Elizabeth Kirkwood
Perfect ten: Bo Derek in Ten
I’m glad the “noughties” are over. It was a terrible name for a decade – far too redolent of a post-ironic Cool Britannia hangover. But as every newspaper and magazine in town is brimming with “best of” lists, all attempting to sum up the zeitgeist of the last ten years, our infatuation with thinking in decades seems to have reached an all-time high. Why?
In part, this is surely due to our increasing need for “historical housekeeping.” Measuring our lives and experience of history in tens injects a reassuring element of control and order over an otherwise inchoate experience. It feels historically comforting to say that something is quintessentially “1930s” (though try to unpick what that means and you’re soon in choppy water). Modern life may be an atomised experience, but at least we can still cling to the bold and unyielding decade to measure out our fractured existence.
Without wanting to sound too Sesame Street-ish about it, there is an appealing unity and perfection to the number ten. We describe flawlessness as a “perfect ten.” But breaking up time into such proscriptive chunks may be both politically and culturally hazardous.
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Frederic Bozo
The recent celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall have generated much historical interest—but not always historical accurateness. The release of documents on British policy towards German unification in 1989-90, in particular, has triggered a considerable flurry of “spin” aimed, it seems, at rewriting history itself. From over 500 pages, journalists have zoomed in on one apparent gem: that President Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher, in early 1990, viewed the impending German unification with a shared angst—panic, even.
To the delight of commentators, a memo written by Charles Powell, Thatcher’s then private secretary, quoted Mitterrand using the H-word in a conversation with Thatcher on 20th January 1990. In their quick march to unification, Mitterrand said, the Germans were once more behaving as “bad” Germans. If nothing was done, he continued, they would swallow up a bigger chunk of Europe than their infamous predecessor. Mitterrand, it seems, was tormented by the resurgence of France’s Teutonic neighbour, and determined to prevent German unification from happening.
But was this really so? A closer look at the document shows that quotes from Powell’s memo have been taken out of context. Clearly, this historical parallel was less something Mitterrand adhered too than an argument (a ‘very blunt’, one, he recognized) that he was using with the Germans themselves in order to make them understand the need at this crucial juncture for a cautious approach of unification, both more controlled and less unilateral.
Likening his friend Helmut Kohl to Hitler was hardly Mitterrand’s style; what he was instead concerned about was a return to old style European alliances of “reinsurance” against Germany—similar, in other words, to the situation “back in 1913.” Even more critically, commentators have ignored the most important message that Mitterrand delivered to Thatcher that day: that Germans “had the right to self determination,” that “we had to accept that there was a logic to reunification,” and that “it would be stupid to say no.”
His message was in sharp contrast to Thatcher’s. She had come to the Elysée palace to ask Mitterrand to pursue a joint policy of postponing unification. Though she “accepted that in the end reunification would come about,” she thought they “must find a way to slow it down.” She “did not necessarily agree that there was nothing to be done.” But to no avail. The only concession Thatcher obtained from Mitterrand was that their respective foreign ministers, Douglas Hurd and Roland Dumas, would soon meet to review the options.
Nothing further came out of the foreign ministers’ meeting several days later. Evidently, Mitterrand and Thatcher had fundamentally different positions on unification and its consequences, and the meeting on 20th January 1990 exposed this. Thatcher rejected German unity as such, whilst Mitterrand’s uneasiness had to do with modalities. “Everything depends on the how and when,” he told Thatcher, emphasising the “reactions of the Soviet Union,” which he feared could be brutal. In other words, he wanted to control German unification, not to oppose it. For him, as also made clear by French documents recently released, the only sensible course of action was to make sure that a unified Germany be kept in a strong international— and especially European—framework.
In the end, the only thing that the conversation on 20th January confirmed was the illusory character of the Franco-British entente. Thatcher left the Elysée disappointed, certain that Mitterrand shared her own prejudices and only lacked the daring to express them. She had hoped, as she later wrote in her memoirs, to get him to overcome “his tendency to schizophrenia” and to cooperate in making use of “all the means available to slow down reunification.” But she recognised that “little or nothing in practical terms” came from the meeting. Persisting in her conviction that Mitterrand was not able to “match private words with public deeds,” she later conceded that he was nevertheless right, that “there was nothing we could do to halt German reunification.”
Mitterrand, it is said, was to some extent under the charm of Thatcher. Perhaps this led her to entertain illusions of a new entente cordiale against a resurgent Germany? As Helmut Kohl remarked in his memoirs, Thatcher “seemed always to hear what she wanted to hear.” But it was Hurd who got it most right: as he wrote years later, Mitterrand’s apparent concurrence with her was “just intellectual play.” His actual aim, the foreign minister understood, was by no means to block German unification, but instead to strengthen Franco-German cooperation and, even more vitally, to re-launch European integration. This, of course, was a cause to which the French president did not even dream of converting the Iron Lady. Within two months of German unification, she was out of Downing Street and spared the agony of signing the Maastricht Treaty, which Kohl and Mitterrand had jointly promoted as a response to it.
Frédéric Bozo is the author of “Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War and German Unification” published by Berghahn Books
Hans Kundnani
Thatcher's foot stamping irritated Kohl
The German word “angst” entered regular English usage only after the second world war. But it’s now a feeling all too familiar to foreign office mandarins fretting about the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall this November. Two decades ago, fearing European domination, Margaret Thatcher tried unsuccessfully to derail German reunification. Chancellor Kohl wrote in his memoirs of his annoyance at Thatcher’s foot stamping in meetings, and even overheard her say: “we beat them twice, and here they are again!”
Behind the scenes, FCO top brass weren’t as sceptical as the iron lady, seeing a unified Germany as all but inevitable. And today—in a desperate attempt to show off their spadework and put to rest lingering German annoyance—David Miliband’s finest have decided to rush out a series of internal archives a full decade before they are due under the 30-year rule. The documents, which will be released in October, include minutes of meetings, as well as of negotiations between Bush Snr, Gorbachev, Mitterrand and Kohl. They graphically illustrate Thatcher’s attitude—including some pointed annotations in the margins of briefings—as well as, by contrast, the more the more benign, pro-unification tactics of the FCO. Clearly, our government believes in freedom of information—so long as it’s all good news.
This article appears in the July edition of Prospect, now on sale
Leo Hornak
Natural Blond
Phillip Blond’s provocative demand for a ‘red tory moment’ in the latest edition of Prospect has continued to make waves over the last week.
At the Observer’s Food Monthly blog, Alex Renton applies Blond’s critique of corporate monopolies to the farming sector, and asks “Is Britain running out of food?”
Beliefnet’s ‘Crunchy Conservative’ Rod Dreher also quotes us at length, and recommends that “[i]f you read nothing else today, make it Blond’s essay”.
Over at the Spectator, Alex Massie is more sceptical of Blond’s anti-Thatcherite credentials: “Self-improvement? Check. Small businesses? The grocer’s daughter was all in favour of them”.
The Royal Society’s Matthew Taylor takes a positively anthropological approach, explaining the piece as a product of a “social dialectic…partly rooted in the collective expression of our cognitive predisposition to a limited array of comparative responses to the social world”. Gramsci would be proud. Read more »
Mary Fitzgerald
A Fourth Way for Britain?
David Cameron should break up supermarket giant Tesco and turn the Post Office into a nationalised parallel banking system, argues influential Conservative party advisor Phillip Blond in this month’s cover story, which unveils a new “progressive” agenda for the British right. Blond, the director of Demos’s new Progressive Conservatism project, argues for a break with free-market Thatcherism, to be replaced by a bold new “Red Toryism” that is socially conservative, sceptical of neo-liberal economics and radically localist; the most challenging new political thesis of the post-credit crunch era.
Has he lost the plot, or is this the way forward for the Tories? The whole article is now free to read online here, so wade in with your views.
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