There is No Alternative

by Claire Berlinski

  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.

  It was Churchill who, at the Congress of Europe in 1948, said, “The movement for European unity must be a positive force, deriving its strength from our sense of common spiritual values. It is a dynamic expression of democratic faith, based upon moral conceptions and inspired by a sense of mission.”

  It is a myth that the Community is simply a bureaucracy with no concern for the individual . . .

  It is a myth that our membership of the Community will suffocate national tradition and culture. Are the Germans any less German for being in the Community, or the French any less French? Of course they are not!245

  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: Anything that the left wing of the Labour Party wants is probably bad for our country. And they desperately want us to leave Europe. Their reasons are clear. They fear that, if we stay in Europe, they cannot have their way. They cannot turn us into a socialist siege state, our society suffocated by a spendthrift government. So if they want us out, I say all the more reason to stay in.246

  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.

  . . . the [European] Community needs to strengthen itself. For we face dangers from within as well as from without. Dangers of disunity, dangers of disillusion. Some people are beginning to have doubts about the European idea in practice. At home, there are those, some of them politicians, who blame the Community for all our problems. Others, a small but vociferous minority, would have Great Britain pull out. That is not the position of the party I lead. We are the European party in the British Parliament and among the British people; and we want to co-operate wholeheartedly with our partners in this joint venture.247

  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.”

  Thatcher won the fight, but the love affair was never the same.

  It is so often that way.

  Despite these conflicts, says Powell, Thatcher at this point still fundamentally believed that “Europe was on balance where Britain should be. It was OK. There were things like common fisheries policies that needed to be changed, improved, but she made this great campaign for the single market in Europe, and it was one of the great successes of Europe. It was certainly very much in our interests.” The Single European Act of 1986, a Thatcher initiative, established a European market, without frontiers, in which goods, services, people, and capital might move freely. This was, of course, consistent with the economic principles she stood for.

  “What tipped her over the edge against Europe was really two things,” Powell says. “One was when they started to go to the single currency. She believed that was eroding national sovereignty to a point which was just unacceptable.” A single currency, Thatcher believed, necessarily entailed something very like a single economic policy: Britain would no longer be able to set its own interest rates or make adjustments to its exchange rates. In other words, it would no longer have access to the key economic instruments normally available to sovereign governments. Instead, these decisions would be made centrally, in the context of a huge federal European budget. To Thatcher, this idea was for obvious reasons anathema.

  The second provocation came in the form o
f Jacques Delors, the socialist president of the EEC Commission. Delors was, in Thatcher’s words, on “the federalist express.” By 1988, she writes, “he had slipped his leash as a fonctionnaire.” Delors in that year announced to the European Parliament that in the coming five years, the European Community would become responsible for 80 percent of all legislation: An “embryo” European government, he said, might emerge.

  To Europeans who had “no real confidence in the political system or political leaders of their own country,” Thatcher later wrote, it might be tolerable to have “foreigners” like Delors “telling you how to run your affairs.” But not to a proud Briton. “To put it more bluntly,” she sniffs, “if I were an Italian I might prefer rule from Brussels too.”250

  As if this wasn’t enough, Delors then pitched up in Britain to address the Trades Union Conference. “He used words to the effect that in a couple years’ time all important decisions about Britain will be taken in Brussels, not here,” Powell recalls. “And that just infuriated her, politically, I mean, made her just angry. She just thought, Well, now, they’ve really come clean on what the elite in Europe are really after. They’re after the extinction of national sovereignty.”

  Delors won the trade unions over. Originally wary, their members became persuaded that the European unification project might well be a way to roll back Thatcherite reforms, particularly since the ballot box certainly wasn’t doing the trick. Ron Todd, the head of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, heard Delors’s speech and emerged, inspired, declaring, “We have not a cat in hell’s chance of achieving [our goals] in Westminster, but we may have it in Brussels.”251 The Labour Party agreed.

  Thatcher remained committed to the overarching principle that anything the Labour Party wanted must be bad for Britain: If they were now for Europe, she was against it. “From then on,” recalls Powell, “she was determined to start a fight back.”

  This is where the story gets ugly. Her clashes with Jacques Chirac in the European Council were, as Powell chastely puts it, “memorable.” In one of them, “He used a word about her so vulgar that all the interpreters screeched to a halt—she was totally unaware of it, not speaking any French at all. She didn’t—”

  “And the word was?”

  Powell blushes. “I wouldn’t dream of repeating it with your recorder on.”

  “I’ll switch it off.”

  “I wouldn’t say it even then. Um, but um—”

  “Is there some way I can find out? Was it reported anywhere else?”

  “I don’t think anyone’s put it in any book, no, but it’s famous for being a vulgarism which would not normally be used in any sort of society, let alone what was supposed to be a polite—I mean, this is because he got very angry with her, this was about agriculture, his desire to protect the French farmers and so on—”

  “And really, truly, the interpreters all screeched to a halt?”

  “Yes, you could hear the brakes going on!”

  “And how was the word translated in the end?”

  “It wasn’t. There was just sort of, you know, this embarrassed pause.”

  I couldn’t find anyone who would tell me what Chirac said, and I still do not know, but judging from Powell’s uncomfortable squirming—he was clearly mortified just thinking of it—it must have been quite something.

  Chirac: Frappe mon cul poilu, sacrifice de putain, tu me casses les couilles! Retournez à la pute qui t’a accouchée!

  Translator 1: [Whispers] Oh-là-là! . . .

  Meanwhile, the obsessively regulatory character of the European project was becoming increasingly apparent. At one stage, directives on transport safety threatened to consign London’s famous double-decker buses to oblivion. The commission objected to calling Cadbury bars “chocolate” because they didn’t contain the regulation measure of cocoa solids. Thatcher, said Powell, “was pretty rapidly reaching the view that actually Britain should withdraw from the European Union. Now, she never said that publicly in a speech, but she came close to it.”

  On September 20, 1988, Thatcher made her infamous speech to the College of Europe at Bruges. She began with a few pleasantries, then briskly offended everyone present by reminding them of the debt they owed to Britain:Over the centuries, we have fought to prevent Europe from falling under the dominance of a single power. We have fought and we have died for her freedom. Only miles from here in Belgium lie the bodies of 120,000 British soldiers who died in the First World War. Had it not been for that willingness to fight and to die, Europe would have been united long before now—but not in liberty, not in justice . . .

  It was British support to resistance movements throughout the last War that helped to keep alive the flame of liberty in so many countries until the day of liberation . . .

  It was from our island fortress that the liberation of Europe itself was mounted.

  She professed her commitment to European cooperation. “I want to see us work more closely on the things we can do better together than alone.” She then defined this as a distinctly more narrow category than envisioned by Delors:. . . working more closely together does not require power to be centralized in Brussels or decisions to be taken by an appointed bureaucracy.

  Indeed, it is ironic that just when those countries such as the Soviet Union, which have tried to run everything from the center, are learning that success depends on dispersing power and decisions away from the center, there are some in the Community who seem to want to move in the opposite direction.

  We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.

  She concluded by warning against Utopian goals: “Utopia never comes,” she said. “We should not like it if it did.”252 Subtext: You lot have certainly got yourself in trouble every time you’ve tried to create Utopia, haven’t you?

  The Bruges speech seems eminently reasonable now, in the fullness of hindsight. It hardly appears to be an expression of fulminating xenophobia—or, for that matter, incipient madness and overweening pride. In 2000, Tony Blair returned to Belgium and allowed that many of Thatcher’s concerns had been justified. But at the time her words had the effect of a thunderclap.

  “The Bruges speech was really like Martin Luther nailing his theses to the church door,” says Powell. “For the first time someone set out the limits of Europe and where it should go. It accepted most of what Europe had done up to that point, but it said: ‘Thus far and no further.’” Indeed, the profoundly offended audience responded with about as much enthusiasm as the Catholic church responded to Martin Luther. “Frankly, I am shocked,” said one European commissioner. “Maybe all her speech at Bruges was intended to keep her nationalist-minded right-wingers happy while the serious business in Europe is done more discreetly,” sniffed another.253

  To those who subscribed to the view—not long ago Thatcher’s own—that in a unified Europe lay the solution to the long tradition of European carnage, Thatcher might as well have delivered this speech in a gas mask while calling for the immediate renewal of hostilities on the Western Front. The Belgian prime minister indignantly replied that European unification “is not based on a utopian concept but rather on some very practical considerations: the preservation of peace and prosperity on a continent torn by fratricidal strife.”254

  This view was emphatically shared by Thatcher’s foreign secretary. In his memoirs, Geoffrey Howe describes Thatcher’s description of a Europe ruled by an appointed bureaucracy and through endless regulation as “sheer fantasy.” Listening to the Bruges speech was, he wrote, “a little like being married to a clergyman who had suddenly proclaimed his disbelief in God.”255

  To those who saw European unification as inevitable, Thatcher’s intransigence seemed strategically witless: By alienating her European counterparts, they believed, she would ensure nothing but a diminished role for Britain. Neil Kinnock swiftly seized upon this poin
t:If we are to get a square deal or even a fair change in the Single Market we need a Government in Britain . . . that will participate in the development of Europe, that will play a direct influential role in fashioning the institutions and relationships of the Market within which our economy must work in order to prosper. Mrs. Thatcher’s failure to accept co-operation and to exert Britain’s sovereignty in a positive way is creating the threat of a two-tier Europe, with Britain firmly stuck in the second rank—passed by Italy in the 1980s, likely to be passed by Spain in the 1990s. We cannot afford that. We mustn’t afford it.256

  For a change, Kinnock found a great deal of sympathy for this view—if not for him—in the Conservative Party.

  “Do you think her sentiments about Europe were at the heart of her downfall?” I ask Powell.

  “No. They were part of it, but they weren’t at the heart of it. They were the tactical excuse for it, unleashing Geoffrey Howe to start a process which led to a fear among many conservative MPs that the poll tax was going to prevent their re-election. And her increasingly high-handed treatment of her closest political colleagues probably cost her more votes, or combined to a much greater vote.”

  “When you say ‘her increasingly high-handed treatment’—”

  “Well, she used to berate Geoffrey Howe in cabinet—”

  “When you say ‘berate’—”

  “Well, just sort of slap him down or overrule him. She got very dismissive, in the end. Impatient. You know, after ten, eleven years in government, head of government when the military went to victories—she had the answers and wasn’t really interested in listening to reservations.”