Leadership in an Interdependent World: The Statesmanship of Adenauer, Degaulle, Thatcher, Reagan and Gorbachev by Ghita Ionescu

Leadership in an Interdependent World: The Statesmanship of Adenauer, Degaulle, Thatcher, Reagan and Gorbachev by Ghita Ionescu

Author:Ghita Ionescu [Ionescu, Ghita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780429719424
Google: AiuNDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 44597965
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-04T00:00:00+00:00


This permanent patriotic reminder of the dangers of Soviet Communism, presented, one can presume, two political interests for Mrs Thatcher. One is the electoral motive: in her constituency of Finchley, with a particularly high percentage of Jewish voters, attacks on the USSR were at that time much appreciated. And, on a much higher and more important plane, those attacks and the entire argument of active military and nuclear defence against the USSR coincided with a re-kindling of anti-Communist and anti-Soviet sentiment in the United States. There, President Reagan, after his election in 1980, had revived the campaign for nuclear armament against the USSR, which he denounced as the ‘source of all evils’ and as a result, promised to embark on the new project of Strategic Defence Initiative, as we shall see in Chapter 4. Although Mrs Thatcher did not, from a strategic point of view approve of the project, she approved of anything that could ‘deter’ the enemy, because she firmly shared the President’s apprehensions about Soviet military intentions.

The other connotation Mrs Thatcher gave to British patriotism consisted in the reaffirmation, in two different ways, of Britain’s pride in herself. While Adenauer had to rebuild the Germans’ confidence in themselves against the paralysing sense of guilt and shame which afflicted them after the war, and while de Gaulle tried to blow back into the deflated post-war French national psychology the warming sense of ‘grandeur’ which had always animated it, Mrs Thatcher had to fight, on obviously less important and dramatic levels, with a nevertheless somewhat comparable malaise of post-war British patriotism.

But, especially after she came to power, Mrs Thatcher’s patriotism developed a more aggressive character towards the British people in general, than that of previous Conservative prime ministers, with the natural exception of Churchill during the war. It had a passionate and stimulating purpose and style, sometimes indeed with Gaullist purple patches, in which she blended reproach and encouragement together. Reproach seemed to be addressed to the deliberate anti-nationalism of the decadent ‘new Left’ and of the post-colonial, or in other terms, ‘post-imperialist’ radical intelligentsia. (This, as already discussed, was renewed with every ‘young generation’ of that ilk since the 1950s.) But it was also addressed to the, to her, insufficiently energetic industry and trade, especially the trade unions, but also the managers. It was also addressed, if in more veiled terms, to the administration in general and notably to the Foreign Office, whose diplomatic and therefore conciliatory attitudes she seemed to interpret as a symptom of national weariness. Her appeals for more work, more vigilance and more initiative ‘if one wants to compete with other powers and reconquer our leading position in the world’, had an urgency and sometimes even a stridency, which denoted a sense of national crisis. The stridency was particularly noticeable in matters in which her almost fanatic respect for the idea of sovereignty, and instinctive dislike for that of internationalism were concerned regardless of whether in the United Nations or in the context of the European Community which, as we shall see, was a major cause of her fall.



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