It just isn't 1833 any more

[bunn]

I see that the residents of the Falkland Islands have voted to stay British again. I'm glad they are getting a choice. I really don't feel that 'they were Argentinian in 1833' is really much of an argument. Imagine if we rolled everything back legally to the status in 1833! It would certainly be entertaining (who's going to volunteer to tell China that they should be a monarchy again?), but I can't help feeling that 'let's just ask people which nation they want to belong to now' is the more practical approach.

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

This is the nail which diplomats and academics are frightened to hit on the head. I read an article last night on the decline of relations between the UK and Argentina which treated Argentina's colonial origins as an interesting footnote, coupled with Argentina's expansion into Patagonia in the second half of the nineteenth century which was itself a form of colonialism.

I am suspicious of all forms of 'manifest destiny'. Argentina, as a post-colonial American state, argues it is its destiny to control a slice of land and sea all the way down to the South Pole. (As well as claiming the Falklands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, they like issuing regulations and initiatives for scientific exploration in Antarctica, which they are in little position to put into effect.) Arguing against this is difficult politically for Britain as it cuts into the kind of amour propre on which many countries base their national identity and through which they understand their history. The United Kingdom had to stop thinking in these terms after the independence of the Irish Free State in 1922.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I share your suspicion.

*independence of the Irish Free State in 1922*
... or Indian independence, or the Suez crisis, or the end of Rhodesia, or spending the 70's wearing the Sick Man of Europe hat. Oh, or Hong Kong, I suppose. The transition timing is probably arguable. I agree that on the whole we find the whole Destiny thing pretty embarrassing, so I suppose it's quite awkward in a way to have a little faraway colony that is so delighted to be British and loudly saying so.

But I can't see that anyone else should get to make the decision for them.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

All those incidents too, particularly as they bring down the curtain on the ambition of the United Kingdom government to be in effect the world government; but the independence of Ireland (though it dawns on British self-definition only creepingly, and still hasn't entirely sunk in) ends in practical terms the aim of monopolising access to the North Atlantic from north-west Europe.