Margaret Thatcher: Herself Alone by Charles Moore

Author:Charles Moore [Moore, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

Battles lost

15

A breach in the Wall

‘She may…use arguments about Moscow’s fears to cloak her own’

Mrs Thatcher’s interest in the transformation of South Africa was personal, sustained and intense. For all this, it was not an issue on which her country’s way of life, possibly its very survival, rested. From the beginning of her time in office, the central focus of her foreign policy had been on the struggles of the Cold War. By 1989, Mrs Thatcher could feel that the momentous changes under way in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe were vindicating the policies she had pursued. But there were dangers too. The move by the United States away from Britain and towards Germany (see Chapter 7) reflected the Bush administration’s calculation that Germany would hold the key to ending the division of Europe and with it the Cold War itself. This was bad news for Mrs Thatcher’s positioning of her country in the world, and provoked quarrels which helped weaken her standing at home.

To Mrs Thatcher, the fall of Communism was thrilling – the culmination, indeed, of her life’s work on the global stage – but the rise of Germany was not. She was very reluctant to accept that the first must involve the second. As a rational strategic thinker, she had a strong, traditionally British sense of the need for a balance of power in Europe in which no Continental nation could predominate. As a child of the ‘home front’ in the Second World War, she had a visceral dislike of German power. Her enforced acquaintance with Helmut Kohl, over the many years they had both been in office, unfortunately strengthened her feelings. Although she almost always acknowledged that Kohl was ‘staunch’ for NATO against Communism and neutralism, and would even grudgingly recognize his numerous attempts to improve their relationship, she could never sympathize with him. She could be moved to tears by the plight of the Poles under Communism, less so by that of the East Germans, despite her detestation of the Berlin Wall. According to Charles Powell, who had served in Germany early in his Foreign Office career, she suffered from ‘a fundamental ignorance of Germany and Germans’, to which she added a certain ‘envy of Germany’.1 This envy grew in her later years in office, as her own economic achievements seemed less secure. In her eyes, Germany had twice made terrible trouble in the world, and might do so again if not closely watched: Germany did not deserve European dominance. When this dominance threatened to emerge, she sought allies to try to prevent it.

By 1989, two related questions sharpened her anxieties about Germany. The first – which would move quickly from distant dream to real possibility – was the idea that the two parts of the country divided by the Cold War might reunify.*1 This was the likely consequence of the weakening of Soviet power, which had artificially partitioned the country. The second was the suggestion that the problems created by this

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