The future of the Falkland Islands: a solution made in Hong Kong?

Abstract

During 1980 and 1981 the Anglo-Argentine dispute over the Falkland Islands attracted relatively little interest either in Britain or in the wider international community, and at the time it seemed easy to dismiss the topic as a trivial imperial postscript. Lord Carrington, British Foreign Secretary to April 1982, is alleged to have admitted that it rated number 242 on the Foreign Office's list of priorities.1 At the United Nations the Falklands question was far from being a mainstream issue and Sir Anthony Parsons, the British represettative at the time of the 1982 war, has confirmed that prior to 1982 the islands were perceived from the UN as 'very peripheral' in both the political and geographical senses.2 Only in Argentina was the matter treated as significant. However, the Falklands war transformed this situation, and the phrase 'the Falklands factor' was coined to refer to such changes, which included a surge of interest in the origins, nature and development of the dispute and an enhanced British commitment to the islands, reflected in successive ministerial statements and epitomized by Mrs Thatcher's visit to the Falklands in January 1983. Previously deemed unworthy of significant expenditure on account of their continuing economic and demographic decline,3 the islands had rated no visitor more important than a junior Foreign Office minister. In such circumstances their sovereignty had been treated as a subject for Anglo-Argentine negotiations. But the 1982 war changed all that, and in January 1983 Mrs Thatcher informed the islanders that she was 'converted' as regarded their position vis a' vis Britain. This was a point reaffirmed on several subsequent occasions, including her 1984 Christmas broadcast in which she asserted that 'I am not negotiating the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands with anyone, they are British'.4