On Europe. Margaret Thatcher

      

       Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

      This is an extract from Statecraft by Margaret Thatcher, originally published in 2002

      Copyright © Margaret Thatcher 2002

      Margaret Thatcher asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

      Cover photograph © Georges De Keerle/Getty Images

      A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008257361

      Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008263775

      Version: 2017-05-08

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       1 Europe – Dreams and Nightmares

       2 Britain and Europe – Time to Renegotiate

       Notes

       Also by Margaret Thatcher

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

      1

       Europe – Dreams and Nightmares

      THE PROBLEMS OF EUROPE

      During my lifetime most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one fashion or other, from mainland Europe, and the solutions from outside it. That generalisation is clearly true of the Second World War. Nazism was, after all, a European ideology, the Third Reich an attempt at European domination. Against both, the resolve of Britain, of the Commonwealth and, decisively, of America were successfully brought to bear. A great victory for liberty was the result. The mainland Europeans benefited from an outcome which, by and large, they had not themselves secured: some have resented it ever since.

      But my opening generalisation is also in a different sense true of the Cold War. Although it was above all in the Soviet Union, that is outside a narrowly defined ‘Europe’, that Marxism became the ideology of empire, Marxism too had European roots. Karl Marx was, it should be remembered, a European thinker in a line of European thinkers; he developed his ideas by studying the experience of Revolutionary France and, I am sorry to say, he prepared his works by courtesy of the British Museum, long before they took political shape in St Petersburg and Moscow; and it was finally the liberal democratic values of the English-speaking peoples, spearheaded from Washington, which proved the ultimate antidote to communism. For a second time – for a third if you go back further to the First World War, though the issues there are somewhat more complex – salvation came from across the Atlantic.

      At a personal level, I am conscious that much of my energy as Prime Minister was also taken up with Europe – and, if I had my time again, still more would have been so. Of course, Britain was not in those days fighting a war against a European power. But there was an increasingly intense struggle, all the same – one which focused on issues of great national and international significance. And, looking forward into the century which has just begun, there is every reason to imagine that this clash of aims and ideas is likely to continue.

      I want, therefore, to examine now in some detail what is at stake – in this chapter from a mainly global perspective, in the next from a more narrowly focused British one. Having sketched out the problems, I shall also suggest some possible solutions. These will, however, not by and large be directed at ‘Europe’. Too many British and other critics have spent too long trying to do that: it is, to speak bluntly, a waste of time, because, as I shall seek to show, Europe as a whole is fundamentally unreformable. My suggestions will thus be addressed principally to those who are still not fully party to the project, and thus not fatally compromised by it.

      NEW STATES FOR OLD

      For most of the Cold War period, the boundaries of Western states marked out on our atlases seemed remarkably clear, and seemed likely to last. In Asia, and still more in Africa, the situation was, of course, more fluid and confusing; though even there it was generally new names rather than new borders that appeared, as one after the other European colonies gained their independence. The greatest divide, though, was between communist and non-communist states, with the former, whatever their notional titles and dignities, falling under the sway of the Soviet Union or China, and the latter enjoying political sovereignty under the formal or informal protection of the United States.

      Since the end of the Cold War, however, that easily identifiable and comprehensible pattern has radically, and probably permanently, changed. Recent years have seen more new states emerge in Europe than at any time since the 1918–19 Versailles and Trianon Treaties. Not that most of these were ‘new’ in the sense that they lacked political antecedents. But certainly in the former Soviet Union and in the Balkans the maps have been redrawn in ways that still leave politicians trying to draw breath, and cartographers in profit. This, then, has been one feature of modern times.

      Yet over the same period, another and contrary trend has also emerged. While the countries of Eastern and Central Europe, the Balkans and the old USSR have been trying to establish viable national institutions, the countries of Western Europe have been seeking to supplant and replace theirs with international ones. The last pretences that the European Union is an economic organisation of freely collaborating independent states are now being discarded. I very much doubt, for example, whether any of his Continental equivalents would echo Mr Blair’s promise that he would ‘have no truck with a European superstate’ and would ‘fight for Britain’s interests and to keep our independence