Occupation and After: Strategic Perspective on the Falkland Islands by the Foreign Relations Committee of the Argentine Confederation in the Decades of 1830 and 1840

Abstract

The early 1810s saw the end of the Spanish Monarchy's domination of the River Plate region. The Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata disintegrated after the May Revolution and was succeeded by various attempts at state formation led by the former capital Buenos Aires, which proved unsuccessful. Thus, in the early twenties, more than a dozen provincial states emerged, which from 1831 to 1852 organized themselves into a confederation. The confederative dynamic meant that the Argentine provinces retained most of their sovereignty, delegating exclusively the responsibility for foreign relations, peace and war to the Buenos Aires government. In fact, the latter was in charge of the envisioning and execution of the foreign policy of the confederation. This paper analyses the confederation’s diplomatic actions in relation to the military occupation of the Falkland Islands by the UK in 1833, mostly focusing on two aspects. First and foremost, a brief account of the diplomatic movements from that point onwards and in the years that followed will be offered. Secondly, a special emphasis will be put on the diplomatic communication between representative of the Argentine provinces in Paris Manuel de Sarratea and Minister of Foreign Affairs Felipe Arana in 1848. The resulting analysis will enable us to elaborate on two assumptions. Firstly, that the Falkland Islands were understood by the provinces' diplomats in regional terms within the broader context of the South Atlantic, with both potential and actual links with Patagonia. And secondly, that diplomatic representatives were concerned about the territorial conformation of the state, which included large numbers of claimed territories, but over which sovereignty was not yet effectively exercised. In this sense, the Islands' case was a prelude of what might potentially have happened later in other areas and hence helps us to understand their occupation as a paradigmatic case within a general framework of disputes over territorial control.