The Path to Power m-2

by Margaret Thatcher

  Naturally, such questions interest me. I have at least an average share of vanity. But they cannot be answered except in the most general (and gloomy) way: they are human achievements and therefore built on sand.

  That gloom must, however, be qualified in two respects. In the first place, great political battles change the direction of history. Subsequent conflicts may sometimes seem to reverse the outcome. But in fact they take place on a different battleground, one permanently altered by the earlier victories. So the final status quo may incorporate many of the features the latest victors originally opposed. Eventually, a Labour government may come to power in Britain. If it does, however, it is unlikely to nationalize the industries privatized in the 1980s, nor restore the 98 per cent top tax rates of 1979, nor reverse all the trade union reforms, let alone implement the proposals contained in the Labour election manifesto of 1983. In some Central European countries, the former communists have regained power (under various shades of false colours); but they show no signs of restoring the command economy or the police state, let alone reviving the Warsaw Pact. What Ronald Reagan and I achieved in the 1980s may well undergo future transformations that neither of us would find congenial. But it will never be transformed into exactly what we fought.

  My second qualification is that our experiences, being in the past, are beyond amendment. Like a life that is ended, they can never be altered — for either good or ill. The young Jews killed in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising will never finish their education, raise families, serve their community, shape their own lives. The Soviet Union lasted for seventy-four years; for hundreds of millions of people that period was the whole of their reality. They lived and died under oppression. Equally, for those who lived to see the ‘velvet revolution’ of 1989 or the aborted 1991 Soviet coup, the regaining of freedom is an experience that can never be taken from them. Almost every citizen of the Eastern bloc can recount some happy experience that flowed ultimately from the West’s firm resistance to communism: liberation from the Gulag, recovery of his family’s property, a reunion with family members across the old Iron Curtain, leaving the collective to start his own farm, the luxury of criticizing once-omnipotent political bosses, the first exercise of consumer choice in buying something better than a Trabant, being able to go to church without fearing that it will mean demotion at work or loss of a university place.

  The people of Britain lived in a free society before 1979 and therefore never suffered the oppression that was everyday life under communism. But after 1979 they enjoyed a self-fulfilment that the rolling-back of socialism and the expansion of freedom made possible. Some were no longer prevented by union power from doing the best work of which they were capable; some were able for the first time to buy a home, or a private pension, or shares in a privatized company — a nest egg to leave their children; some found that a good private school or a private hospital bed was no longer a privilege of the rich — they could buy it too; some exercised their new prosperity by sharing it with others in the upsurge of charitable giving in the 1980s; and all enjoyed the greater freedom and control over their own lives which cuts in income tax extended. A future government might curb the reforms which made these new lives possible — whether in the East or the West. But it could never remove the lived experience of freedom or the knowledge that such freedom is possible under the sun. As a character says in the film Ninotchka when the heroine in Moscow receives a letter censored with heavy black lines from greeting to signature: ‘They can’t censor our memories.’

  Of course, no human mind, nor indeed any conceivable computer, can calculate the sum total of these experiences in terms of happiness, achievement and virtue, nor indeed of their opposites. It follows therefore that the full accounting of how my political work affected the lives of others is something we will only know on Judgement Day. It is an awesome and unsettling thought. But it comforts me to think that when I stand up to hear the verdict, I will at least have the people of the Church of the Holy Cross in court as character witnesses.

  APPENDIX I

  Speech by Rt Hon Mrs Margaret Thatcher OM FRS to the Global Panel in The Hague, Friday 15 May 1992

  EUROPE’S POLITICAL ARCHITECTURE

  Mr Chairman,

  We are fortunate to be meeting in The Hague, a beautiful city kept beautiful by a country which values its architectural heritage. Goethe described architecture as ‘frozen music’. And in a city like this it is not hard to imagine the grand symphonic melodies that might be released if we could defrost the Town Hall and the great urban squares.

  Architecture tells us a lot about ourselves, about our idea of God, about our relationship with our fellow men, and about our vision of Man’s destiny.

  The great medieval cathedrals gave us an exalted spiritual view of Man’s place in a universe governed by an all-loving and all-seeing Creator.

  The Age of Reason pictured civilized man in a neat, geometrically ordered landscape dotted with neo-classical structures at regular intervals — with no more than one small folly to each estate.

  And in our own day, the vision of New European Man walking purposefully towards the Common Agricultural Policy was exquisitely realized in the Berlaymont building in Brussels.

  What music would Goethe hear if he could look upon the Berlaymont, perhaps while acting as an adviser to the Commissioner responsible for developing a policy for European culture (which has languished so long without one)?

  And what a climax of discord and disharmony! For the Berlaymont — its halls lined with cancer-causing asbestos — is to be pulled down.

  Look at the architecture of the last fifty years — in particular, at the architecture that went beyond the modern to the futuristic. It was certainly very dramatic, but the one thing it no longer expresses is the Future. What it expresses is yesterday’s vision of the future — one captured by the poet John Betjeman in 1945:

  I have a vision of the future, chum.

  The workers’ flats, in fields of soya beans,

  Tower up like silver pencils, score on score.

  But the Berlaymont school of architecture is a convenient symbol for the political architecture of the European Community. For it too is infused with the spirit of ‘yesterday’s future’.

  Mr Chairman, the European Community we have today was created in very different circumstances to deal with very different problems. It was built upon very different assumptions about where the world was heading. And it embodied political ideas and economic theories that in the light of recent history we have to question. Today I want to do exactly that. In particular, I shall try to answer three questions.

  First, how can we best deal with the imbalance in Europe created by the reunification and revival of Germany?

  Second, how can we reform European institutions so that they provide for the diversity of post-communist Europe and be truly democratic?

  Third, how can we ensure that the new Europe contributes to — rather than undermines — the world’s economic prosperity and political stability?

  Our answers to these questions can no longer be bound by the conventional collectivist wisdom of the 1940s and fifties. That is yesterday’s future. We must draw on the ideas of liberty, democracy, free markets and nationhood that have swept the world in the last decade.

  THE BEGINNING OF THE COMMUNITY

  It was Winston Churchill who, with characteristic magnanimity in 1946, with his Zurich speech, argued that Germany should be rehabilitated through what he called ‘European Union’ as ‘an association between France and Germany’ which would ‘assume direction’. This could not be done overnight, and it took American leadership. In 1947, after travelling through Europe in that terrible winter when everything froze over, George Marshall, the then Secretary of State, promoted the idea of American help. Marshall Aid was administered by institutions set up ad hoc — it had to be, if only because most European states did not have adequate machinery, the Greek delegate being found one day simply making up figures for his countr
y’s needs — and I expect there were others besides.

  The initial impetus was for European recovery. It owed much to simple American good-heartedness. It owed something to commercial calculation: the prosperity of Europe, in free-trade conditions, would also be the prosperity of America. But the main thing was the threat from Stalin. Eastern Europe had shown how demoralized peoples could not resist cunningly executed communist takeovers, and Marshall Aid was intended to set Western Europe back on its feet. It was a prodigious success.

  But we have found, again and again, that institutions devised for one set of problems become obstacles to solving the next set — even that they become problems in their own right. The Common Agricultural Policy is an example. As originally devised, it had a modest aim that was not unreasonable.

  Yet we all know that the CAP is now an expensive headache, and one quite likely to derail the Uruguay Round. Because of agricultural protection we stop food imports from the poorer countries. They themselves are nowadays vehement supporters of market principles: it is from the Cairns Group of developing countries that you hear demands for free trade. Yet in the industrialized part of the world, the taxpayer and the consumer stump up $270 billion in subsidies and higher costs; and the World Bank has calculated that, if the tariff and other barriers were cut by half, then the poorer countries would gain at once, in exports, $50 billion. In case you might think that these sentiments are somehow anti-European, I should say that they come from an editorial in the economic section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 4 May.

  Here we have a prime example of yesterday’s solutions becoming tomorrow’s problems. You could extend this through the European institutions as a whole. They were meant to solve post-war problems, and did so in many ways extremely well. Western Europe did unite against the Soviet threat, and, with Anglo-American precepts, became free and very prosperous. That prosperity, denied to the peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia, in the end caused demoralization among their rulers, and revolt from below. We are now in a quite different set of circumstances, with the Cold War over.

  Looking at European institutions today, I am reminded of a remark made about political parties in the French Third Republic. Some of them had names which reflected radical republican origins from the 1870s, but years later they had become conservative. These radical names, ran the remark, were like the light reaching Earth from stars that were long extinct. Equally with the end of the Cold War we have to look again at the shape of Europe and its institutions.

  THE GERMAN QUESTION

  Mr Chairman, let me turn first to the new situation created by the reunification of Germany. And let me say that if I were a German today, I would be proud — proud but also worried. I would be proud of the magnificent achievement of rebuilding my country, entrenching democracy and assuming the undoubtedly preponderant position in Europe. But I would also be worried about the European Community and its direction. The German taxpayer pays dearly for his place in Europe. Britain and Germany have a strong joint interest in ensuring that the other Community countries pay their fair share of the cost — and control the Community’s spending more enthusiastically — without leaving us to carry so much of the burden.

  Germany is well equipped to encourage such financial prudence. Indeed I would trust the Bundesbank more than any other European central bank to keep down inflation — because the Germans have none-too-distant memories of the total chaos and political extremism which hyper-inflation brings. The Germans are, therefore, right to be increasingly worried about the terms they agreed for economic and monetary union. Were I a German, I would prefer the Bundesbank to provide our modern equivalent of the gold standard rather than any committee of European central bankers.

  But there is an understandable reluctance on the part of Bonn to defend its views and interests so straightforwardly. For years the Germans have been led to believe by their neighbours that their respectability depends on their subordinating their national interest to the joint decisions of the Community. It is better that that pretence be stopped. A reunited Germany can’t and won’t subordinate its national interests in economic or in foreign policy to those of the Community indefinitely. And sometimes Germany will be right when the rest are wrong, as it was over the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia. Indeed, if the Federal Republic had led the way in recognizing these countries earlier, Serbian aggression might have been deterred and much bloodshed prevented. Whether rightly or wrongly exercised, however, Germany’s new pre-eminence is a fact. We will all be better off if we recognize that modern democratic Germany has come of age.

  Nevertheless Germany’s power is a problem — as much for the Germans as for the rest of Europe. Germany is too large to be just another player in the European game, but not large enough to establish unquestioned supremacy over its neighbours. And the history of Europe since 1870 has largely been concerned with finding the right structure to contain Germany.

  It has been Germany’s immediate neighbours, the French, who have seen this most clearly. Both Briand in 1929 and Schuman after the Second World War proposed structures of economic union to achieve this. Briand’s proposal was made just at the moment when the rise of the Nazis made such a visionary scheme impossible and it failed. But Schuman’s vision of a European Community was realized because of an almost unique constellation of favourable circumstances. The Soviet threat made European cooperation imperative. Germany was itself divided. Other Western nations sought German participation in the defence of Western Europe. West Germany needed the respectability that NATO and the Community could give. And American presence in, and leadership of, Europe reduced the fears of Germany’s neighbours.

  With the collapse of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany, the entire position has changed. A new Europe of some thirty states has come into being, the problem of German power has again surfaced and statesmen have been scrambling to produce a solution to it. At first France hoped that the post-war Franco-German partnership, with France as the senior partner, would continue. Chancellor Kohl’s separate and successful negotiations with Mr Gorbachev quickly showed this to be an illusion.

  The next response of France and other European countries was to seek to tie down the German Gulliver within the joint decision-making of the European Community. Again, however, this quickly proved to be an illusion. Germany’s preponderance within the Community is such that no major decision can really be taken against German wishes. In these circumstances, the Community augments German power rather than containing it.

  Let me illustrate this point with two examples where I agree with the German position. The first, as I have mentioned, was the German decision to recognize Croatia and Slovenia which compelled the rest of Europe to follow suit. The second is the refusal of the Bundesbank to pursue imprudent financial policies at the urging of some of the countries of the G7. However much I may sympathize with these policies, the blunt fact is that Germany has followed its own interests rather than the advice of its neighbours, who have then been compelled to adjust their own stance.

  THE BALANCE OF POWER

  What follows from this is that German power will be best accommodated in a looser Europe in which individual nation states retain their freedom of action. If Germany or any other power then pursues a policy to which other countries object, it will automatically invite a coalition against itself. And the resulting solution will reflect the relative weight of the adversaries. A common foreign policy, however, is liable to express the interests of the largest single actor. And a serious dispute between EC member states locked into a common foreign policy would precipitate a crisis affecting everything covered by the Community.

  The general paradox here is that attempts at cooperation that are too ambitious are likely to create conflict. We will have more harmonious relationships between the states of Europe if they continue to have room to make their own decisions and to follow their own interests — as happened in the Gulf War.

  But it would be idle to deny that suc
h a balance of power — for that is what I have been describing — has sometimes broken down and led to war. And Europe on its own, however organized, will still find the question of German power insoluble. Europe has really enjoyed stability only since America became a European power.

  The third response therefore is to keep an American presence in Europe. American power is so substantial that it dwarfs the power of any other single European country. It reassured the rest of Europe in the face of Soviet power until yesterday; and it provides similar comfort against the rise of Germany today — as the Germans themselves appreciate.

  Why aren’t we worried about the abuse of American power? It is difficult to be anxious about a power so little inclined to throw its weight around that our principal worry is that American troops will go home.

  And there’s the rub. There is pressure from isolationist opinion in the USA to withdraw from Europe. It is both provoked and encouraged by similar thinking in the Community which is protectionist in economics and ‘little European’ in strategy. In trade, in the GATT negotiations, in NATO’s restructuring, we need to pursue policies that will persuade America to remain a European power.

  EUROPE FREE AND DEMOCRATIC

  If America is required to keep Europe secure, what is required to keep Europe free and democratic?

  When the founders of the European Community drew up the Treaty of Rome, they incorporated features from two quite different economic traditions. From liberalism they took free trade, free markets and competition. From socialism (in guises as various as social Catholicism and corporatism) they took regulation and intervention. And for thirty years — up to the signing of the Single European Act — these two traditions were in a state of perpetual but unacknowledged tension.