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Why The Falkland Islands will never be Argentine By Professor Carlos Escude It
is sufficient to talk to any Buenos Aires cabdriver to understand that the
Argentine people know that the Falkland Islands will not be
‘recovered’ by Argentina. The
only locals who appear not to understand this basic fact of life are a
group of war veterans, a small bunch of nationalist fundamentalists, and
practically the entire lot of Argentine politicians. Needless
to say, however, in so doing the politicians are cheating and lying.
The great majority of these politicians know that the Falklands
will not be Argentine again, but they choose not to acknowledge this for
fear of losing votes. Indeed,
within Argentina’s ‘political class’ there are two types of lies
regarding the Falklands: the benign and the malign ones.
The Falklands discourse of the late foreign minister Guido Di Tella
was plagued with paradigmatic examples of ‘benign lies’.
He wanted Argentines to believe that Argentina was going to recover
the Falkland Islands through peaceful means, ‘seducing’ the Islanders
while accumulating a sufficient number of national successes so as to
actually make it convenient for the average Islander to accept Argentine
sovereignty. Di Tella did not
accept the Islanders’ right to self-determination, but he was conscious
of the fact that if Argentina did not succeed in making itself an
attractive country, it would be impossible to get the British Government
and Parliament to accept a transfer of sovereignty. This
type of lie is benign because the costs of failure, to Argentina, are low.
Di Tella’s Christmas cards to the Falklands population will be
remembered in Falkland history as the eccentric gesture of a well-meaning
official who represented a neighbouring country that once threatened the
Islanders. The most important
cost of this type of lie is the attempt to deceive the Argentines
themselves. Because the
Argentines already know intuitively that the Falklands will not be theirs
again, this lie leads to an increase in the disillusionment of the
Argentine people vis-a-vis a political class that is chronically dedicated
to the ignoble art of lying. Contrariwise,
the ‘malign lie’ consists of claiming that Argentina will recover the
Islands if it adopts a ‘tough’ policy.
Most politicians from both major political parties, as well as
many professional diplomats, engage in this type of lie, even if
they are somewhat subdued with the present economic and political crisis
of Argentina. Crisis
notwithstanding, however, when it comes to issuing opinions about the
Falklands they will usually agree that to attempt to ‘seduce’ is a
waste of time, that the Islanders must be disregarded, and that the costs
to Britain of not transferring sovereignty to Argentina must be increased. This
is a malign, arrogant, macho-type lie because it propounds a policy of
confrontation that, if implemented, would be dreadfully costly to
Argentina herself, and would never succeed in recovering what was lost as
far aback as 1833, and which the war of 1982 made irrecoverable. This
second type of lie is also perversely naive.
It proposes to increase the British costs of remaining in the
Falklands, without taking account of the fact that in order to increase
the British costs one much augment the argentine costs, and without
realising that Britain has infinitely more economic, diplomatic and
military resources than Argentina. There
is no way of making Britain ‘spend more’ without Argentina herself
spending more as well. And the
increased British costs will always represent a much smaller percentage of
total British resources, than the increased Argentine costs vis-à-vis
total Argentine resources. Thus,
increasing the British costs of not transferring sovereignty is
necessarily a worse deal for Argentina than for Britain.
And last but not least, these increased costs to Argentina will be
felt much more dramatically by Argentina’s increasingly poor masses,
than by the well-off elites who would profit emotionally and politically
from such a reckless policy. Whey
then is this malign lie consistently repeated when the issue of the
Falklands is debated? The
answer would appear to be that, in Argentina, a perverse political
dynamics is at work whereby professional politicians fear that to say the
‘painful’ truth about the Falklands (ie. that they will never again be
Argentine) will make them lose votes to politicians who continue to engage
in the fantasy that the Islands will be recovered.
If politician A admits publicly that the Falklands will not be
recovered, he or she will lose votes to politician B, who by continuing
with the lie will succeed in reaping political profits from primitive
popular emotions. The
end result, of course, is to the detriment of the country itself.
But when politicians consistently sell their souls to the popular
vote, that is of little or no import. The
author Professor Carlos Escude is a member of the Argentine National
Council of Scientific Research and an academic at the Universidad Torcuato
Di Tella, Buenos Aires This essay appears in a collection entitled ‘The Future of the Falkland Islands and its People’ by Lyubomir Ivanov et. al. published by Double T Publishers (2003) and is reproduced by kind permission of Dr. Ivanov.
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