Citation:
Date Presented:
February 3Abstract:
This thesis seeks to place the Falklands War in the wider historical frame of the relationship between the British Empire/United Kingdom and Argentina. The breakout of the Falklands War can be attributed to overactive imperial insecurities in both the United Kingdom and Argentina. By the early 1980s, the British Empire had largely disintegrated, and the British population was living not only with the soreness of the loss of overseas territories, but also with a sense of domestic economic and social decay. Also, front and center in the minds of British policy makers was the Suez Crisis and the embarrassment it caused for the United Kingdom. Similarly, Argentina had been in decline since the outbreak of the First World War, and in the 1940s the issue of the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) rose to prominence in Argentine political discourse as a hybrid nationalist/anti-imperialist cause. While these developments engendered the conditions for the outbreak of the war, the decision to invade—and the decision to respond—was very much bound to the political projects of Margaret Thatcher's conservative administration in the United Kingdom and the military junta in Argentina, led by Leopoldo Galtieri. Both administrations promised national rejuvenation in their respective countries, and the Falkland Islands proved to be, for both parties, the best way of preserving that promise. I am currently still working on the nuance of the relationship between the United Kingdom and Argentina, specifically researching and trying to articulate the economic influence that British actors had in the country during the early twentieth century. Also, I am struggling with managing the flow between the large-scale, macroscopic picture I am drawing on an international level and the content of the interviews I did in the Falkland Islands.