POLITICS
Mrs Thatcher enlists Eastern Europe for her war of ideas
NOEL MALCOLM
There is a jinx on Mrs Thatcher. Recently, every time she has hoped for a triumph on the international stage, events have conspired to turn the spotlight away from her. Early one morning in mid-July she returned flushed with success from the Houston summit, only to find Downing Street full of reporters shouting questions about Mr Ridley. And last weekend, hav- ing worked hard on her speech for the Aspen Institute in Colorado — which her spokesmen were describing as the most important foreign policy speech of her entire premiership — she was completely overshadowed by the events in Kuwait.
The spokesmen had been exaggerating a little, in any case. It was sheer hubris on the part of her speech-writers to include a reference to Churchill's 'iron curtain' speech at Fulton, Missouri, as if begging for the comparison to be made. This address was an important one, but its importance lay mainly in its relation to previous statements by Mrs Thatcher — in the way that it skirted round some issues and modified or strengthened her stance on others. And what it showed was not that she has become more of a visionary in international politics, but rather that she has become more canny in fighting her corner.
The obvious contrast is with the Bruges speech of September 1988. That text was certainly more important: one cannot im- agine anyone founding an 'Aspen Group' (even with the pleasing prospect of being able to issue 'Aspen Papers') as a tribute to last week's performance. But at the same time the Bruges speech did create much more trouble than it was worth. Her attack on the creation of an identikit European personality', for example, was a gift to her opponents. It enabled them to transfer the whole argument to the level of 'cultural identity' — assuring us that political union was no threat to anything, because in a United States of Europe morris-dancing would still be permitted in Britain.
The Aspen speech, by contrast, had been very carefully filleted: anything which might be construed as hostility to the foreignness of other European countries had been removed. Whether this was because the Prime Minister now feels that she can leave the more populist arguments against European federalism in the hands of Mr Ridley remains to be seen. In three weeks' time, when Mr Ridley's promised series of articles on Europe in the Sunday Express has come out, it will be easier to tell whether she and he are operating the `nice interrogator/nasty interrogator' rou- tine favoured, in films, by American cops. But meanwhile she has discovered the perfect device for converting her apparent hostility into charity: instead of being awkward for Britain, she is being altruistic for Eastern Europe.
I do not wish to suggest that this is mere cynicism on her part. On the contrary, she deserves credit for having declared in her Bruges speech (a full year before the collapse of the Berlin Wall), 'We must never forget that East of the Iron Curtain people who once enjoyed a full share of European culture, freedom and identity have been cut off from their roots. We shall always look on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities.' But one has only to compare two crucial passages from the two speeches to see how useful, as a sort of proxy, Eastern Europe now is in her argument:
Bruges: We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.
Aspen: If we set off down the path of giving more and more powers to highly centralised institutions, which are not democratically accountable, then we should be making it harder for the Eastern Europeans to join. They have not thrown off central command and control in their own countries only to find them reincarnated in the European Community.
The first formulation sounded proud and insular (with, if I am not mistaken, a subliminal reference to what Macmillan told the Strasbourg Assembly in 1950: `Fearing the weakness of democracy, men have often sought safety in technocrats. But frankly the idea is not attractive to the British. We have not overthrown the di- vine right of kings to fall down before the divine right of experts.') The second sounded more like a generous tribute to the democratic instincts of the East Euro- peans — while delicately identifying the Berlaymont building in Brussels as the Kremlin of the West.
The East European gambit has not been properly played before in the EEC debate. M. Mitterrand may have argued last De- cember that a great leap forward to Euro- pean federalism was needed to cope with German unification; but his argument has fallen flat. German unification is going ahead at full steam, untroubled by the fact that European federalism is not. Psycholo- gically, considerations about Eastern Europe count more for Mrs Thatcher's side of the argument than for M. Mitterrand's. In the new democracies of, say, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, it is natural to associ- ate the growth of economic and civic freedom with national freedom from exter- nal control. But in practical terms Mrs Thatcher is probably over-estimating the support she would get from these countries once they were the new boys in the Brussels playground. Their economic weakness would inevitably make them compliant: it is hard to object on principle to 'pooling' authority over your economy with your neighbours, when you are a pauper and they are millionaires. And while Mrs Thatcher thinks an influx from the East would strengthen anti-federalism, there are senior figures in the Foreign Office who think just the opposite. 'The more countries you have', one told me, 'the greater the need for majority voting. Besides, a lot of the problems these coun- tries are worried about, such as the en- vironment, are things which will require more power at the centre to impose Europe-wide solutions.' • Mrs Thatcher's enlistment of the East might not do her much good, eventually, in reality; but it is certainly helping her now in her rhetoric. I use 'rhetoric' here in the correct sense of the term, meaning the presentation of an argument in a form suitable for its audience. Her audience in this case, we should not forget, was Amer- ican. For 45 years, American politicians have been interested in the cold war but curiously uninterested in the war of ideas between European federalism and its cri- tics. Ever since the Marshall Plan, they have tried to nudge Europe towards in- tegration, blandly assuming that a United States of Europe must be, like the USA, a Good Thing. Now that the cold war is officially over, they may think that Euro- pean integration follows naturally together with American withdrawal. But with her gentle comparison between Mos- cow and Brussels, Mrs Thatcher reminds them that the issues are a little more complicated than that. She is calling, so to speak, the old Europe into existence, to redress the balance of the new.
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