What if we’d lost the Falklands?
New Statesman – What if… Britain had lost the Falklands war
Dominic Sandbrook writes a series of “what if …” articles which imagine history as it might have been had one thing about history changed; I guess a kind of “sliding doors” theory of history. In this case, he imagines that in the capital of the Falklands, or Malvinas, there is a big mural showing the Argentinian soldiers who lost their lives in the invasion, a huge flag covering the old Anglican cathedral and talk of a garden of reconciliation. In the UK, Thatcher was kicked out of the leadership of the Tory party and the country spent the rest of the decade governed by a coalition of the Tories and the Social Democratic Party (which, in real life, spent the 1980s in an alliance with the Liberals, with which it eventually merged).
Let’s get one thing straight: the name Malvinas is not a loaded term. It’s used everywhere where Spanish or other Latin languages are spoken: Islas Malvinas in Spanish, Iles Malouines in French (which is the origin of the Spanish), Ilhas Malvinas in Portuguese. Whether British diplomats insist on calling them the Falklands when doing business abroad I don’t know, but everywhere in South America they’re the Malvinas. Even in Chile, which was on our side during the Falklands war.
I’m not a big fan of Thatcher, and the fact that the Falklands war is likely to have won her the 1983 election doesn’t give me much comfort (although the Labour party’s share of the vote was its lowest ever, only about 2% more in terms of votes cast than the Liberal-SDP alliance, although because of the distribution of the votes, Labour got far more seats). However, losing the war brought people out on the streets against the generals in Argentina, as they were sick of the fear and repression which had been the order of the day since the coup of 1976, and had realised that the army, besides being incapable of running the country without recourse to mass murder, couldn’t even win a war.
The upshot was that Argentina’s generals were the first military junta to fall from power in the Southern Cone; by the end of the decade, there was only one dictatorship left (Paraguay, where the incumbent had been thrown out and the newcomer instituted reforms shortly afterward). Sandbrook does not ask what sort of governments would be in power in Argentina, Chile or anywhere in the region if the generals had received that boost and the country had remained under military rule. We can debate the value of democracy, but military rule almost always delivers corruption and brutality, and it is largely because Argentina lost that war that the dominant power in the Southern Cone spent most of the 1980s as a free country.
