MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Confidence behind the Falklands

(*) Klaus Dodds is a professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London and the editor of The Geographical Journal.

By Klaus Dodds (*) - Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s death does not represent an opportunity to resolve the long-standing sovereignty dispute over the Falkland Islands, or Islas Malvinas. If anything it is a reminder of how entrenched her legacy is to this particular aspect of British foreign and security policy.

I remember being in the Falklands in May 1997, about two months before the Hong Kong handover ceremony, and in the midst of a U.K. general election. The Falkland Islanders watching the television coverage with me were genuinely unnerved by the prospect of the ending of 18 years of Conservative Party rule: first Thatcher and then her successor John Major. Would a new government led by Labour Party leader, Tony Blair, soften the U.K.’s non-negotiation stance toward Argentina and kick-start a new round of sovereignty negotiations?

In the first of the three Blair-led administrations (1997 to 2001), there was an improvement in British-Argentine relations despite the Argentine president, Carlos Menem, claiming that the islands would be returned to Argentina by the year 2000. The U.K. and Argentina showed it was possible to cooperate over areas of mutual concern such as fishing, communications and the sensitive subject matter of visits of Argentine next of kin. But there was never any prospect that the British government was going to depart from its established position that there was nothing to negotiate over when it came to sovereignty.

What Margaret Thatcher did so brilliantly was to make the U.K. position of non-negotiation political orthodoxy and ensured that no one of any political standing pursued any other possible outcomes. Hong Kong may have been negotiated away but there were treaty-based considerations to factor in. Plus China was not a country to be trifled with. To Argentina’s great frustration, over 30 years later, it has not been able to persuade either the United States or regional neighbours to destabilize the British strategy of non-negotiation. If anything the growing confidence of the Falklands community is increasingly evident – they are in no mood to do anything but self-determine their future. The recent referendum signalled that.

I bet April 8 will become in the Falkland Islands, at least, a Margaret Thatcher memorial day.