Statecraft. Margaret Thatcher
we have gained a glimpse of Armageddon.*
We now know that bin Laden’s terrorists had been planning their outrages for years. The propagation of their mad, bad ideology – decency forbids calling it a religion – had been taking place before our eyes. We were just too blind to see it. In short, the world had never ceased to be dangerous. But the West had ceased to be vigilant. Surely that is the most important lesson of this tragedy, and we must learn it if our civilisation is to survive.
PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION
At the time of writing these lines I have just learned that my portrait has been moved from the ‘Contemporary’ to the ‘Historical’ Room of London’s National Portrait Gallery. This is perfectly fair. After all, eleven years have passed since I left Number Ten Downing Street. The world has, as they say, ‘moved on’ in all sorts of respects.
For example, in 1990 we could not have foreseen the huge impact which the information revolution would have upon business, lifestyles and even war. We could not have imagined that the mighty Japanese economy would have stalled so badly, or that China would have risen so fast. We could not have envisaged that perhaps the most chilling threat to Man’s dignity and freedom would lie in his ability to manipulate genetic science so as to create, and re-create, himself. Nor, needless to say, would even the most far-sighted statesman have predicted the horrors of 11 September 2001.
But it is always true that the world that is can best be understood by those conversant with the world that was. And ‘the world that was’ – the world which preceded today’s world of dot.coms, mobile phones and GM food – was one which saw a life-and-death struggle whose outcome was decisive for all that has followed.
Of course, just to speak of the ‘Cold War’ nowadays is to refer back to an era which seems a lifetime, not a mere decade and a half, ago. In truth, as I shall argue at many stages in this book, the underlying realities have changed rather less than the rhetoric. But changes there have been – and, on balance, ones of enormous benefit to the world.
DEBATES IN PRAGUE
People will continue to argue about the significance of the collapse of communism for as long as there are books to write and publishers to print them. But on Tuesday, 16 November 1999 a number of the main actors in those dramatic events – myself among them – met in Prague to put our own interpretations. It was ten years since the Czechoslovak ‘Velvet Revolution’ had led to the fall of one of the most hardline communist governments in Europe and its replacement by democracy.
I had not participated in the celebrations a few days earlier in Berlin held to mark the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I would have felt uneasy doing so. This was not because I felt any nostalgia for communism. The Wall was an abomination, an indisputable proof that communism was ultimately a system of slavery imposed by imprisoning whole populations. President Reagan had been right in 1987 to demand of the Soviet leader: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’
But nor could I then or now regard Germany as just another country whose future was a matter for Germans alone to decide, without involving anybody else. A united Germany was bound to become once again the dominant power in Europe. It would doubtless be diplomatic, but it would also be culpably naïve, to ignore the fact that this German drive for dominance has led in my lifetime to two terrible, global wars during which nearly a hundred million people – including of course nine million Germans – died. The Germans are a cultured and talented people; but in the past they have shown a marked inability to limit their ambitions or respect their neighbours.
Awareness of the past and uncertainty about the future led President Mitterrand and me, with not very effective assistance from President Gorbachev, to try to slow down the rush to German unification. In the end, we failed – partly because the United States administration took a different view, but mainly because the Germans took matters into their own hands, as in the end, of course, they were entitled to do. It was good that German reunification took place within NATO, thus avoiding the risk that it might have constituted a dangerous non-aligned power in the middle of Europe. It was also good that Germans were able to feel that they had won back control of their own country – as a patriot myself I certainly do not deny anyone else the right to be patriotic. But it would be hypocritical to pretend that I did not have deep misgivings about what a united Germany might mean. So I had no intention of going to Berlin in October 1999 to spoil the party.
Prague, though, was a different matter entirely – this was one party I hoped to enjoy. The Czechs, of course, have suffered the brunt of both Nazism and communism. And, having been failed by the democratic powers in the face of both totalitarian aggressions, they know a thing or two about the need for vigilance.
My favourite European cities all lie behind the former Iron Curtain – St Petersburg (for its grandeur), Warsaw (for its heroism), Budapest (for its leafy elegance). But Prague is quite simply the most beautiful city I have ever visited. It is almost too beautiful for its own good. In 1947 the historian A.J.P. Taylor asked the then Czech President Edvard Beneš why the Czech authorities had not put up stronger resistance to the seizure of Czechoslovakia by Hitler in 1939. Beneš might, I suppose, have replied that the Czechs were taken unawares, deceived by German promises. Or he could have answered that the Czechs were outnumbered and so resistance was useless. Instead, to Taylor’s surprise, he flung open the windows of his office overlooking the irreplaceable glories of Prague and declared: ‘This is why we did not fight!’
The Czech Republic has been one of the more successful post-communist countries, thanks mainly to the visionary economic policies of its former Prime Minister, my old friend and Hayekian extraordinaire, Vaclav Klaus. But he could not have succeeded as he did had the Czechs not retained an instinctive understanding of how to make a civil society and a free economy work. They gained these insights through the historical memory ingrained in their culture – it is, after all, worth remembering that before the Second World War Czechoslovakia enjoyed an income per head equal to that of France. The Czechs are a people who have never forgotten how to combine knowing how to live with knowing how to work. So, for all these reasons, when I was invited to Prague with George Bush Sr, Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl, Lech Walesa and (representing her late husband) Mme Danielle Mitterrand, I eagerly accepted.
Our host was President Vaclav Havel. Czechoslovakia had been immensely fortunate in 1989 to have Mr Havel – someone of total integrity and enjoying near-universal respect – to symbolise popular resistance and eventually become its leader and the nation’s president. President Havel is the sort of leader you could not imagine coming to power in ordinary circumstances – which some people may consider quite a recommendation. He is a considerable playwright, an intellectual, a combination of gentleness and courage – he spent over five years in jail for his views. He speaks quietly but forcefully, no orator in the ordinary sense but with something of the preacher’s ability to convey moral certainty and to communicate inspiration.
Mr Havel’s office in the presidential wing of Prague Castle, where we met that afternoon, looks out onto the river and the old city beyond. The furnishing has doubtless changed since Beneš’s time. A large Egyptianesque nude female statue stands by his desk: for the President’s tastes in art, like his politics, are not altogether mine.
President Havel’s anti-communism is not in doubt. But he is a man of the left and his view of the world reflects this. As he would put it in a speech the following day: ‘The present calls for a new perception of the contemporary world as a multi-polar, multicultural and globally interconnected entity, and for a consistent reform of all international organisations and institutions in order that they might reflect this new understanding.’ This kind of utopian language, even from one so eloquent, worries me.
Mr Havel and I, though, agree entirely,