriotic education set against the backdrop of the conflict in 1982. By offering a reading of this text, I shall highlight a literary treatment of the Malvinas question that embraces an understated, allusive narrative mode to dissect the patriotic heart of the Malvinas ‘cause’.

The military, civil society and the nation

At the time of the invasion of 1982, the armed forces were able to call upon existing ideas of what constituted the Argentine nation (and their own place within that ‘imagined community’) to mobilise patriotic allegiance. The deeply-rooted assertion that the Malvinas belonged to Argentina, communicated above all through the education system (Lorenz, 2006, p. 17), was transformed into action. But beyond the specificity of this powerful cause, the armed forces could also invoke their own right (or duty) to protect the fabric of the nation. As Luis Alberto Romero (2004, p. 23) highlights, ‘la asociación de la nación y de su destino con la institución militar’ emerged as a powerful idea at the start of the 20th century, generating the narrative that ‘el Ejército “nació con la patria”, es el sostén último de sus valores y el responsable final de su grandeza’. By launching a military intervention that aimed to defend Argentina’s borders, the junta reasserted their claim to a well-rehearsed role: that of the saviours of the nation and protectors of the patria (a claim evoked in every military coup in Argentina’s history (Goebel, 2011)).

However, following defeat in the Malvinas and the collapse of the military regime, some of these previous patriotic certainties were cast into doubt. Federico Lorenz (2006, p. 17) highlights the profound questioning of the role of the armed forces in the first years after the return to democracy, including ‘su relación como protectores de la ciudadanía y de los sagrados valores de la Patria’. In this light, the flag-waving scenes of 2 April became a jarring moment of alliance between the military and civil society, an expression of a historically accepted relationship that no longer held validity. In the post-dictatorial context, the 1982 conflict was quickly re-cast as a policy of the regime and associated with its human-rights abuses, rather than being perceived as a conflict in the name of civil society (Guber, 2004, p. 147).

Despite this discursive shift, the uncomfortable fact of the public support for the invasion remained; and Vicente Palermo notes the significant challenge this presented to the powerful emerging narrative that positioned society exclusively as a victim of the military regime (2007, p. 282). Lorenz argues that as a result of this ambiguity the war ‘fue considerada como un síntoma de una sociedad que había militarizado sus formas de relacionarse, y que debía ser reeducada’ (2006, p. 192) and cites Alain Rouquié’s verdict that the Malvinas (and the public support the conflict received) revealed a ‘militarización muy profunda de la vida política y a la vez una politización de los militares que no es fácil de eliminar’ (Rouquié, 1983, cited in Lorenz, 2006, p. 191).³ In 1982 patriotism had triumphed over politics, leaving crucial questions for the post-dictatorial process of soul-searching.

Rouquié’s observations that the boundaries surrounding the military’s role had become unacceptably (and dangerously) blurred do not relate only to the most obviously political arenas. The flag-waving scenes of 2 April 1982 reveal an easy slippage between the military and nation that was carefully cultivated by the regime, a manipulation of the symbolic that Diana Taylor has described as a ‘theatre of operations’ whereby ‘nation-ness was resemanticized’ in line with the values of the regime (1997, p. 95).⁴ In the words of Rosana Guber, the dictatorship ‘se arrogó la exclusiva y absoluta representación de la Nación’ (2004, p. 229). Similarly, Alejandro Grimson, Mirta Amati and Kaori Kodama argue that the military’s use of the state’s performative patriotic symbols had altered their potential meaning, creating a problematic association between markers of the national and the dictatorship: ‘La dictadura militar produce efectos decisivos sobre la idea de nación. En la medida en que sustentaban su accionar en una retórica patriótica, consiguieron apoderarse de un conjunto de símbolos – como la bandera y la escarapela, el himno y otras canciones patrias’ (2007, p. 431). At the point of the return to democracy, the state was therefore faced with the task of re-appropriating the nation’s system of symbolic production. Lorenz underlines the political urgency of this dilemma for the newly instated democratic regime:

Redefining the concept of patria without its previously essential military component therefore represented an indispensable political task that was partly enacted through changes in the rituals of national celebration. The military’s role in the ritos patrios was minimised, for example, including the notable absence of a military parade in the celebrations of 25 May for the decade from 1989 to 1999 (Grimson, Amati and Kodama, 2007, p. 435; p. 447). Where once the armed forces seemed a natural part of patriotic celebration, their symbolic role was now uncertain.

Markers of the military were also present in other domains of public life as Argentina returned to democratic rule, including the national history taught in schools. For much of the 20th century, this relied heavily on tales of military glory, particularly surrounding the wars of independence that had led to the formation of Argentina as a territorial reality (Romero, 2004). Martín Kohan has referred to this as the ‘culto militarista del sistema escolar argentino’ (2005, p. 14), while Rouquié asserts that ‘la mayoría de los ciudadanos argentinos no está lejos de pensar que su país es una creación de sus generales. En efecto, es lo que enseña la “historia-batalla” de las escuelas, no sin fundamento’ (1981, p. 73). In the years following the return to democracy, this school narrative underwent significant revision (Romero, 2004); and Lorenz links this shift directly to the impact of the dictatorship, stating that ‘una de las consecuencias culturales profundas de la dictadura militar ha sido la destrucción del relato histórico nacional – total, abarcador, complaciente – como el que millares de argentinos se habituaron a recibir, compartir y transmitir en las escuelas’ (2009, p. 32). A historical narrative that had remained relatively unchanged for almost one hundred years could no longer survive intact in a nation reeling from the military’s abuse of power.

The public response to the invasion of the Malvinas in 1982 therefore lies at a complex intersection of ideas of patriotism, the unique position occupied by the Islands in Argentina’s national imaginary and the military’s self-proclaimed right to act as the ‘saviours’ of the patria. Martín Kohan’s work (as both an author and an academic) offers a sustained engagement with these questions, particularly in relation to the patriotic symbolic apparatus in Argentina and the ways in which national identity narratives are produced and sustained. The implications of building a nation’s history around a military epic is a theme that recurs throughout his writing, perhaps most significantly in Narrar a San Martín (2005), an essay charting the process that transformed a general in the wars of independence into the padre de la patria. Similarly to Lorenz (2006, p. 16), in this work Kohan argues that with defeat in the Malvinas ‘hay todo un mundo de certezas que colapsa’ in relation to nationalist discourse (2005, p. 30). Kohan’s thesis, however, is that the figure of San Martín is not part of this collapse, leaving a military figure safely installed in the rituals of patriotic celebration. Despite the climate of change surrounding traditional historical narratives in the midst of a deep moment of national reflection and self-scrutiny, Narrar a San Martín asserts that military glory was not fully purged from the commemoration of the nation’s past.

A critique of the public positioning of military endeavours is also the subject of Kohan’s more recent essay, El país de la guerra (2014), which narrates a history of the presence of war in Argentina’s cultural and political landscape. In quoting Alberdi’s assertion that war is ‘una manera de interpretar el mundo […] una manera entera de organizar la sociedad’ (2014, pp. 27–8), Kohan synthesises a principle that can be seen as underlying much of his fiction. Several of his novels question what it means to base a nation’s ritos patrios around a celebration of war and military heroism, particularly following dictatorship and the disaster of the Malvinas.

Kohan’s literary work therefore explores key questions surrounding the relationship between military and civil life in post-dictatorship Argentina, examining the complex connections between patriotic performance, markers of national identity and the military. In Ciencias morales, Kohan explicitly sets these identity discourses against the apparent moment of their collapse: the conflict of 1982. By focusing on the symbolic structures of patriotic celebration, the routines and rituals through which the nation is performed, the text asks whether the process of the decoupling of military and civil life perceived as such an urgent and fundamental task in the return to democracy has indeed taken place; and whether the re-appropriation of the symbolic domain by the democratic state has succeeded.

Ciencias morales and patriotic education

Although Argentina’s post-dictatorship government recognised the need to alter the symbolic charge of markers of the national, this did not necessarily lead to a complete and permanent overhaul of Argentina’s patriotic liturgy. By the end of the 1990s, markers of the national that had seemed ‘contaminated’ by the military regime (including the national anthem) were creeping back into usage and in 1999 a military parade was reinstated in the celebrations of 25 May (Grimson, Amati and Kodama, 2007, pp. 446–7). Ciencias morales (2007) was therefore published after the immediate reaction against patriotic displays (particularly those with an explicit connection to the armed forces) appeared to have passed, replaced by a certain degree of ‘patriotic normality’. This gradual slide back into familiar representations of the nation provides important context for Kohan’s exploration of the crisis point of 1982. By returning the reader to a point when the national and the military were still explicitly fused together, the novel tests the limits of the ideal of a civil patria apparently beyond the reach of its military institutions, exploring whether these deep political and symbolic connections can be unravelled.

The novel’s action is played out in one of Argentina’s best-known educational institutions: the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires (famed for schooling generations of Argentina’s elite). The Colegio is positioned as a metonymic representation of the country and its past, described at one point as a ‘selecto resumen’ of the nation (p. 10). Its connection to nation-building is emphasised throughout: the presence of Bartolomé Mitre, the school’s founder and the historian who constructed the national narrative surrounding independence, looms large; and we are reminded that Manuel Belgrano, a key independence hero and creator of the Argentine flag, studied at the school. The text references the school’s efforts to ‘pacify’ relations between boys from the north of the country and Buenos Aires, tasking the Colegio with the same project of national consolidation as the country’s 19th-century statesmen. This emphasis on the deliberate, conscious shaping of a nation by political elites reaffirms the Republic’s status as a political construction rather than ‘natural’ entity, an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 2006) that must be continually maintained to preserve its existence.

The need constantly to produce and reproduce the nation underpins the rhythm of daily life in the text. Argentina’s educational system has been explicitly charged with building patriotic pride and allegiance since its earliest days (Bertoni, 2001, p. 47) and the novel’s Colegio bears out this performative mission. Static symbols and active performance merge in a patchwork of national commemoration: the daily ritual of raising and lowering the Argentine flag; the singing of the national anthem in the celebrations for 25 May; the rehearsals for the parade in honour of Belgrano (whose bust also adorns the school). These routines can be perceived as acts of ‘banal nationalism’ as described by Billig (1995): ‘habits’ with an ideological function to reproduce the nation-state. Billig’s concept foregrounds the daily practices through which we are reminded of our nationality, seeing these as rehearsals for crisis points that require our allegiance. In Kohan’s school setting, the next generation are learning the patriotic ‘habits’ that will allow them to ‘remember’ their national identity.

Crucially, Billig’s thesis identifies an ultimate purpose to these rituals and symbols that continually recall the nation: the ability to mobilise support for warfare. He differentiates between the ‘waved’ and the ‘unwaved’ flag, with the desire to wave the flag in a moment of crisis only made possible through the ‘unimaginative repetition’ (p. 10) of ideological habits that reproduce the nation. In Ciencias morales it is the unwaved flags that take centre stage. The unquestioning daily performance of rituals invoking the nation, supported by annual events and commemorations, are there in place of the dramatic moment of overt public support for armed conflict seen in 1982. The text’s insistence on these habits and routines therefore underscores their crucial function in creating a powerful imaginative construct that can be called upon in an hour of need and specifically to generate support for an act of war. We do not see the crowds filling the streets on 2 April; instead, the text shows us the careful reproduction of the nation that makes that moment possible.

The text explicitly references this ultimate purpose, portraying its acceptance as a rite of passage on the journey to ‘becoming Argentine’. As the Colegio’s pupils prepare for the commemorative act honouring Belgrano, the narrator imagines the scene that awaits the school children in this public demonstration of their commitment to nationhood:

Through this description, the flag is transformed from a benign marker of belonging into an ideological tool. It demands not only support for acts of war in its name, but the promise that citizens will be prepared to lay down their lives in its defence. This seemingly innocuous patriotic ritual therefore serves to make sense of the unthinkable: the call for the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ in the name of the nation (Billig, 1995, p. 11). Crucially, the young citizens’ pledge is made in front of parents who bear witness to this promise, consenting to lay their children on the sacrificial altar of the patria. Every aspect of the participants’ behaviour is ritualised, including the gendered behaviour of the parents who willingly express their pride. This is a carefully constructed performance with a clear ideological purpose at its heart: to teach the next generation their patriotic duty.

This idea of an ultimate sacrifice in the name of the patria is not an abstract, distant possibility in the novel, but a real and imminent threat. The constant, brooding shadow of the Falklands–Malvinas conflict is primarily communicated through the private drama of a family who have been called upon to honour their pledge to the nation by sacrificing a son. The main character we follow, María Teresa, works at the Colegio and has a brother in the army, possibly completing national service. Her home life is dominated by the postcards he sends and her mother’s increasingly delicate nervous state as his division moves ever nearer to the South Atlantic conflict zone. As the family face the reality of their patriotic contract, ‘banal’ reminders of nationhood pepper their day-to-day lives: the image of the Argentine flag on the telephone as the mother waits anxiously for her enlisted son to call her back (p. 155); or the flags waved at the solidarity concert featured on the news (p. 73). Through interweaving the banal and this gut-wrenching threat of grief, the text strips away the familiarity of ritual and exposes the reality of a promise to give one’s life for the nation.

By revealing the ‘ultimate purpose’ of patriotic duty as a commitment to support and even contribute to military action, the novel troubles any notion of patriotism as a purely civic engagement. This uncomfortable association is further highlighted in the school’s nation-flagging routines, which display an omnipresent military inflection. The pupils rehearse marching for the parade in honour of Belgrano, requiring them to obey associated commands: ‘quier, deré, quier, deré, fir-més, descan-só’ (p. 191). The daily ceremony of raising and lowering the national flag is reminiscent of military parades and is accompanied by the patriotic song ‘Aurora’, which (as the novel reminds us) references an ‘águila guerrera’ (p. 75). Kohan dissects this lyric’s fusion of national origin and war in El país de la guerra (2014, pp. 13–17), imbuing this reference in Ciencias morales with increased significance. The education the novel’s pupils receive is also streaked with militaristic patriotism: we witness an art lesson in which the teacher shows paintings of battle scenes from the War of the Triple Alliance (a conflict in which Argentina was on the winning side, as the narrator reminds us in an ironic aside).⁵ Presented with this complex fusion of education, patriotism and military routine, we are left to wonder what aspects of nationhood, if any, are purely civic events.

This troubling fusion is given greater political urgency in the text through the unspoken but ever-present shadow of the proceso. The school functions almost as a miniature police state, patrolled by a team of preceptores who enforce cast-iron discipline regulating every aspect of the pupils’ behaviour. The text is punctuated by descriptions of the suffocating discipline that governs school life: the incessant daily routine of lining up; the ‘toma de distancia’ ensuring the pupils are precisely spaced in their lines; the silent filing in and out of classrooms. This echoes the political reality of the way the regime made its presence felt during the proceso: as Taylor reminds us, the junta issued strict national guidelines regarding pupil dress and behaviour as part of the policing of citizens’ daily lives (p. 105). This echo is even more distinctly felt through the character of señor Biasutto, the jefe de preceptores (the head of discipline) in charge of orchestrating this regime of control within the Colegio. We learn that Biasutto joined the school in 1975, the year that the real-life Colegio gained a new rector: Eduardo Aníbal Rómulo Maniglia, who continued in post when the junta came to power, imposing extreme discipline and vigilance to eliminate ‘subversion’ (Pertot, 2008). The military hallmarks of the pupils’ performance of national identity therefore take on an added significance through this context. They are performances not just of ‘being Argentine’, but of how the patriotic ideal was constructed under dictatorial rule.⁶

Significantly, Kohan chooses to deny his protagonist any internal resistance to the politically charged network of symbols and power in which she participates. María Teresa is one of the school’s preceptoras and is therefore charged with upholding its strict disciplinary code, a role she performs with rigorous attention (and blind allegiance). This unthinking acceptance extends to her participation in rituals of national commemoration, most notably the act to mark 25 May (the day in 1810 considered the start of Argentina’s bid for independence from Spain). The novel’s understated description focuses on the drizzle and María Teresa’s futile attempts to clear her glasses; her attention is only returned to the content of the ceremony by a shout of ‘¡viva la patria!’ (p. 97). However, the apparent innocence of the annual celebration is abruptly shattered by a rare direct reference to political reality: as the pupils file into place, a journalist attempts to ask them their thoughts on the Falklands– Malvinas War.⁷ This functions as a potent reminder of the celebration’s underlying political implication. Grimson, Amati and Kodama highlight that in the celebration of 25 May in 1982 ‘se remonta la acción bélica presente y la defensa de la patria hasta la gesta de 1810, se recurre a la asociación de la guerra de Malvinas con la de Mayo’ (2007, p. 437). By allowing the Falklands– Malvinas conflict to intrude into the routine performance of nationhood, the text destroys the ritual’s apolitical appearance, emphasising instead its potential to serve as a legitimising tool. As a result, it reveals the symbolic apparatus of patriotism as a powerful force waiting to be mobilised, in this case by a repressive regime.

The depiction of patriotic ritual in Kohan’s novel therefore evokes the junta’s exploitation of the framework of national allegiance and critiques the characters’ passive acceptance of the naturalness of their own participation in these acts. Set against this political reality, the novel’s depiction of acts of banal nationalism takes on a much more powerful (and sinister) meaning. They become unconscious performances of allegiance to this project of ‘national reorganisation’, an unthinking transfer of habits that obscures its potentially profound implications. Kohan’s text denaturalises these habits, foregrounding their military component and exposing the political consequences of blindly lending support to the national flag without regard for who is wielding its power. The novel insists that patriotism, including the Malvinas cause, does not exist ‘beyond’ politics and dismantles the apparent innocence of this form of national pride. It therefore demands a deeper consideration of the elements that make up a country’s patriotic liturgy, asking whether the traditional (military) components of performing Argentine national identity hold validity in a 21st-century society, particularly one with a recent experience of military dictatorship.

Conclusion

And so to return to that balcony scene of 2 April, absent from Kohan’s novel but resonating as a question and a provocation throughout its pages. In place of flag-waving crowds, Ciencias morales charts the process by which young Argentines are schooled in the practices of performing their national identity. It portrays these rituals as both a manifestation of the military government’s grasp on civil society during the dictatorship and a seemingly natural part of day-to-day citizenship: a jarring combination of meanings that meet in the figure of the Malvinas.

The novel consciously engages with the broader social and political context outlined at the start of this chapter: the attempts to wrest control of the imaginative construct of the nation from the military, creating a clearer separation between the two. Its critique is therefore not restricted to the Falklands–Malvinas War (and the public support for the conflict), or to the relationship between the dictatorship and civil society, which can both be considered finite historical events. Instead, it confronts an aspect of public life which is (as in every nation) ongoing: the performance of national belonging and the education of the next generation as citizens.

By exploring the Malvinas through the prism of patriotism, the novel seems to steer away from asking what is unique about this national cause and instead focuses on its underpinning structures. This transforms the investigation from a historical one to a questioning that directly invokes the present: although the militarised routines present in the novel are tinged with the shadow of the proceso, the raising and lowering of the flag accompanied by the singing of ‘Aurora’ are still a routine familiar to thousands of Argentine schoolchildren today (as Kohan highlights in El país de la guerra, p. 14). This can be seen as a more challenging, unsettling provocation. It offers no comforting reassurance that the lessons of the past have been learned, or that the structures that enabled the military government to repress civil society have been dismantled. Rather than offering a clear resolution, it leaves a potent question mark over the role of familiar practices and national symbols. Having revealed the intimate fusion of national commemoration and the military, it refuses to offer any indication that this underlying relationship has been successfully unravelled, leaving the concept of civil nationhood in a seemingly precarious position. Ciencias morales can be seen to offer its own explanation for the public support for the Malvinas, rooted in this learned association between the military and patria. But it also issues a warning: that unless we change these structures, there is no guarantee that we have shut the door to the past.

References

Anderson, B. (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso).

Bertoni, L.A. (2001) Patriotas, cosmopolitas y nacionalistas: la construcción de la nacionalidad argentina a fines del siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: Fondo de cultura económica).

Billig, M. (1995) Banal nationalism (London: Sage).

Goebel, M. (2011) Argentina’s Partisan Past: Nationalism and the Politics of History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press).

Grimson, A., M. Amati and K. Kodama (2007) ‘La nación escenificada por el Estado: una comparación de rituales patrios’, in A. Grimson, M. Amati and J. Nun (eds.), Pasiones nacionales: política y cultura en Brasil y Argentina (Buenos Aires: Edhasa), pp. 413–502.

Guber, R. (2004) Por qué Malvinas?: de la causa nacional a la guerra absurda (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica).

Jensen, S. (2020) ‘Exile, the Malvinas War and human rights’, in G. Mira Delli-Zotti and F. Pedroso (eds.), Revisiting the Falklands–Malvinas Question: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: University of London Press), pp. 53–74.

Kohan, M. (2005) Narrar a San Martín (Buenos Aires: Hidalgo).

— (2007) Ciencias morales (Barcelona: Anagrama).

— (2014) El país de la guerra (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia).

Lorenz, F. (2006) Las guerras por Malvinas (Buenos Aires: Edhasa).

— (2009) ‘¿Sueñan las ovejas con bicentenarios?’, El Monitor, 23: 32–34, available at: http://www.me.gov.ar/monitor/nro0/pdf/monitor23.pdf (accessed 15 May 2016).

Palermo, V. (2007) Sal en las heridas: las Malvinas en la cultura argentina contemporánea (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana).

Pertot, W. (2008) ‘La patota del Nacional’, Página/12, available at: http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-112385-2008-09-28.html (accessed 29 July 2016).

Romero, L.A. (2004) La Argentina en la escuela: la idea de nación en los textos escolares (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI).

Rouquié, A. (1981) Poder militar y sociedad política en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Emece).

Taylor, D. (1997) Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press).

TV Pública Argentina (1982) Archivo histórico: Noticiero ‘60 minutos’ – 2 de abril de 1982 – Guerra de Malvinas, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzcgExhuCIQ (accessed 26 June 2016).

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1 Argentine television coverage of this event is available online. See TV Pública Argentina (1982).

2 See, for example, Jensen’s article in this volume.

3 Rouquié, A. Humor, vol 101, March 1983, p. 45.

4 Lorenz provides an important reminder that the public support for Malvinas cannot be simplistically reduced to a single, shared nationalist response but instead encompassed different understandings of the Malvinas cause and the war (2006, pp. 41–2; see also Jensen, 2017). However, Taylor’s (1997) analysis highlights the difficulty of reflecting any such nuance in the performance of support for the war. If the junta was successfully wielding the power of national symbolism, the separation between support for the regime, support for the war and national pride could not easily be communicated through the familiar framework of patriotic performance.

5 This teaching of military glory is a clear reference to (and criticism of ) what Rouquié describes as the ‘historia-batalla’ of the Argentine school system: see discussion above.

6 For analysis of the junta’s imposition of their own patriotic ideal, see Taylor (1997).

7 Significantly, this question is posed in French rather than Spanish, marking it as an outside intervention and preserving the non-naming of the conflict in the language of the text (the journalist simply refers to it as ‘la guerre’).