Bankotsu
14th September 2009, 06:43
Was Margaret Thatcher right to fear a united Germany?
Documents published last week highlight the former prime minister's concern that the fall of the Berlin Wall could be a risk to Britain's national security. Was she right to be worried, asks historian Andrew Roberts
By Andrew Roberts
13 Sep 2009
"We do not want a united Germany," Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev at a lunch meeting in the Kremlin in September 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. "This would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the whole international situation and could endanger our security."
Among the 1,000 transcripts of Politburo and other high-level papers smuggled out of Russia by Pavel Stroilov, a researcher in the Gorbachev Foundation, and published for the first time last week – in what The Times described as a "bombshell" – was Thatcher's admission to Gorbachev that although she supported German reunification in public, in private and off-the-record she felt "deep concern" about the "big changes" afoot.
In fact, far from being a scoop, each of these points were contained on pages 792 and 793 of The Downing Street Years, Lady Thatcher's autobiography published in 1993. But what the smuggled Russian documents do is highlight the accuracy of Thatcher's own account of those heady days of two decades ago.
Writing of the meeting with Gorbachev, she says: "I explained to him that although Nato had traditionally made statements supporting Germany's aspiration to be reunited, in practice we were rather apprehensive."
In reply, "Mr Gorbachev confirmed that the Soviet Union did not want German reunification either.
This reinforced me in my resolve to slow up the already heady pace of developments. Of course I did not want East Germans to live under Communism, but it seemed to me that a truly democratic East Germany would soon emerge and the question of reunification was a separate one, on which the wishes and interests of Germany's neighbours and other powers must be fully taken into account."
That this did not happen – because, instead, Chancellor Kohl forced through speedy reunification – is a matter of history, and no one appreciated her utter defeat more than Thatcher herself: "If there is one instance in which a foreign policy I pursued met with unambiguous failure, it was my policy on German reunification," she later admitted.
Yet before Thatcher is criticised for myopia, and even worse xenophobia, over her German policy, it is worth considering the dangers that Western leaders believed they might face when the tectonic plates of 45 years shifted overnight.
Margaret Thatcher's first concern was over the future of Nato, which had kept the peace in Europe since 1949, for it was widely feared that a reunited and thus much more powerful Germany might leave Nato to pursue its own security arrangements, perhaps as part of a deal with USSR.
In a long phone conversation with President Bush on February 24, 1990, Thatcher emphasised that Germany had to remain in Nato and that the Soviet Union must not be made to feel isolated. She saw how the balance of power in Europe might change overnight, and warned that "looking well into the future, only the Soviet Union – or its successor – could provide such a balance".
Another fear was that a strong Germany might replace Britain as America's closest ally in Europe, a suspicion that had been inflamed by a speech of President Bush's in May 1989, in which he had referred to Germany as America's "partner in leadership".
Although he later added that Britain was a partner in leadership too, in Margaret Thatcher's view, "the damage had been done". Any power likely to usurp Britain's role as America's ally, in effect to kill off the Special Relationship, was likely to raise Thatcher's ire.
Then there was the undoubted threat that a far more powerful Chancellor Kohl would have a far louder voice in the counsels of Europe, where Thatcher was fighting a long rearguard action against closer European integration, something that was to trigger the party coup against her a year later. "In the longer term, the emergence of free, independent and anti-socialist governments in the region would provide me with potential allies in my crusade for a wider, looser Europe," Thatcher later admitted, "but the immediate effect was to strengthen the hand of Chancellor Kohl and fuel the desire of President Mitterrand and M. Delors for a federal Europe that would bind in the new Germany to a structure within which its preponderance would be checked."
In order to understand why this was so, Thatcher tried to look into the German psyche.
She felt that Germany's desire for a wider and deeper European Union was, as she put it, "partly a demonstration that the new Germany would not behave like the old Germany from Bismarck to Hitler. In this cause, the Germans were prepared to see more powers for the Commission and they gave special importance to increasing the power and authority of the European Parliament. So the Germans were federalists by conviction."
In order the better to try to understand the Germans, Thatcher invited several historians of Germany to a meeting at Chequers on Sunday March 24, 1990. Lord Dacre, Norman Stone, Fritz Stern, Gordon Craig, George Urban and Timothy Garton Ash gave her and foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd a crash course in German national characteristics. According to the memorandum of the meeting drawn up by her foreign policy advisor, Sir Charles Powell, this included "angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complexes and sentimentality".
Although there was a media storm when the memorandum was leaked soon afterwards, Thatcher stood by her decision to try to understand the German mentality. "I do not believe in collective guilt," she said. "It is individuals who are morally accountable for their actions. But I do believe in national character, which is moulded by a range of complex factors."
The fact that Germany only became a country relatively late, under Bismarck in 1871, meant that, in Thatcher's view, it "has veered between aggression and self-doubt. The true origin of German angst is the agony of self-knowledge."
When the news came through in early 1990 that Helmut Kohl had refused to sign a border treaty with the Poles that recognised their 1945 frontiers, shockwaves went through the chancelleries of Europe, and prompted particular worries in France. One colleague of Mitterrand, Jacques Attali said he would go to live on Mars if reunification occurred.
Nor were these fears wholly eradicated when the German-Polish treaty was finally signed in November 1990, the same month as Thatcher's fall. Because of Germany's eastward expansion in the economic sphere, Thatcher was still of the belief in 1993 that, in her words, "by its very nature, Germany is a destabilising, rather than a stabilising, force in Europe".
Her memories of sitting around her father's radio set as a young teenager listening to Churchill's speeches in 1940 had gone deep. The Thatcher household was very opposed to the appeasement of Germany in the 1930s, and Margaret's views were strongly influenced by that period of her life.
Her sister Muriel had an Austrian Jewish penfriend called Edith. After the Anschluss in March 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria, Margaret's father, Alfred Roberts, persuaded the Grantham Rotarians to take in Edith, and for a period she stayed with the Thatchers in Grantham. "She told us what it was like to live as a Jew under an anti-Semitic regime," Margaret recalled. "One thing Edith reported particularly stuck in my mind: the Jews, she said, were being made to scrub the streets."
As a result, the Thatcher household "wanted to see Hitler's wickedness ended, even by war if that was necessary". Yet it was always sober geopolitics, rather than anti-German paranoia, that actuated Margaret Thatcher's policies.
She recognised that postwar Germany had evolved into a responsible, peace-loving democracy and she forged working relations with Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, though they were never particularly personally warm.
By the end of Thatcher's prime ministership, her concerns about Germany had not been borne out. It has not left Nato; indeed, it has sent troops to Afghanistan. Nor has it destabilised Europe, or needed ''balancing'' by the Russians. Nor has it (yet) forced Britain into the EU economic and monetary union that she so stoically set her face against.
Yet simply because genuine British and French fears were not in the end realised, it does not follow that Thatcher was wrong in wanting to try to steer events more carefully and slowly than the great groundswell of German support for reunification in the event permitted.
"These events marked the most welcome political change of my lifetime," she wrote of the fall of the Berlin Wall. "But no matter how much I rejoiced at the overthrow of Communism in eastern and central Europe, I was not going to allow euphoria to extinguish either reason or prudence."
Those are words of calm statesmanship, and leave intact Margaret Thatcher's hitherto very high reputation for the management of foreign affairs.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/margaret-thatcher/6179595/Was-Margaret-Thatcher-right-to-fear-a-united-Germany.html
Documents published last week highlight the former prime minister's concern that the fall of the Berlin Wall could be a risk to Britain's national security. Was she right to be worried, asks historian Andrew Roberts
By Andrew Roberts
13 Sep 2009
"We do not want a united Germany," Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev at a lunch meeting in the Kremlin in September 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. "This would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the whole international situation and could endanger our security."
Among the 1,000 transcripts of Politburo and other high-level papers smuggled out of Russia by Pavel Stroilov, a researcher in the Gorbachev Foundation, and published for the first time last week – in what The Times described as a "bombshell" – was Thatcher's admission to Gorbachev that although she supported German reunification in public, in private and off-the-record she felt "deep concern" about the "big changes" afoot.
In fact, far from being a scoop, each of these points were contained on pages 792 and 793 of The Downing Street Years, Lady Thatcher's autobiography published in 1993. But what the smuggled Russian documents do is highlight the accuracy of Thatcher's own account of those heady days of two decades ago.
Writing of the meeting with Gorbachev, she says: "I explained to him that although Nato had traditionally made statements supporting Germany's aspiration to be reunited, in practice we were rather apprehensive."
In reply, "Mr Gorbachev confirmed that the Soviet Union did not want German reunification either.
This reinforced me in my resolve to slow up the already heady pace of developments. Of course I did not want East Germans to live under Communism, but it seemed to me that a truly democratic East Germany would soon emerge and the question of reunification was a separate one, on which the wishes and interests of Germany's neighbours and other powers must be fully taken into account."
That this did not happen – because, instead, Chancellor Kohl forced through speedy reunification – is a matter of history, and no one appreciated her utter defeat more than Thatcher herself: "If there is one instance in which a foreign policy I pursued met with unambiguous failure, it was my policy on German reunification," she later admitted.
Yet before Thatcher is criticised for myopia, and even worse xenophobia, over her German policy, it is worth considering the dangers that Western leaders believed they might face when the tectonic plates of 45 years shifted overnight.
Margaret Thatcher's first concern was over the future of Nato, which had kept the peace in Europe since 1949, for it was widely feared that a reunited and thus much more powerful Germany might leave Nato to pursue its own security arrangements, perhaps as part of a deal with USSR.
In a long phone conversation with President Bush on February 24, 1990, Thatcher emphasised that Germany had to remain in Nato and that the Soviet Union must not be made to feel isolated. She saw how the balance of power in Europe might change overnight, and warned that "looking well into the future, only the Soviet Union – or its successor – could provide such a balance".
Another fear was that a strong Germany might replace Britain as America's closest ally in Europe, a suspicion that had been inflamed by a speech of President Bush's in May 1989, in which he had referred to Germany as America's "partner in leadership".
Although he later added that Britain was a partner in leadership too, in Margaret Thatcher's view, "the damage had been done". Any power likely to usurp Britain's role as America's ally, in effect to kill off the Special Relationship, was likely to raise Thatcher's ire.
Then there was the undoubted threat that a far more powerful Chancellor Kohl would have a far louder voice in the counsels of Europe, where Thatcher was fighting a long rearguard action against closer European integration, something that was to trigger the party coup against her a year later. "In the longer term, the emergence of free, independent and anti-socialist governments in the region would provide me with potential allies in my crusade for a wider, looser Europe," Thatcher later admitted, "but the immediate effect was to strengthen the hand of Chancellor Kohl and fuel the desire of President Mitterrand and M. Delors for a federal Europe that would bind in the new Germany to a structure within which its preponderance would be checked."
In order to understand why this was so, Thatcher tried to look into the German psyche.
She felt that Germany's desire for a wider and deeper European Union was, as she put it, "partly a demonstration that the new Germany would not behave like the old Germany from Bismarck to Hitler. In this cause, the Germans were prepared to see more powers for the Commission and they gave special importance to increasing the power and authority of the European Parliament. So the Germans were federalists by conviction."
In order the better to try to understand the Germans, Thatcher invited several historians of Germany to a meeting at Chequers on Sunday March 24, 1990. Lord Dacre, Norman Stone, Fritz Stern, Gordon Craig, George Urban and Timothy Garton Ash gave her and foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd a crash course in German national characteristics. According to the memorandum of the meeting drawn up by her foreign policy advisor, Sir Charles Powell, this included "angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complexes and sentimentality".
Although there was a media storm when the memorandum was leaked soon afterwards, Thatcher stood by her decision to try to understand the German mentality. "I do not believe in collective guilt," she said. "It is individuals who are morally accountable for their actions. But I do believe in national character, which is moulded by a range of complex factors."
The fact that Germany only became a country relatively late, under Bismarck in 1871, meant that, in Thatcher's view, it "has veered between aggression and self-doubt. The true origin of German angst is the agony of self-knowledge."
When the news came through in early 1990 that Helmut Kohl had refused to sign a border treaty with the Poles that recognised their 1945 frontiers, shockwaves went through the chancelleries of Europe, and prompted particular worries in France. One colleague of Mitterrand, Jacques Attali said he would go to live on Mars if reunification occurred.
Nor were these fears wholly eradicated when the German-Polish treaty was finally signed in November 1990, the same month as Thatcher's fall. Because of Germany's eastward expansion in the economic sphere, Thatcher was still of the belief in 1993 that, in her words, "by its very nature, Germany is a destabilising, rather than a stabilising, force in Europe".
Her memories of sitting around her father's radio set as a young teenager listening to Churchill's speeches in 1940 had gone deep. The Thatcher household was very opposed to the appeasement of Germany in the 1930s, and Margaret's views were strongly influenced by that period of her life.
Her sister Muriel had an Austrian Jewish penfriend called Edith. After the Anschluss in March 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria, Margaret's father, Alfred Roberts, persuaded the Grantham Rotarians to take in Edith, and for a period she stayed with the Thatchers in Grantham. "She told us what it was like to live as a Jew under an anti-Semitic regime," Margaret recalled. "One thing Edith reported particularly stuck in my mind: the Jews, she said, were being made to scrub the streets."
As a result, the Thatcher household "wanted to see Hitler's wickedness ended, even by war if that was necessary". Yet it was always sober geopolitics, rather than anti-German paranoia, that actuated Margaret Thatcher's policies.
She recognised that postwar Germany had evolved into a responsible, peace-loving democracy and she forged working relations with Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, though they were never particularly personally warm.
By the end of Thatcher's prime ministership, her concerns about Germany had not been borne out. It has not left Nato; indeed, it has sent troops to Afghanistan. Nor has it destabilised Europe, or needed ''balancing'' by the Russians. Nor has it (yet) forced Britain into the EU economic and monetary union that she so stoically set her face against.
Yet simply because genuine British and French fears were not in the end realised, it does not follow that Thatcher was wrong in wanting to try to steer events more carefully and slowly than the great groundswell of German support for reunification in the event permitted.
"These events marked the most welcome political change of my lifetime," she wrote of the fall of the Berlin Wall. "But no matter how much I rejoiced at the overthrow of Communism in eastern and central Europe, I was not going to allow euphoria to extinguish either reason or prudence."
Those are words of calm statesmanship, and leave intact Margaret Thatcher's hitherto very high reputation for the management of foreign affairs.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/margaret-thatcher/6179595/Was-Margaret-Thatcher-right-to-fear-a-united-Germany.html