German unification: Thatcher was wrong

German unification: Thatcher was wrong
By Timothy Garton Ash, For The Straits Times

HISTORY has come back to haunt Britain. Just over 20 years ago, the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher told the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: 'Britain and Western Europe are not interested in the unification of Germany. The words written in the Nato communique may sound different, but disregard them. We do not want the unification of Germany.'

She went on to say, inaccurately: 'I can tell you that this is also the position of the US president.'

That's according to the Russian record, made by one of Mr Gorbachev's closest aides. A British note of the conversation, just published in a volume prepared by Foreign Office historians, conveys the same ideas in more elusive Whitehall wording.

This was an act of spectacular disloyalty to a faithful and important Nato ally. It showed a lack of respect for the aspirations of the East Germans, who would soon say clearly that their hopes of freedom - the political value Mrs Thatcher was most closely identified with - would best be realised by unification with an already free German state. And it was very short-sighted.

She was not just expressing her worries in private to a Western ally; she was putting them before the man who had the power to stop German unification. The British note goes on: 'Mr Gorbachev said that he could see what the Prime Minister was driving at. The Soviet Union understood the problem very well and she could be reassured. They did not want German reunification any more than Britain did.'

Things are made no better by the fact that then French president Francois Mitterrand was conveying much the same message to Moscow. Mr Gorbachev's close adviser Anatoly Chernyaev, who made the record of the Thatcher conversation, notes in his diary on Oct 9, 1989, that president Mitterrand's aide Jacques Attali 'talked with us about a revival of a solid Franco-Soviet alliance, including military integration - camouflaged as the use of armies in the struggle against natural disasters'.

At a witness seminar in London last week, organised by the Foreign Office historians, Mr Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German foreign minister at that time, reacted with magnificent condescension. He was aware of Mrs Thatcher's opposition, he said, but he didn't worry too much about it. He knew that so long as the Germans had the Americans behind them, the Brits would always come round in the end. Which, of course, they did - but not without squandering a heap of goodwill in Germany.

The now published records show that the Foreign Office, from the then Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd down, did repeatedly warn (although not without some mandarin trimming along the way) that Mrs Thatcher's vocal opposition was impolitic, misguided and short-sighted. That is doubtless one reason why the Foreign Office is hurrying to publish the documents now, after just 20 years.

It is particularly interesting for me to read the internal pre-history of what became known as 'the Chequers seminar' in March 1990, attended by six historians of Germany, of whom I was one. Since that famous or infamous event is represented only by a vivid but misleading summary by Mrs Thatcher's then private secretary Charles Powell, it is worth saying again what several other participants have already put on record: the overwhelming message of all the historians present was that the Federal Republic must be trusted and supported in carrying through German unification.

I remember one electrifying moment when the veteran, conservative historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had been in Germany immediately after the end of World War II, interrogating senior Nazis for his classic account of the Last Days Of Hitler, said to the effect: Prime Minister, if anyone had told us in 1945 that there was a chance of a Germany united in freedom, as a solid member of the West, we could not have believed our luck. And so we should welcome it, not resist it.

Twenty years on, we can see clearly how Trevor-Roper was right and Mrs Thatcher, wrong. None of her nightmares has been realised. United Germany is not lording it over Europe. Even a severe economic recession has not driven German voters to the far right. When Mrs Angela Merkel announces her new government, it will be a moderate liberal-conservative coalition of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats: the very model of a modern centrist democracy. And German unification opened the door to European unification, through the eastward enlargement of the European Union.

Yes, even in this success story of united Germany, there are some causes for concern. A political system originally designed to prevent a reversion to dictatorship has developed almost too many checks and balances, so that necessary reform is difficult. Germany's special relationship with an authoritarian Russia is a European problem.

But there are justified concerns about every major European state - not least, about Britain. Europe used to have sleepless nights over something called 'the German question'. Twenty years on, a bigger worry should be the British question.

It's in Britain that the leader of a far-right, nationalist, xenophobic party, the British National Party, controversially appears on the BBC's Question Time, a mainstream television show. It's Britain that has a discredited parliament, a constitutional mess, the erosion of civil liberties and a chronic identity problem. It's Britain that still can't work out where it belongs in the world, and what kind of country it wants to be.

The writer is professor of European Studies at Oxford University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.



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Twenty years on, we can see clearly how Trevor-Roper was right and Mrs Thatcher wrong. None of her nightmares has been realised. United Germany is not lording it over Europe. Even a severe economic recession has not driven German voters to the far right. When Mrs Angela Merkel announces her new government, it will be a moderate liberal-conservative coalition of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats: the very model of a modern centrist democracy.