Why Britain went to war over the Falklands

There was always more at stake than a tiny group of islands 8,000 miles away

Forty years ago today, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a British dependency. A recent poll found that 47 per cent of 18-34 year olds in Britain did not know in which decade the Falklands War took place. Perhaps that’s because, at the time, Whitehall’s decision to send a Royal Navy task force to the South Atlantic in 1982 inspired a great amount of national consensus. Indeed, that was the main feature of the war.

The near-unanimous support which greeted Britain’s war was uncoloured by the dissent that later accompanied Tony Blair’s Iraq war in 2003. The appetite for direct military intervention was much greater. And today we can see that an unwillingness actually to put British boots on the ground is a whole world apart from the fervour there once was for war with Argentina. Then, through what was known as the Falklands Factor, Thatcher proved able to rally aggressive national chauvinism for a war abroad against what she presented as the disloyalty of a still militant working class at home. Famously, victorious Royal Marines sailed back into Southampton with an anti-union banner emblazoned with the legend ‘call off the rail strike or we’ll call an airstrike’. The defeat of the miners’ strike (1985), and of the Labour Party in a series of elections, was pretty much ordained after that.

Why, though, were British critiques of the Falklands war so muted? What were the origins of the war, and what can we learn from it now?

The left’s flaccid critique

The dominant critique of the war amongst liberals was well captured in a popular book by the distinguished British illustrator Raymond (The Snowman) Briggs. In The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (Hamish Hamilton, 1984), Briggs set out what he saw as the childish, old-fashioned nature of the war. It was all so…. unnecessary, wasn’t it? Disproportionate, over the top.

Brooks was both rueful about and contemptuous of the outright jingoism Thatcher had managed to unleash around the war: ‘after this’, he concluded, ‘there was a Grand Parade to celebrate the Great Victory and everyone went to Church and Thanked God’. As for the Labour left, the war’s principal critics, it had always been fond of import controls and other economic forms of nationalism. Now it was taken by surprise by the full-on militaristic version that swept the country in 1982.

As ever, the left was ill-prepared. At various times, it tried to make an economic reading of the origins of the war, searching for the benefits to UK plc of oil, gas, fish and even guano in the South Atlantic. Since, however, pickings were slim here, a Briggs-style ‘cultural’ reading became necessary.

The left saw the conflict in simple terms. On the one hand, there was a backward-looking, repressive and fascist banana republic, represented by the Argentinian junta led by General Leopoldo Galtieri – in all his regalia, no doubt still helping Adolf Eichmann’s luckier Nazi colleagues lead a quiet life in Buenos Aires. On the other hand, there was the getting-on-for-fascism of a belligerent and also backward-looking personality, Margaret Thatcher. She triumphed, a special issue of the New Left Review grudgingly conceded, because of her successful brand of ‘authoritarian populism’ and ‘pitiful nostalgia’. She had, it said, asserted ‘a Churchillian renaissance that has wonderfully transported the country back into becoming a world power once again’.

Today this glib, cultural reading of the war is still central to the residual British memory of it. Thus Dominic Sandbrook, Britain’s most ubiquitous cultural historian, insists that, at the time, the Falklands War was ‘a scene from history, a colossal costume drama, a self-conscious re-enactment of triumphs past… From start to finish there was something oddly 18th-century about the Falklands campaign… when you start noticing the Georgian resonances, it’s hard to stop’. Cultural readings of the war, indeed, continue today, as the trauma of the war is foregrounded, and its origins obscured.

The nature of the war

Galtieri invaded the Falklands, an unprovoked act which was obviously hated by the 1800 Islanders. Yet war is never simply a matter of who started it. In any war, we must assess the nature of the combatants and their dispute in all its many-sided specificity – including, rather importantly, not just state-to-state military conflict and the economic sanctions that typically go with that, but also the domestic politics and class struggle within each of the adversaries.

Every war is different. Were the Falkland Islanders a nation deserving self-determination, in the way, say, that Ukraine clearly is and does today? Not at all. Was Britain, which had built the railways in 19th-century Argentina and had connived with its reactionary regimes until it was supplanted by Washington during the Second World War, still an imperial power in Latin America? It was: for instance, just Lloyds Bank and Midland Bank were each owed a then-colossal £3bn by Latin America in 1983 (1). Was Argentina a similarly imperial power? No.

Geographically and historically, Argentina had the proper claim to the Islands. It was imperial Britain that seized the Malvinas from a fledgling, newly independent Argentina back in 1833. Where was the justice in that?

Its generals murdered the Argentinian left by the thousand. But Argentina, with a population of 28.8 million in 1982, had no role outside its immediate region, no nuclear weapons, no seat on the United Nations Security Council.

The Falklands War, then, was a thoroughly unequal contest, and not just in military terms – in fact, things did get quite dicey for the British forces at times. Yet democrats had to oppose the war. All those, like Labour leader Michael Foot, who portrayed it as a just struggle against fascism, did so purely out of convenience. The British left had long discovered fascists in Latin America, the better to pass over Britain’s sordid actions there (2).

The war in context and in retrospect

The real, strategic reason for the war lay in plain sight, if only the British left had cared to look. Defence minister John Nott declared: ‘If you don’t stop an aggressor, albeit one that attacked a small group of islands 8000 miles away, then someone else will have a go somewhere else in the world’.

He was right. The Cold War was on and British ships, designed to combat the Soviet threat in the North Atlantic, did not look cut out for brandishing global invincibility in the South Atlantic. But Britain’s rule and its martial reputation had to be defended at home and abroad – especially given the continuing ache of the debacle at Suez (1956), and especially as Britain’s war in Ireland, just one year previously, had seen the death of the Republican leader and hunger striker, Bobby Sands.

After 4 May, Irish Taoiseach Charles Haughey sought the end of European Economic Community sanctions on Argentina. For Whitehall, this was one more confirmation that Britain had to stand tall in the Falklands. But even with Ronald Reagan’s America, Britain saw the need to uphold its independent strength.

Secretary of State Al Haig’s support for the British cause, at first limp, eventually strengthened. Yet if we refer to the widely respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Britain had further reason to assert itself. While debate about US satellite coverage of the warm-up to the invasion has continued into the 21st century, in 1983 SIPRI was emphatic on the question: from the map shown here, which covers the ground tracks of two US satellites, ‘it can be seen that, during orbits 12205 and 12221, satellite 1980-10A flew over several Argentine military bases on 27 March and over the Falkland/Malvinas Islands on 28 March and 2 April, the day of the invasion’ (3).

In other words, it is very probable that Washington knew about the invasion five or more days beforehand. But did it tell London? That seems unlikely. Latin America, and especially Argentina, was Uncle Sam’s sphere of influence, not Britain’s (4). So: at first given only lukewarm backing from Washington, London had little choice but to show steel – to America.

Though the Cold War still had seven years to run, the Falklands War set the pattern for plenty of wars after it. Instead of a nuclear missile exchange between European tank armies, it underlined to the ruling class the importance of conventional weapons and sea power, especially around developing countries.

Today, in the year after British sent an aircraft carrier to fly the flag near Taiwan, let’s not repeat the historic mistake of thinking such a manoeuvre is all to do with Boris Johnson’s ‘Global Britain’, his Churchillian illusions, desire to rekindle faded imperial glory, and all that. As with the Falklands, British imperialism sets sail to project power to all-comers. And when that happens, the corrosive effect on domestic politics should never be forgotten.

References

(1) The sums represented more than 150 per cent of each bank’s capital, and respectively 7.1 and 5.7 per cent of assets. Clearly the sums owed weighed heavily with both sides. See Table 3.7 in Subbarao Venkata Jayanti, ‘The Impact of Latin American Debt Crisis on U.S., U.K., and Canadian Bank Stocks’, 1991, LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses, 5189. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/5189

(2) See for example Ann Kelly, ‘Fascism in Latin-America’, Labour Monthly, Vol 26 No 5, May 1944, and John W White, ‘Torture in Argentina’, Labour Monthly, Vol 27 No 6, June 1945. In the eyes of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the publisher of Labour Monthly, Argentina’s great crime was to declare neutrality in the Second World War

(3) Bhupendra Jasani, ‘The military use of outer space’, World armaments and disarmament SIPRI Yearbook 1983, p429

(4) Sir Nicholas Henderson, Britain’s ambassador to the US and the man credited with persuading Washington eventually to back Britain, was later asked if he thought the US was surprised by the invasion. Starting with an evasion, he replied: ‘Yes, I think, so: because America was very close, politically and diplomatically, at that stage (we are talking about March 1982) to Argentina. They were using Argentina and depending upon them a great deal for support with the problems they were having in Central America’. Henderson, in ‘The Falklands War’, seminar held 5 June 2002, Centre for Contemporary British History, 2005. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/political-economy/assets/falklands.pdf, p26