MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Cooperate and move on

Falklanders celebrating the March 10/11 referendum

By Fabian Bosoer and Federico Finchelstein (*) - In Argentina, the passing of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher brings memories of a seemingly irresoluble conflict. The conflict stands as a metaphor of a larger history of global misunderstandings.

In our country, but also to some extent, in Latin America at large, Thatcher is often presented as responsible for the 1982 Anglo-Argentine War over the South Atlantic Islands known in Britain as the Falklands and in Argentina as Malvinas. She certainly played a decisive role in the war and she also greatly benefited politically from its victorious outcome. But the war was started by the Argentine military junta that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983.

Consider dual citizenship, regional decision-making and joint responsibilities over natural resources.

War actions were rooted in a mythical view of the country’s history. This Argentine revisionism presented the claim over the Islands as a national sacred cause. In this context, raising the possibility of a dialogue was presented as being tantamount to treason or worse.

This conflict mode allowed Argentina and the U.K. to downplay real negotiations or, for example, the idea of shared sovereignty by the two countries. The military demonized the other side while Thatcher re-energized British military nationalism at the dusk of empire.

National myths and the myth of empire seemed to drive the rationale of trans-Atlantic political actors in wartime. In peace, negotiations stalled, perennially reaching impasses as if the phantoms of war always came to life along with the repressed memories of the conflict.

There are global and national histories of the war in the South Atlantic but the all-or-nothing current attempts on both sides at accomplishing a total national solution to the conflict are rooted in mythical considerations of the histories of both nations.

The administrations of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in Argentina and David Cameron in the U.K. share this nationalist exclusionary approach to the conflict. They also share a tendency to use the intensity of the war memories as a domestic political tool. While Argentina would gain from entering direct negotiations, the British Foreign Office should be able to distinguish the historical differences between the international policy of the military dictatorship that initiated the war and the diplomatic initiatives of Argentine democratic governments since the return of democracy almost 30 years ago. Including sovereignty as a topic for open-ended critical debate would be a starting point for new negotiations.

A more critical reading of past contexts would open the possibility of less nationalism and more shared responsibilities. Re-imagining traditional notions of national sovereignty could in the future create a shared sovereignty over the Islands. This might involve dual citizenship for its inhabitants and would present a challenge to rethink democratic institutions and intraregional and cross-regional decision-making and collaboration.

Argentina and Britain have strong civil societies, which are deeply embedded in the tradition of critical democracy and open debate. Far from territorial nationalism, shared responsibilities over natural resources could provide a first step in breaking with the past.

In the meantime, the no-compromise war legacy of Margaret Thatcher continues and it might be time to finally regard it not as a living memory but as a thing of the past.

(*) Fabián Bosoer, op-ed editor the Argentine newspaper Clarín, is the author of “The Malvinas/Falkland Islands, the Final Chapter”. Federico Finchelstein is associate professor of history and director of the Janey Program in Latin American Studies at The New School in New York.