Preface

Guillermo Mira and Fernando Pedrosa

Almost forty years after the events analysed in this book, the causes and consequences of the military conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom in 1982 still reverberate in a sea of feverish memories and oblivions. What is certain is that the conflict around the Falklands–Malvinas survives and, in the words of Bernard McGuirk (a contributor to this volume), remains unfinished business.

Every aspect of the archipelago that makes up the Falkland–Malvinas Islands (including their very name) is mired in complexity, controversy and antagonism. Despite this reality, many of those who passionately discuss the various political points that characterise the conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom insist upon the immovable certainties behind their arguments and claims.

For this reason, among the little that can be affirmed with a degree of consensus is the irrefutable fact that the archipelago is located in the South Atlantic Ocean, that it is made up of more than one hundred islands, that they cover a total of 11,700 square kilometres, and that they are located just over 500 kilometres off the Argentine coast and 13,000 kilometres from Great Britain. Two large islands stand out from this group, and they lie just under 15 kilometres apart.

Everything else seems to be open to debate – even the Islands’ geological origin, given that relatively recent scientific findings affirm that, in fact, they originate from Gondwana, which was one of the two continental blocks that existed prior to the formation of Panagea. Specifically, the islands separated from what we know today as southern Africa. The advance of glaciation caused that rupture and the islands’ subsequent movement to where they are today. Therefore, at least in that sense, they have nothing to do geologically with Patagonia, as was believed for a long time.

Fortunately, the origin of this book is much simpler and easier to locate in time and space. It grew out of a work of reflection and study on recent Latin American history that we have been developing with research teams from the University of Salamanca and Buenos Aires. We have been joined by researchers from other institutions and countries, many of whom are an important part of this work, as authors and for their contribution in the tasks of editing, translation and publication.

The direct antecedent of this book is a work called Extendiendo los límites: Nuevas agendas en historia reciente [Extending the Limits: New Agendas in Recent History] (Mira and Pedrosa, 2016), where we proposed the need to re-evaluate the field of recent history as one with exponential growth, but whose success produced its premature exhaustion. In that book we pointed out an issue that was little debated then, but today appears more clearly:

This question came to replace one aspect that had been surprisingly understudied: the role of the national state as a producer and legitimiser of visions of the past and, conversely, its role as suppressor of other voices.

The aforementioned book, which can be taken as a precedent of the one presented here, not only was not positioned within a closed or single discourse, but also offered a range of issues that sought to stretch the boundaries of recent history. This book continues that trajectory but changes the strategy: it is no longer about presenting multiple problems and approaches to stimulate new questions and make disciplinary limits more flexible; here we restrict ourselves to a single subject, but we also offer multiple approaches for new reflection.

This book is about the conflict over the Falkland–Malvinas Islands, and it is particularly focused on the War and its aftermath, analysing it from diverse perspectives, and in that process bringing together Spanish, British and Argentine specialists and researchers. It aims to put together a choral, heterogeneous and diverse work, but at the same time, a reflective one, so that it appeals to rationality and, above all, to critical thinking within a sinuous and problematic terrain. Consequently, it eschews both the mythification of bellicosity and nationalistic thinking; but neither is it a merely descriptive essay of dates and events in search of an impossible and unproductive objectivity.

This book combines approaches from history, political science, sociology and cultural studies, defined in a broad sense. The intention that moved us was to make available to the English-speaking public in general (and the British one in particular) different perspectives, which intersect and dialogue between them, away from tired and barren roads and the focus on exceptionalism that has characterised some historiographical approaches to the 1982 conflict.

Many people have accompanied us on this path. In addition to the contributors, we would like to express our gratitude to those who, over many years, have made possible a frank and stimulating dialogue between the ‘two shores’: Linda Newson, Maxine Molyneux, Catherine Davies, Catherine Boyle, Christine Anderson, Catriona McAllister, Bernard McGuirk, Stephen Hart, Julio Cazzasa and Francisco Panizza, who, for many reasons and in many circumstances, have been key actors. Their reflections, advice and friendship have helped us complete the long emotional and intellectual journey that began on 2 April 1982 – amid disbelief, fear and indignation, and that has brought us this far. Special thanks to Catriona McAllister for her assistance in translating chapters originally written in Spanish.

The chapters in this book

This work begins with a text written by the compilers, Guillermo Mira and Fernando Pedrosa, who offer a series of critical reflections on academic and cultural approaches to the Falklands–Malvinas War. To carry this out, they present a composite historicisation that reveals that the War and everything that surrounded it are not only a problem of recent history, but that their roots date back to the construction of the Argentine state and nation. They propose a way to read the various productions on the subject where the organising axis is, rather than format or language, the presence of the state in search of greater legitimacy to increase its control over a conflictive and vital society.

María José Bruña presents the Falklands–Malvinas War as one of the most revealing examples of biopolitical control in recent history. For her, the War was a decision taken by two governments who knew that hundreds of young men were sent to their certain death. That is why Bruña defines it as a ‘biopolitical strategy’ for these governments to perpetuate themselves in power. Using Todorov’s conceptualisations, the author analyses the testimony of a Falklands– Malvinas War veteran, which allows her to explore various forms of resistance by the soldiers, such as laughter, fraternity and imagination confronting the biopolitical control of power.

Silvina Jensen explores the impact of the War on Argentine exiles. They are men and women who for years – far from their country – had laboriously forged a unity of action and discourse with the sole purpose of denouncing and repudiating the military dictatorship that had usurped power in Argentina. From the margins, the author addresses a controversial issue: the popular fervour in Argentina during the decisive days that led to the War. During its course, from a visceral hostility against the United Kingdom emerged a widespread adherence to the performance of the dictatorship in the ‘Reconquista’ of the Islands.

Fernando Pedrosa’s chapter presents the characterisation of the positions adopted by the European and Latin American political parties, many of which were members of the Socialist International (SI). Afterwards, he delves more deeply into the different visions of the Anglo-Argentine conflict, evaluating the way in which it influenced inter-party relations, the social democrats’ transnational organisational strategies, and regional politics in general. This allows him to create a map of the transnational political actions taken, which is quite different from the one usually presented in the specialised literature on the subject, mainly arising from the perspective of the parties as the main characters in the political processes and on the international stage of the time. Furthermore, this approach allows us to observe the more fluid and ambiguous actions taken by the different left-wing organisations that were far from being a collective, as they were characterised by rigid and inflexible strategies.

Upon the recognition of a troubled relation between the defeat of Argentina’s military dictatorship in the War and the restoration of democracy in the country, Guillermo Mira undertakes a revision of the most influential theories about transitions to democracy in Latin America, and points out their controversial aspects. Focusing on the Argentine case, he offers an explanation of why the South Atlantic War not only triggered a political earthquake that would force the Argentine military to abandon their claims to continue governing (while giving a boost to the radical transformation that Margaret Thatcher was leading in the United Kingdom), but that it also had profound repercussions at the regional and global levels.

By 2006, Julieta Vitullo – author of a subsequent chapter – was finishing her doctoral thesis, convinced that fiction had ‘achieved the most complex answers to the problems and questions that the War poses’ (Vitullo, 2012, p. 16). Before concluding her in-depth investigation, Vitullo decided to visit the Falklands–Malvinas. By chance, she had the opportunity of meeting two veterans who, after twenty-five years, were returning to the battlefields that had marked their lives. The researcher’s improvised camera became a witness to the revived experience of those conscripts, now mature men. Following her unexpected guides, Vitullo recorded ten hours of images.

The chapters of Julieta Vitullo and Edgardo Dieleke reconstruct the winding path that led to the documentary The Exact Shape of the Islands, in which a literature student is involved in the plot of the very narratives she analyses, while interacting with the central actors of the tragedy. This factor allows her to develop a warm flow of empathy towards the protagonists and victims of both sides. She also develops a renewed sensitivity towards the setting where these events took place.

In this regard, the notes taken by Edgardo Dieleke, which are halfway between a travel diary and filming notes, allow us to access to the aesthetic, physical and emotional dimensions of the Falklands–Malvinas: colourful islands, with beaches, hills and ravines of melancholic beauty; the hospitality of the locals whose lives were changed by the War; the memory in the islands’ music that did not get to become the film’s soundtrack because its author was afraid of hurting the sensibility of the community to which it belongs.

Joanna Page’s chapter delves into one of the war’s thorniest questions: ‘There is a sequence that is often repeated in films about the Malvinas: the archival footage of the moment at which Galtieri announces the invasion on 2 April 1982 to an overflowing Plaza de Mayo. The news is met with an ovation by the exultant thousands gathered below. How might we explain such a ringing endorsement of a bloody regime in a square that had, only three days earlier, witnessed a mass demonstration against the dictatorship?’ Page presents and analyses two documentaries by Julio Cardoso. She postulates that his films provide an alternative point of view on the subject, regarding how it had been treated in the years of the transition. The author shows that Cardoso rejects the idea of the 1982 War as a fact that breaks in suddenly and nonsensically and, on the contrary, she historicises the event until it is presented as another milestone in the history of an Argentine nationalism that comes from the days of yore.

Approaching a similar question, but this time from the field of literary fiction, the chapter by Catriona McAllister also departs from the images of General Galtieri on the balcony of the Casa Rosada, cheered on by a euphoric crowd. She reflects on discourses of national identity in Argentina, focusing on the relationship between the military and patriotic celebration, both before and after the dictatorship. In order to do so, she analyses several texts by the writer Martín Kohan and focuses particularly on his novel Ciencias morales [School for Patriots, 2007], where he reflects on patriotic education with the 1982 conflict as a backdrop.

Returning to these questions from a pedagogical perspective, Matthew Benwell and Alejandro Gasel consider the ways in which the issue of the Falklands–Malvinas is currently being taught in secondary schools in the city of Río Gallegos, capital of the province of Santa Cruz in the deep south of the Argentine Patagonia. This work is based on interviews with high school teachers and educational officials who work at the provincial and national level in Argentina. The authors highlight the potential and relevance of the topic based on the place assigned to the Falkland–Malvinas Islands as an icon of the ‘territorial nationalism’ incorporated into school textbooks since the second half of the 20th century, which is based on increased state control of the national curriculum.

The chapter by Cara Levey and Daniel Ozarow weighs in on the immediate and long-term consequences of the referendum that took place in March of 2013 on whether the Falklands–Malvinas should remain a British Overseas Territory. The authors offer some ideas about what happened next, in terms of its diplomatic and political consequences. They consider that the referendum and its consequences represented a missed opportunity for the two governments to engage in a sincere dialogue, and they argue that despite the often confrontational rhetoric, Argentina and the United Kingdom share a common ground and, to some extent, a similar vision for the future of the Islanders.

In his chronology and updating of the political and diplomatic milestones that have marked the dispute over the Falklands–Malvinas, Andrew Graham-Yooll advises that new directions should be undertaken in the treatment that the dispute has received by successive authorities in Argentina and the United Kingdom. In a sometimes provocative tone, he censures the language of tension and insult against the adversary, and advises replacing it with diplomacy and moderation, in what he considers to have been a fruitless dialogue for too long.

Bernard McGuirk is a literary and cultural critic, and author of the landmark study Falklands–Malvinas: An Unfinished Business (2007). In his role as president of the International Consortium for the Study of Post-Conflict Societies, he has worked with people other than just politicians and diplomats in both the United Kingdom and Argentina. His text will not be easy to read for those seeking ineluctable truths, spiced as it is with critical theoretical analysis as well as an ever up-to-the-minute commentary on the peddled position-taking of the nationalists, pedants, bigots, and jingoists whose interventions abound whenever the troubled terms ‘Falklands’ or ‘Malvinas’ are raised, inevitably triggering – or being triggered by – notoriously vested interests. Iconoclasm is the keynote of McGuirk’s approach to what he shows to be, sadly, the most pressing ‘unfinished business’ of any – if not all – the attempts at entente cordiale.

In the final chapter, Christine Anderson and María Osuna make available to scholars and the general public documentation about the Falklands–Malvinas War preserved in dependencies of the governments involved and other institutions that have contemporary sources on the conflict. In order to do this, the authors have followed the Sources for History scheme, developed by the University of Chicago (2010). Having documentary material that conserves the recent past of the region is crucial to resolving the conflict through diplomatic channels. Following the spirit in which this contribution was written, we highlight that it is a document under construction, which will need constant review and the inclusion of the sources that will be made available depending on the times of access to the repositories of the respective countries.