The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges memorably characterised the Falklands war as "two bald men fighting over a comb". Now that a British company has begun to drill for oil 60 miles north of Port Stanley we can see that writers, even wise old Nobel laureates such as Borges, sometimes let a good phrase block out the light of a more considered understanding. The Falklands war was not, of course, "about" oil; of all the views of its rights and wrongs, only the Soviet Union chose to see it as a straightforward struggle to grab natural resources. But oil, or rather the prospect of its discovery in lavish quantities ("another Kuwait" was mentioned), coloured both Argentinian and British policies towards the Falkland Islands for a dozen years before the war broke out in 1982, and you might even argue that in a circuitous way helped cause it. If Borges had described the conflict as "two balding men fighting over a hair restorer – as tried successfully by millions", he wouldn't have been completely right either, but he would have been be nearer the mark.
The news that the seabed around the Falklands might contain rich oil deposits was first conveyed to a British government in 1969. Richard Crossman, then a member of the cabinet, recorded in his diary his surprise at the fact that "the Foreign Office said that the only thing to do was to conceal the suggestion and prevent any testing". What the FCO feared was that exploration would aggravate the territorial dispute with Argentina. In public, British politicians maintained a show of confidence in Britain's legal sovereignty over the islands, just as they do again now in the face of Argentinian protests over the drilling rig in the north basin. In private, they were less sure. In 1936, John Troutbeck, head of the FCO's American department, wrote a memo summarising the problem. The difficulty of Britain's position was that "our seizure of the Falkland Islands in 1833 was so arbitrary a procedure as judged by the ideology of the present day. It is therefore not easy to explain our possession without showing ourselves up as international bandits."
Increasingly the British claim depended not on treaties and claims, but on a doctrine in international law known as "prescription", which allows that ownership can arise out of long-term occupation. In the anti-colonial mood of the postwar decades, this played less well but at least in the Falklands no indigenous population had been suppressed or expunged. The Falklands had been settled by people of almost entirely British stock since the 1840s and whenever their opinion was tested the message came back that British was what they wanted to remain.
They held a traditional view of sovereignty – what the American scholar Lowell S. Gustafson called "hard sovereignty", meaning the single ownership of a territory under one flag. Many in Argentina held the same view – they simply wanted to plant a different flag. The quarrel had been irreconcilable for more than a century with little harm done, but in the 1970s the prospect of oil wealth made the search for compromise more urgent. By 1975, 50 oil companies had applied to Britain for exploration rights. Faced with shriller Argentinian demands for negotiations on the transfer of sovereignty, with war a possibility if they were refused, Britain stalled. This angered Falkland islanders who wanted economic development. In London and Buenos Aires, officials and a few of the less nationalist politicians felt their way towards a solution – "soft sovereignty", meaning joint ownership by condominium or a leaseback deal in which sovereignty was conceded to Argentina but Britain for most practical purposes carried on as the owner.
Leaseback eventually became the policy that the Thatcher government tried to sell to the islanders, with Nicholas Ridley its most inept salesman. They had been neglected for years; the Falklands were essentially company islands, peopled by tenants of the Falkland Islands Company, which made profits from the wool of 600,000 sheep and left mutton behind as the diet. Lord Shackleton, commissioned in 1975 to investigate the islands' economic future, reproved the company and the British government for their lack of investment and noticed that the people, while honest and physically hardy, had "a degree of acceptance of their situation which verges on apathy". Later he told me, not quite correctly in view of what happened in Diego Garcia: "If these people had been black, Britain would never have got away with it." And you could see what he meant: the condition of 1,800 people 8,000 miles away had never much concerned liberals, though it was beginning to anger patriots.
When I went there in 1978, Britain had been trying to introduce the Falklands to the idea of co-operation with Argentina for several years. Every civilian visitor and every piece of airmail landed there by permission of Buenos Aires' military junta, which owned the airline and issued the visas. Likewise Argentina's state-owned oil firm shipped in all the islands' fuel. A few Argentinians even lived there, including two young women sent out to teach children Spanish. But if anything Argentina grew steadily more feared and hated. One day I complimented Stanley's magistrate on the portrait of the Queen above his bench. "Yes, so much better than the famous one by that Italian chap," the magistrate said. Annigoni? "That's the man. He made her look so Latin."
In 1978, the rumours were of a condominium. People suspected that London was about to sell them "down the river plate" and in Britain the pro-Falklands lobby grew. Three years later Ridley's leaseback plan was opposed in parliament. And so a cycle of action and reaction set off by the word "oil" ended with British diplomacy having nowhere to turn. Argentina began to sink drills in disputed waters. Britain's government took no more warlike a stance than placing adverts in the International Herald Tribune inviting oil companies to consider the "legal implications". Argentina paid no attention, while Britain announced it was to remove its last regular patrol ship in the south Atlantic. In the words of Gustafson, by early 1982 Argentina had initiated a process of exploration "by which title to the Malvinas was beginning to flow back to it".
Only a few weeks later Argentina reversed this hopeful position by its disastrous decision to invade. Evicting its army cost 650 Argentinian and 258 British lives, but in Britain it remains the most popular of any war fought since 1945 – a legitimate correction of foreign aggression, a short campaign, a clear victory. What it wasn't was a solution. As Lawrence Freedman has written: "It is not the case that because the blood of British soldiers was spilled over the Falklands the islands must now remain British forever. If that was a firm rule then Britain would still be a substantial imperial power." If enough oil is found, then sooner or later there will be talk once again of soft sovereignty.
Las famosas, orgullosas de sus curvas
