Revisiting the Falklands-Malvinas Question: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

This multidisciplinary collection on the Anglo-Argentine war of 1982 for possession of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands addresses a well-worked topic, although its blend of Argentine and European scholars strikes a better authorial balance than many predecessors. Five of its thirteen chapters address the six-week war itself, and seven others its echoes during recent years; two librarians present an archival and bibliographic guide. Interpretations are mixed and at times conflicting. Some contributors adhere to established views; others capture the obsessive longing for restitution of the islands among many Argentines shaped by intense, idiosyncratic nationalism.The editors themselves contribute the main historical pieces. Guillermo Mira and Fernando Pedrosa's introduction recalls the efforts of the Argentine military in 1982 to cast itself as a symbol of national identity, which culminated in the islands' occupation. In a separate chapter, Mira analyzes the relationship between the war and the democratic transition in Argentina of 1983. As he recognizes, viewing the wartime defeat and the subsequent election as simple cause and effect fails to contextualize events. By 1980 the initial élan of the so-called Proceso de Reorganización Nacional had dissipated, while in early 1981 a phony economic boom under economy minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz collapsed. By that point, conditions foreshadowed the dictatorship's demise. Invasion of the islands a year later followed creeping civilian opposition, internal division, and rising instability in ways that replicated a standard cyclical pattern of the previous 30 years. Occupation of the islands marked an attempt to derail the cycle, prolonging military rule in a novel, more populist guise. Military defeat, however, reinstated the cycle, leading 18 months later to the election of 1983.Pedrosa charts reactions to the war among international leftist groups. He recites the floundering responses of the British Labour Party, a process evoking the responses of European socialists in 1914 to the outbreak of World War I, as the party capitulated to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's bellicose determination to resist the Argentine occupation. Ian Mikardo, international secretary of the Labour Party, vainly sought to redirect attention to the internal abuses of the Argentine junta; with similar ineffectiveness, Labour leaders Michael Foot and Tony Benn urged mutual withdrawal as a prelude to negotiations.A chapter by María José Bruña Bragado uncovers the strong esprit de corps among Argentine troops following the occupation. Their “laughter” and “fraternity” contrast with standard depictions of the troops as fraught, abused victims of the ruling junta. Silvina Jensen exposes contrasting reactions to the war among Argentines then exiled abroad. Some deplored the occupation as another gross excess of the dictatorship, but others celebrated it as the fulfillment of a cherished national goal. Among the latter, an overpowering sense of national vindication trumped hostility toward the military. Bruña Bragado and Jensen underscore the mythical potency of the islands among many Argentines. As an antithesis of this picture, Matthew C. Benwell and Alejandro Gasel indicate much feebler irredentist impulses in the far-southern city of Río Gallegos, an area with extensive historical contact with the islands. Their observation suggests that the nationalist heartlands of Argentina are located among cities to the north, led by Buenos Aires.The book includes pieces by Julieta Vitullo and Edgardo Dieleke, the cowriter and codirector respectively of the documentary film The Exact Shape of the Islands (2014). Vitullo recounts visiting battle sites with two Argentine ex-combatants. Like other works featuring war veterans, her essay juxtaposes searing memories of combat and loss alongside a sense of camaraderie among former enemies. Andrew Graham-Yooll, an erstwhile editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, makes a moderate plea for tolerance and negotiation. Cara Levey and Daniel Ozarow impugn the referendum staged on the islands in 2013, when 1,513 voted to maintain ties with Britain and only 3 against. Historians may note ironic similarities between this referendum—a much less respected polling method in Britain since 2016 following Brexit—and the expressions of electoral unanimity on the mainland under the long-ago rule of Juan Manuel de Rosas. Bernard McGuirk recounts his personal successes in promoting Anglo-Argentine ties; his montage of British newspaper cartoons on the war attempts to inject humor and a sense of irony into his campaign.Joanna Page and Catriona McAllister, two cultural and literary specialists, contribute the book's most interesting essays. Page assesses the films of Julio Cardoso, whose work typically depicts the 1982 war as a mere stage in a secular struggle toward the fulfillment of the Argentine people. His metaphysical gloss resonates with the work of leftist nationalist authors such as Jorge Abelardo Ramos (1921–94) and Juan José Hernández Arregui (1913–74). Their work drew on the alchemy of Argentine populism created by Hipólito Yrigoyen (1852–1933) and Juan Perón (1895–1974). In recent years, the neo-Peronist governments of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Pacho O'Donnell, director of the Instituto Nacional de Revisionismo Histórico, together with filmmakers like Cardoso, have spun similar ethereal threads.Cardoso's depiction of the war of 1982 displaces the military dictatorship from its customary centrality; he illustrates the islands' attraction as a popular myth. As in Bruña Bragado's piece, war veterans are extolled as citizen-patriots. Page notes Cardoso's testimony to the potency of memory among ex-combatants and the enduring sense of loss among the families of war casualties. Partly attracted by this approach, Page glances half-dubiously at the nationalist genre to which the film belongs. McAllister's study of the novelist Martín Kohan shares her subject's antipathy to nationalist shibboleths, including mythmaking about the Falkland Islands. Page ponders historicizing Argentine nationalism to allay her reservations about it yet concludes that Cardoso's “disquieting visions . . . do not err in their reading of the past” (p. 159).