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February 16, 2012
COLONIALISM AND THE FALKLAND ISLANDS
Posted by Jon Michaud
Lauren Collins writes from London that the British are in an uproar over remarks that Sean Penn made about the deployment of Prince William to the Falkland Islands. “The world today is not going to tolerate any ludicrous and archaic commitment to colonialist ideology,” Penn said, during a meeting on Monday with Argentina’s president, Cristina Kirchner. The furor, involving an Oscar-winning actor, seems like a perfectly timed sidebar to the many backward glances at the Thatcher years prompted by the Oscar-nominated film “The Iron Lady.”
In the spring of 1982, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote a trio of Letters from London, reporting on “the dreamlike weirdness” of the war pursued by Thatcher after Argentina invaded (or reclaimed, as Penn would no doubt argue) the Falkland Islands. In one dispatch, Panter-Downes noted that the military censorship of reporting from the far-flung hostilities had resulted in the feeling among Britons that “not since the Crimean War has there been so little photographic recording of a British expedition.”
While Panter-Downes focussed mainly on the British reaction to the war, Jane Kramer published a Letter from Paris in June of that same year that more directly addressed the complex questions of colonialism that have been revived by Penn’s comments. Kramer related how her Portuguese concierge, Mme Gonçalves, viewed the war. Formerly an inhabitant of Angola, Mme Gonçalves had fled that country after it gained independence, and was, Kramer wrote, “interested in colonial claims and attachments and betrayals.” For Mme Gonçalves, the point of the present conflict was less about the legitimacy of Argentina’s claims to the islands than “whether the Falkland shepherds would be killed or would have to start wandering,” as she and her husband had been forced to do. Kramer then notes that, among her neighbors, there were some who considered the Falklands to be French:
The first Falkland colonists were French whalers who sailed from Saint-Malo with a charter from Louis XV that guaranteed their rights to the islands and to the waters around them. The old general who lives in the wing across the courtyard told Mme Gonçalves that just the other day someone had actually claimed Les Malouines (as they are called here) for France in a letter to Le Monde.
From this local perspective, Kramer broadened the discussion to the arena of international relations. The Falklands war happened to coincide with a G7 summit, hosted by François Mitterand at Versailles and the action in the South Atlantic made for some uncomfortable moments among the assembled leaders:
Like England, France owns little pieces of the world here and there—from rhetorically respectable overseas departments like Réunion in the Indian Ocean, to the archipelago of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, off Québec, with six thousand people. America, of course, has had territories of its own in the South Pacific since the Second World War… At Versailles this month the Americans were mainly uneasy over the possibility that small questions of hegemony, like the Falkland question, would end up raising bigger questions of prerogative.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2012/02/the-falklands-and-colonialism.html#ixzz1ma6HZGjA
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