Pink Ice: Britain and the South Atlantic Empire (review)

The concept of ‘critical geopolitics’ is a relatively new one, combining a traditional topic with insights drawn from postmodern and postcolonial critical theory. Klaus Dodds has spent his academic career promoting this new approach, undaunted by the readiness of so many scholars to abandon geopolitics for the glamour of geoeconomics and globalization studies. In a collection Dodds edited with David Atkinson, Geopolitical Traditions: a century of geopolitical thought (London: Routledge, 2000), Peter Taylor described geopolitics as “the periphery of a periphery of a periphery” (375). Recent events have changed all that, though it is fair to say that the South Atlantic itself remains marginal both geopolitically and academically.

After an introduction by Peter J. Beck (almost the only other scholar to have written substantially about the British South Atlantic in recent times), Pink Ice features chapters on Antarctica and the Falkland Islands which address various aspects of south Atlantic geopolitics. The Falkland Island Dependencies Survey (FIDS) began during the war to enhance Britain’s presence in the south Atlantic, and Dodds notes Ealing Studio’s “Scott of the Antarctic”, a film featuring location shots courtesy of the FIDS in order to publicize the survey’s heroic work. The film was a box office flop, foreshadowing the ignominious Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1955–1958. In the midst of postwar rationing and debt, “Britain was still prepared to invest in Antarctic science and exploration precisely because it offered solace to those seeking reassuring signs of national heroism and scientific acumen” (75). Although it succeeded in crossing the continent, the Commonwealth Expedition also featured underfunding, and rivalry between expedition leaders Dr. Vivian Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary.

The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 helped to preserve British interests on the continent, and saved all parties from a destructive scramble for territory. It also left interested parties free to concentrate on the Falkland Islands. Dodds is at his best when detailing the matrix of suspicion and alienation prompted by “Football, Foot and Mouth and the Falklands”. The traditionally close relationship between Britain and Argentina - a relationship often referred to as ‘informal empire’ - broke down in the 1960s amid football scandals (one English coach referred to Argentinian players as ‘animals’) and the introduction of deadly foot and mouth disease by Argentinian cattle. British governments were also pragmatic about the need to increase trade with Argentina and, despite regular Royal Navy patrols in the south Atlantic, it was clear that Britain would have liked to reach an accommodation with Argentina over the Falkland Islands.

Here they were thwarted by the Falkland Islanders themselves. Emphasizing their Anglo-Saxon origins, the islanders refused to be handed over to a military regime growing notorious for its human rights abuses. They feared betrayal when Britain scaled down its naval presence in the south Atlantic and allowed Argentina to operate regular flights in and out of the islands. The story of the Falkland Islands War of 1982 is well known, and Dodds is on familiar ground when he says that ‘A remote and poorly understood corner of the South Atlantic transformed British political life’ (202). He presents a sophisticated analysis of the racial discourses of affinity which transcended time and space to declare, as the Times did in 1982, that “We are all Falkland Islanders now”(167).

Pink Ice contains a great deal of material reworked from previous publications and brings them together into a larger regional context. In a historiography almost completely dominated by India and Africa, any glimpse of other parts of the British empire is most welcome, and Dodds is right to say that the conceptualization of territory still matters a great deal in our allegedly “post-colonial” world. Academics have clustered around the Falklands War, and to a lesser extent around Antarctic exploration, but Dodds is practically unique in his insistence on the importance of the wider South Atlantic context. His use of the critical geopolitical theory of Gearoid Ó Tuathal, John Agnew and others is uneven, however. His chapter on the Washington Conference negotiations, for example...