Late last week Simon Jenkins unloaded his wisdom about the Falklands question, and guess which side it fell on. It is possible to form the impression that Jenkins has a simple method in these matters: if Britain is in dispute or contention with someone else, then side with the someone else. But of course he wouldn't see it that way, so intellectual charity dictates that one should try to understand his reasons. Please do so, those of you who can. Jenkins's argument on this is an ever-shifting dance of considerations that appear to carry weight at one moment and to lose weight at the next.
Early in the piece, having referred to Britain's defeat of Argentina in the Falklands War in 1982, Jenkins tells us that 'Military conquest does not establish legal title'. From this you might suppose that he attaches no weight to military conquest and attaches significant weight to legal title. But hold everything. It's rather more complicated. Britain's claim, Jenkins goes on to say, rests on long occupation of the islands and 'the oft-proclaimed wish of these Britons [the Falkland islanders] not to become Argentinian' - considerations which are, he allows, strong in international law. So there's some more weightiness to put beside the weightlessness of military conquest.
However, look again and what do you see? Everything changes in the dance. 'But legal title is not all', says Jenkins, qualifying the just previously-acknowledged strength of those considerations in Britain's favour. And 'democratic consent' suffers a similarly precipitate weight loss: though 'always important', it is 'hardly an absolute'. (But does some shadow of it recur still later in the piece when we are told that Britain will have to negotiate 'because the world... will insist on it?') And military conquest, given the thumbs down at the beginning, seems to win a reprieve of sorts, Jenkins telling us that Britain was lucky to win the Falklands War for various reasons, and had it not done so, the Argentine occupation might have succeeded - as if this alternative possible outcome could now carry moral or legal weight unless military success carried moral or legal weight, which we know Jenkins thinks it doesn't when it's Britain's military success.
If you're dizzy by now, don't worry. There's one thing you can cling to while clearing your head - a single stable object around which the whirling rhetorical dance of Simon the Jenkins rotates. It's contained in the word 'imperial'. The Falklands became British through 'a crude act of imperial aggression'; and Britain's stance now is bound to be seen as 'imperial arrogance'; and 'Distant colonies are a post-imperial anachronism'. This is rich, truly rich, given that Argentina's very existence is the result of what can only be called an imperial adventure, in which colonization overwhelmed all indigenous claims and claimants to any prior legitimacy. That Jenkins and others who think like him prefer not to notice that national facts like Argentina - and Australia, Canada, the United States of America - came out of acts of colonization simply swallowing up, so to put it, the indigenous peoples of the relevant regions into an entirely new political legitimacy, and prefer not to notice that this legitimacy is virtually never now challenged; that they prefer not to notice these things while at the same time choking on the so-called post-imperial anomaly of the Falkland Islands is no reason for anyone else, anyone capable of intelligent thought, to overlook the ludicrously arbitrary nature of their reasoning.
Legal title, democratic consent, military conquest - praise or dismiss each one when it suits you, discount or invoke each one as the need may arise. Colonialism and imperialism - reject the results of these comprehensively except... except when the results have been most sweeping. This is the fare dished out by our veteran columnist.
Britain may like to enter talks with Argentina over ways of sharing the benefits of oil exploration should there be any, as an earnest of goodwill and in the interest of harmonious relations. It should not, however, give an inch over sovereignty unless it is by the express decision of the Falkland islanders themselves.