There is No Alternative (46 page)

Her critics—particularly the members of her party who defenestrated her—do not take this argument at face value. Thatcher, they say, was hostile to the European project for no good reason. She was simply, in her fundament, a profound xenophobe who despised Europeans generally and the Germans in particular.
²³⁸

As the author of a book titled
Menace in Europe,
I can hardly pretend neutrality on this subject. I agree with Thatcher and think
it absurd to believe that the excellent arguments she advances in
Statecraft
are the reflection of nothing more than xenophobia. Permit me the indulgence of quoting myself: “No effort to unify Europe has ever succeeded. Most have ended in blood. The European Union is historically nuts. It reflects neither the will of a single nation-state, nor the will of an Empire, based on the ability of a central political entity to dominate its periphery, nor some form of established European national identity with deep historic roots. . . . The EU is in effect an empty empire.”
²³⁹

Thatcher is known to history as the great Euroskeptic. As a Euroskeptic myself, I would be delighted to report that on this matter she has always been constant as the northern star. But this is not the case. The peculiar truth is that for most of her career, she was a passionate advocate of European unification. The charge that her policies represented nothing more than pathological xenophobia simply can't be reconciled with the facts.

It
is
true that Thatcher didn't much care for Germans. I ask Charles Powell whether he believes the claim that at heart, Thatcher simply loathed them. “Well, yes,” he says. “I think one has to be very candid, yes. She was antipathetic to Germany. Could never quite accept that it had changed. She had an antipathy above all to the German manner, really. [Helmut] Kohl, who tried very hard to get on to terms with her, had that German manner, had that sort of big booming German—that sense that
Germany pays, and that therefore Germans were entitled to lay down the law.
She just hated that. Now, what does it stem from? It stems from a girl brought up at an impressionable age coinciding with the rise of Nazism and the Second World War.”

Of course it does.
²⁴⁰
And not just the Second World War: Thatcher was raised, like everyone of her generation, in the shadow of the First World War. “In our attic,” she recalls in her memoirs, “there was a trunk full of magazines showing, among other things, the famous picture from the Great War of a line of British soldiers blinded by mustard gas walking to the dressing station, each with a hand on the shoulder of the one in front of him.”
²⁴¹

She was not yet fourteen when the Second World War broke out. I have heard that one of her secretaries once asked her what she believed her most meaningful accomplishment to have been. Surprisingly, she replied that it was rescuing her sister's Jewish pen-pal, Edith, from the Nazis. After the 1938 Anschluss, she persuaded her father and his Rotary Club to help Edith escape from Austria and to shelter her in Grantham. This, Thatcher said, more than anything else, was her proudest achievement.
²⁴²
Thatcher mentions Edith only en passant in her memoirs: “One thing Edith reported particularly stuck in my mind. The Jews, she said, were being made to scrub the streets.”
²⁴³

During the war, German bombing raids on Grantham killed seventy-eight of her fellow townspeople. She carried a gas mask with her to school. When the air raid sirens went off, she did her
homework under her kitchen table. Yes, I'm sure this made an impression. The Germany of Thatcher's adolescence—the age at which political prejudices tend to be shaped—was a nation of murderous, jackbooted thugs. Italy was ruled by a preposterous Italian bellowing from a balcony. The French and the Dutch were collaborators; Americans were liberators. It would be understandable if living through this era had persuaded Thatcher to believe that Britain should have no truck with the grand project of European unification. Certainly, this interpretation is often retrospectively imposed on the story.

But in fact it persuaded her—as it persuaded many—that little could be more important than European unification. “We should remember,” she said in 1961, “that France and Germany have attempted to sink their political differences and work for a united Europe. If France can do this so can we.” In the same speech she argued that if Britain failed to enter the Common Market—the precursor to today's European Community—“We should be failing in our duty to future generations.” In response to those who feared Britain would cease to formulate its own foreign policy and lose its separate identity, she replied,

Not precisely the voice of Euroskepticism, that.

Was this speech a youthful folly? A tactical concession to majority opinion? Not at all. Britain entered the European Economic Community in 1973 under the Heath government. In 1975, with
his own cabinet divided over Europe, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson called a national referendum. “Parliament has decided to consult the electorate on the question whether the UK should remain in the European Economic Community,” said the ballot. “Do you want the UK to remain in the EEC?”

Both the Labour and the Conservative parties were split. The left wing of the Labour Party, in particular, was vehemently opposed. Thatcher led the Conservative Party's “Vote Yes” campaign. “The Community gives us peace and security in a free society,” she intoned, “a peace and security denied to the past two generations.” She pulled out the rhetorical blunderbuss to make her case, invoking the spirit of Churchill, who was, she intimated, looking down upon the British people from his throne in Paradise and urging them to vote yes.

She
specifically
argued during this campaign that membership in the EEC militated against the expansion of the frontiers of the state in Britain. Remember these words:

Two years later, she was still embracing this line, positioning herself firmly against those in her party who were voicing doubts about the wisdom of further integration.

Let no one tell you that Thatcher never succumbed to the European fantasy—nor that her subsequent hostility to further integration was motivated by nothing more than irrational and petty prejudice. It simply isn't so.

So what changed?

Simply put, the romance between Thatcher and Europe soured as so many love stories do: They started to fight when the money got tight. She became progressively more infuriated, Powell recalls, by “the fundamental unfairness of the arrangements for British membership—and the budgetary part above all.”

Some 70 percent of the European Community's budget was devoted to agricultural subsidies. Britain's agricultural sector was smaller and more efficient than those of its European counterparts, and moreover its economy was not based upon agriculture. It was unacceptable, Thatcher felt, that at precisely the time she was asking the British public to accept broad public cuts in spending she should also ask them to subsidize inefficient European farmers to the tune of a billion pounds a year.

Britain was receiving only £1 for every £1.50 it contributed to the EEC. It was the second-biggest net contributor after Germany, but one of the poorest member states. So upon taking office, Thatcher demanded a rebate. In November 1979, at the Dublin European Council, Thatcher began an epic argument with her European counterparts. It was to last five long years. “We are not asking the Community or anyone else for money,” she said repeatedly. “We are simply asking to have our own money back.” She threatened to withhold further contributions to the EEC if she did not get her way. To Europeans who wished to maintain the pretense that Europe was now one happy family, this demand seemed distinctly unfraternal. “Every meeting,” Powell recalls, “was turned into a battle about Britain's contribution. It was seen as anti-European to argue about what your contribution was, and half of them pretended they didn't
know
what they contributed.”

It did not take long for the members of the new European family to remember that idealistic rhetoric aside, they loathed one another and always had. At a meeting in Strasbourg, French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing insisted upon being served his
meal before Thatcher. When next he visited her in London, she repaid him by seating him beneath portraits of Nelson and Wellington. “I suspect,” she purred, “that the distinguished Britons looking down on us from the walls—who were accustomed to a different sort of relationship between our two countries—would have been surprised and, in their hearts, pleased.”
²⁴⁸
In her memoirs, she recalls Giscard gazing at the portraits and remarking upon the irony. “I replied that it was no less ironic that I should have to look at portraits of Napoleon on my visits to Paris. In retrospect, I can see that this was not quite a parallel. Napoleon lost.”
²⁴⁹

The summits grew progressively more acrimonious and were marked each time by greater rudeness. Giscard would ostentatiously read his newspaper while Thatcher banged on and on about the budget; Helmut Schmidt would close his eyes and pretend to snore. Once, apparently, as Thatcher was raving about “my oil” and “my fish,” she punctuated her comments with the words “my God!” Someone in attendance loudly replied, “Oh, not
that,
too.” According to legend, during a 1984 summit meeting, she slammed her handbag on the table and screeched, “
I want my money back!
” This did not actually happen, but again, it is one of those anecdotes that suggests something about the mood of these encounters.

Finally, exhausted, François Mitterrand gave way. At the Fontainebleau Summit in 1984, the EEC agreed to give an annual rebate to the United Kingdom, amounting to 66 percent of the difference between Britain's contributions and its receipts. Powell recalls the “electric tension” when Mitterrand said, at last, “Mrs. Thatcher should have what she wants.”