Don’t
Mention the War, by John Ramsden
The
following excerpt has been taken from the final chapter of Ramsden’s book.
It’s entitled: ‘People to people, there’s a problem’.
The text of Staatsexamen Frühjahr 2008 is
highlighted in RED
Alongside
unhelpful images and memories, Britain experienced in the 1980s and 1990s more
open anti-German prejudice among her rulers than at any time since 1945. Within
the broader aim of reasserting Britain internationally, Margaret Thatcher and
some of her senior ministers harboured deep personal suspicion of everything
German. Though these were mainly open secrets to be deduced from their
pronouncements, in 1989-92 they erupted to the surface. Unlike
near-contemporaries who themselves had fought against Germany and come back keen
to ensure that no such war should ever happen again, Thatcher never got over the
experience of being a civilian threatened by the Luftwaffe. As Prime
Minister she was constantly amazed that those around her did not share her views
and sought advisers who did, notably her private secretary Charles Powell. When
consulting historians chosen for their expertise on post-war Germany, she
lectured them on what they ought to be advising her to do, generally what she
already intended; after witnessing one such meeting,
Douglas Hurd noted in his diary that 'none of [the academics] shared her
extravagant suspicions of Germany but this just makes her flail about more. All
good humoured, but they are half amused half depressed by her prejudices.' Nor
did she ever get on well personally with her German opposite number after 1982,
Helmut Kohl. When she visited Kohl in his native Rhineland in 1989 and he made
great efforts to show her around, her reaction on the plane home was 'my God,
that man is so German!' Challenged for her views, she announced that
she did not believe in 'national guilt', adding, 'but I do believe in national
character'. Reminded of the size of Germany's contribution to the EU budget, she
responded, 'it's always been a misnomer to say that the Germans are the
paymasters of Europe. The Germans have been simply paying reparations for all
the things they did during the war.' Nor was she comforted by West Germany's
economic strength, which had sustained democracy since 1945, for she 'never
believed that German nationalism was dead'; younger Germans were sure to seek
reunification and make their country again the dominant Force in Europe.
For her foreign policy adviser George Urban, Thatcher's views on Germany were
close to the 'Alf Garnett version of history'. Germans were not reassured when
supporters defended her views, as the columnist Peter Jenkins did in 1990; she
was not really 'subliminally anti-German', just typically English and 'subliminally
anti-European'.48
These
views were not very different from those held by Harold Macmillan as Prime
Minister twenty-five years earlier — except that Macmillan kept his opinions
to himself until he wrote his memoirs, while Thatcher was less careful. A
quarter century of German democracy might anyway have transformed perceptions,
but as Hurd recalls, 'her firm idea of Germany … was not based on any
understanding of the new German political system', and she had rarely taken part
in such 'bridges' to Germany as Königswinter Conferences or the Conservatives'
own meetings with Christian Democrats. She was unlucky therefore to be the
premier forced to carry out the pledge to support the reunification of Germany
given by her post-war predecessors, some of whom, like Macmillan, had
not meant a word of it at the time. Struggling to obstruct the process,
she argued like the victors of 1945 that German unity was simply too big an
issue to be decided by Germans for themselves, but received backing of
consequence from nobody who mattered. When Russia, America and France all
accepted German unity, she had little option but to recognise what had happened,
but even then assented only when assured that 'sizable' British, French and
American forces would remain on German soil, to contain not a Soviet threat but
a hypothetical German one. This was, as she put it in her memoirs, 'one instance
in which a foreign policy I pursued met with unambiguous failure'. The arguments she advanced against joining the rush
towards German unity included fears that Gorbachev's Russia would be
destabilised and Glasnost imperilled. As a Eurosceptic she was not
convinced by French intentions to accelerate the unification of Europe, to
'bind' united Germany to democracy. At heart, though, it was German 'national
character', and therefore fear of a powerful Germany, that lay behind worries
about 'all those Prussians and Saxons who are now joining West Germany but had
no experience, since 1933, of any political system other than Nazism and
Stalinism'. Discussions with hand-picked historians at Chequers demonstrated
that she was almost alone in her views, but she kept replying, 'Yes, but you
can't trust them.' Even as unification went ahead, she told a German
diplomat that 'it would take at least another 40 years before the British could
trust the Germans again'. In her memoirs she added in retirement a new barb to
the repertory of Germanophobia: 'the true origin of German angst is the
agony of self-knowledge'.49 She had barely given her
ungracious blessing to German unity when the 'Ridley affair' burst into the open.
One of her closest supporters, the Industry Secretary Nicholas Ridley, had
given an interview to the Spectator and ranted about the German threat
once the interview was officially over, but without making it clear that his
remarks were off the record. Ridley suggested that the EU was 'a German racket
to take over Europe [and] you might just as well give it to Adolf Hitler,
frankly'. This the Spectator underlined with a dramatic cartoon, of
Ridley painting a Hitler moustache on a poster of Kohl. Ridley and Thatcher
deplored publishing private conversations (which this was not), and at first
thought that withdrawing the offending words would be enough; neither seems to
have grasped that to think such things or to say them in private was almost as
offensive as voicing them in public. Despite Party Chairman Kenneth Baker's
efforts to repair the damage ('Nick had been very frank …'), the row rumbled
on, though German politicians did limit the impact by hinting that Ridley must
have been drunk. Since Ridley was so close to Thatcher, Foreign Secretary
Douglas Hurd's position became impossible, since no German politician would
believe promises of friendship while the Prime Minister's confidant espoused
such views and remained in the cabinet. Ridley therefore had to resign and take
the blame with him, but again Thatcher's memoirs show her real opinions:
Ridley's 'gaffe' was just 'telling an inconvenient truth'. Even that strategy
failed, for within a few days minutes of the Chequers meeting leaked into the
headlines. This record bore little resemblance to the memories of historians who
had attended, nor indicated the Prime Minister's isolation. Among the 'abiding
part[s] of the German character' identified by the meeting, according to Charles
Powell's minutes, were 'angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism,
inferiority complex, sentimentality', while further discussion had added 'a
capacity for excess' and 'a tendency to over-estimate their own strengths and
capabilities'. The New Statesman pointed out that most of these qualities
were attributed to Thatcher herself, even by admirers. Ridley, now on the
backbenches, received thousands of letters deploring the fact that he had been
forced out, and his views were supported by half the Tory backbenchers contacted
by Channel Four. Polls suggested that a third of the public agreed with him, too,
especially older people — as they did when similar polls were conducted in
Denmark and the Netherlands.50
The
Ridley affair, and public support for the disgraced minister, appears in
hindsight an early flowering of the xenophobia that would flourish during the
Maastricht debates and in the UK Independence Party as an electoral force, but
in the short term the effect was to contribute further evidence of Thatcher's
inflexible opinions to a party majority desperate for her retirement, which it
secured later in the year. Her successor, John Major, supported moves to improve
relations with Germany, launched by Douglas Hurd from the Foreign Office and by
the Party Chairman. Major worked hard at building a rapport with Kohl, and
delivered a key speech, promising to put Britain 'at the heart of Europe', to
the Christian Democrats in Bonn. If he was unsuccessful in prising Germany away
from its alliance with France, then he merely failed where every prime minister
for forty years had failed. Yet during Major's second year in office divergences
over economic policy prompted another Anglo-German crisis. From the perspective
of British ministers, locked into the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) that
constrained exchange rates, the escalating cost of integrating the reunified
Germany produced high interest rates internationally and unpopular consequences
within Britain. By September 1992, with German interest rates staying high to
restrain inflation there, the ERM strained to bursting point. At a meeting in
Bath there was a confrontation between the British Chancellor of the Exchequer,
Norman Lamont, and the head of the Bundesbank; stuck in Balmoral, Major heard
one of his staff shout over a poor line, 'I don't think that we can rely on the
Germans', at which his police guards responded in chorus, 'Dead right!' The
situation worsened when the Bundesbank president made incautious comments about
the need for further currency revaluations after Italian devaluation, and his
refusal categorically to withdraw the remarks launched a speculative attack on
the pound until, on 'Black Wednesday', Sterling crashed out of the ERM. During
that dramatic day repeated demands that German banks support the pound produced
only inaction, though British ministers showed little awareness of the
Bundesbank's constitutional independence when urging Kohl to order it to help.
This was a public disaster for British policy, and it was tempting to blame it
on Germany, in view of how it had come about, apparently confirming within two
years the worries about German power that Thatcher and Ridley had voiced. For a
time intergovernmental relations were strained, and the press on each side
unhelpfully heated a boiling pot. Ralf Dahrendorf noticed that Thatcher and Kohl
would barely even speak to each other at the next Königswinter Conference, even
though the whole point of such meetings was to foster harmony; each sat by the
chairman, but turned away and conversed animatedly with the person on their
other side. Even sending the Queen to Germany did not work now, for both crowds
and enthusiasm were less than before, except in East German cities like Leipzig
that had never seen her before.51
48)
John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, vol. II: The Iron Lady (Cape, London,
2003), 257-8, 304, 632-4; George Urban, Diplomacy and Disillusion at the
Court of Margaret Thatcher (I. B. Tauris, London, 1996), 82-3, 99, 103-4;
Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (HarperCollins, London,
1993), 61, 94, 552, 759, 769; Douglas Hurd, Memoirs (Little, Brown,
London, 2003), 382-4; Spiegel, 19 February 1990; Douglas Hurd, 'The German
Unification Process', in Mayer and Stehling, Anglo-German Relations, 152.
49)
Wolfram Kaiser, Using Europe, Abusing the Europeans: Britain and European
Integration, 1945-63 (Macmillan, London, 1996), 214, 222-3, 225, 813; Urban,
Diplomacy and Disillusion, 124, 133-4, 136, 141-2, 147, 150; Hurd,
'German Unification Process', 147, 149; Campbell, Iron Lady, 636-7, 639;
Thatcher, Downing Street Years, 755, 783, 789-91; Kielinger, Crossroads and
Roundabouts, 216.
50)
Urban, Diplomacy and Disillusion, 99, 151-2; Kenneth Baker, The
Turbulent Years (Faber, London, 1993), 348-9, 358-9; Campbell, Iron Lady,
635; Nicholas Ridley, My Style of Government (Hutchinson, London, 1991),
156, 223, 224, 227; Hurd, Memoirs, 386; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
13 and 14 July 1990; Kielinger, Crossroads and Roundabouts, 6-7; Daily
Telegraph, 13 May 1990.
51) Baker, Turbulent Years, 351-2; Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon, eds, The Major Effect (Macmillan, London, 1994), 284-5; John Major, Autobiography (HarperCollins, London, 1999), 122, 153, 323, 329-37; Anthony Seldon, Major: A Political Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1997), In Office 47, 164, 310, 314, 323, 338; Sarah Hogg and Jonathan Hill, Power and Politics: John Major in No. 10 (Little, Brown, London, 1995), 76-7; Norman Lamont, In Office (Warner Books, London, 1999), 36, 153, 216, 244, 254, 259, 279, 283, 387; Zeit, 20 July 1990; Süddeutscher Zeitung, 23 October 1992.
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