In what was probably the most likely election result in history, the Falkland Islands have voted to stay part of the United Kingdom. No one should be shocked by this.
The British Press are trumpeting that this is either a great statement about British unity and that the Falklands should stay British, or bemoaning the vote as a vile and evil continuation of the British Empire, and the Malvinas should be Argentine/free.
The Argentine press is generally nonplussed, and are carrying quotes from government officials, with claims that the native population of the Malvinas wasn't allowed to participate, and that the vote was Brits only, so of COURSE they voted to stay in.
The most balanced response I've found to the whole situation comes from the Buenos Aires Herald:
Among all the Argentine rhetoric against today’s vote, one inaccuracy is worth highlighting because the detail is perhaps not trivial. Argentine Ambassador to London Alicia Castro dismissed the referendum “as “called by the British in which only British citizens can vote to decide whether the territory they inhabit is to be British.” This is not strictly true — the voting requirement is seven years’ residence so that recent British arrivals are disenfranchised while various Chileans (or even the odd Argentine) can vote. Behind this vote to be British is thus the reality of a population which increasingly is not so much “implanted” as globalized and being a British overseas territory might well be a transitional phase towards finding its own place in the world. The smart reaction would thus be to try and make Argentina part of that future rather than stuck in the anti-colonial fixations of the past.
Although that last line makes my Democratic Peace Theory happy and I wish it were possible, it seems a bit naive. Argentina invaded these folks. There was an armed resistance, and people remember being rounded up by soldiers and expelled from their homes. I think it's really unlikely that Falklanders with that memory of invasion would ever willingly choose to be a part of Argentina. If this is left up to the Falklanders, it's not likely to happen any time soon, and the more the Argentines protest this, the stronger Falklanders will feel about the issue.
My position on the Falklands/Malvinas? It's none of our damned business as Americans.
The last time Americans got involved in this issue was in the 1830s. The Argentine official running the islands, Louis Vernet, killed a number of Americans and was committing acts of piracy against our merchant vessels operating in the area, taking them as prizes, and selling them. The USS Lexington responded to Vernet's piracy by annihilating the settlement where he based his operations, and then hung out for a while in Chile just to make sure that he didn't return. The Brits returned a few years later, having withdrawn from the islands in the 1770s. We haven't really been involved since.
Unless someone in the Falklands starts killing Americans again, I'm convinced we should continue to just stay out of this issue.
I'm really ambivalent about this.
On the one hand, the Argentines were latecomers, arriving only after the Brits left. No indigenous American population ever lived on the Islands, though folks from Tierra del Fuego may have visited at one point. That's not clear at all. What is clear is that much of the fauna and even the trees were introduced by Europeans. The people who live there clearly want to remain part of the UK, and self determination of local populations is important to me. This isn't a situation like south Africa, where a white minority rules over a native majority. There is a fairly sizable Chilean minority, but they're allowed to vote because they've been there for decades, and it's pretty clear they voted to stay in the UK (Anyone who's lived in the islands for 7 years or more got to vote in this election).
On the other hand, the nation that the locals want to be a part of is the United Kingdom. The British Overseas Territories were formerly called the Crown Colonies. The Falkland Islands and the rest of the British Overseas Territories are in fact the last vestiges of the British Empire. Argentina has dealt with enough colonialism and imperialism, and we haven't exactly been helpful to them in the 20th century on those fronts. They deserve to be able to make intelligent decisions about their natural resources, like the oil fields that lean ever so slightly into the economic exclusion zone from the Falklands, without having to worry that some European Power is going to start sucking up all of their resources.
And that's what much of this is about: A British Falklands threaten Argentina's natural oil reserves. They might want to exploit those, or they might want to leave them alone. The Oil is Argentina's and they should be able to decide what happens with it.
Also, the Monroe Doctrine says Brits out. Not that the Argentines would be particularly pleased if we started talking about that tired old nonsense again.
What do you think about the Falklands/Malvinas issue, Kossacks?