ABSTRACT
In the dawn hours of 2 April 1982, a task force of Argentine soldiers and marines landed on the Falkland Islands—an archipelago some three hundred miles off the coast of southern South America. The Falklands conflict was a very old-fashioned war, pitting a European power against a Third World state—precisely the kind of conflict that conventional wisdom since at least Suez had taught us could no longer happen. Argentine accounts of the dispute make much of the "Falkland Islands lobby" in Britain—that is, representatives of the Falkland Islands Company, chief employer and sole concessionaire of the archipelago. Sovereignty proved indivisible because, strange as it might seem to diplomats and international civil servants, people in the Falklands cared deeply about symbols and about their own identity-far more, in fact, than they did for any conceivable economic incentive. Without Argentina's defeat on the field of battle, the country might never have returned to electoral democracy.
