Thatcher & George II

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

KEVIN CAREY says that, despite anti European sentiment in Britain, European self-sufficiency in defence is inevitable..

Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, whose grasp of history approximates to Governor George W. Bush's knowledge of geography, marked (to use "celebrate" would be totally to misrepresent the lady who fell with the illest grace imaginable) the 10th anniversary of her fall from the British Premiership with an attack on the proposed European Rapid Reaction Force, saying that

"We have always relied for our survival on the English speaking people".

Where this places Welsh speakers, French Canadians and a miscellany of other language users who fought for Britain in the two great wars of the 20th Century I am not sure.

It would be a credit, at least morally, to Mrs. Thatcher if she did not know but I suspect that her racism is of the Milosevic kind.

Again, giving her the benefit of the doubt in hope rather than in expectation, she might well in her statement have been referring to Sir Winston Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples, but I do not suppose she troubled herself either with source material or with a contrary point of view.

"Winston", a presumptuous appropriation to which she was much given, embodied everything which she stood for and was never to be questioned. Clearly most of Churchill's own political history is off limits; the time when he was an orthodox Conservative in peace time was both short and late. Coarsely sarcastic but incapable of irony, she would not get the joke.

One has to presume that the biggest English speaking nation, allowing some liberality in definition, is the United States which came into the First World War halfway through, came into the Second when its fleet was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbour, scuppered the Suez campaign in 1956 and stood airily by while Thatcher's gallant forces re-occupied the Falkland Islands.

Indeed, the transatlantic history of the 20th Century might most conveniently be described as the successful campaign by the United States State Department to relegate Britain to a medium sized power with no empire and no autonomy of action.

Inter War naval treaties left the Pacific in American control and rendered Singapore undefendable by the British. The terms on which Churchill stood alone effectively bankrupted the country, made loss of empire inevitable and threw it into the pot with a shattered post war Europe.

In fact, from 1945 until the Smithsonian Agreement of 1971 the United States was markedly less generous to the old ally than it was to Germany.

If there has been a "Special relationship" between the two countries it has been based on language and culture, on Britain's great potential as a bridge between continental Europe and Washington but the political aspect is a folie de grandeur. In terms of realpolitik after American hauteur over the Falklands the British, particularly as a major oil producer, had no business charging into the Gulf.

And now that the American public, post the Gulf and Kosovo, has been persuaded of the effectiveness of the casualty free war, it is questionable why anyone should want an alliance with the United States except if they are in dire need of a few high level bombing raids.

In truth, British Prime Ministers have never understood Europe well but their understanding in the 20th Century has not grown with necessity.

The outbreak of the First World War was a catastrophic diplomatic breakdown and its peace was equally disastrous. Churchill "Stood alone" because his predecessors had gone on misunderstanding and when the war was won the country went on standing alone and failed to join the European Economic community.

That was put right in 1972 by Sir Edward Heath who, having announced his retirement from Parliament, has been reviled for his consistency which is termed "stubbornness".

In the last 28 years our relations have been grim, no grimmer than they were under Mrs. Thatcher who acquired silly folk status for "handbagging" our allies whom she treated as opponents.

Part of this was simple chauvinistic pig-headedness, reinforced by perhaps forgivable linguistic imperialism, but the recent uproar over mad cow disease and the terms of trade for beef show how ignorant the British still are of the political and administrative ways of our nearest neighbours, the French. If we cannot understand how matters are handled in Paris there is no hope for us in post-Byzantine Athens or post Bernstein (Eduard) Scandinavia.

Thatcher's major failure, common to politicians of the 'Right', is that she thinks you can make economic arrangements without parallel political arrangements; money without responsibility would be a simple way of putting it.

But if you have free trade you need an impartial umpire and the freer the trade the stronger the umpire needs to be. So she signed major agreements to free trade within the European Union (descendent of the European Economic Community) but opposed the mechanisms which would help it to work effectively.

This is the background to British opposition to using the new Euro currency and it also lies behind the Conservative attack on the creation of this Rapid Reaction Force.

Yet although a majority of people are opposed to joining the Euro a majority regards it as inevitable, just as most people are aware of the limits of American altruism, stretching back to the "Overfed, oversexed and over here" slogan when GIs were encamped here in preparation for the reconquest of France.

All in all Congress has been consistently more sensible than occupants of the White House since the end of the Cold War.

Europe should look after its own defence and has no need of nuclear weapons.

The corollary, harder to swallow in some quarters, is that Europe may wish to undertake military operations which the United States does not like.

Washington may have to learn the kind of tolerance which Europeans largely exercised during the Vietnam War and various interferences in Central and Latin America.

In time we might choose, in Europe, to extend our back yard to Palestine which is a good deal nearer to our centre than is Cape Horn to Ohio.

The final irony is that the great "Iron Lady", who basked in the reflected, though tarnished, glory of President Reagan has found herself totally at odds with the foreign policy of likely to be President Bush.

COMMENTS? QUESTIONS? Why not e-mail Kevin?

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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