Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (115 page)

After lunch it was suggested that I might like to look around the nearby church of St Brygida. To my delighted astonishment, when Mr Walesa and I entered I found the whole church packed with Polish families who rose and sang the Solidarity anthem ‘God give us back our free Poland’: I could not keep the tears from my eyes. I seemed to have shaken hundreds of hands as I walked around the church. I gave a short emotional speech and Lech Walesa spoke too. As I left, there were people in the streets crying with emotion and shouting ‘Thank you, thank you’ over and over again. I returned to Warsaw with greater determination than ever to do battle with the communist authorities.

In my final meeting with General Jaruzelski I kept my word to Solidarity. I told him that I was grateful that he had put no obstacle in the way of my visit to Gdansk – though it has to be said that the authorities had put on a total news blackout about it both before and afterwards. I said how
impressed I had been by Solidarity’s moderation. If they were good enough to attend round-table discussions, they were also good enough to be legalized. General Jaruzelski gave no impression of being prepared to budge.

A fortnight later I was back in Washington as President Reagan’s last official guest. This gave me the chance of discussions with President-elect Bush.

I later learned that President Bush was sometimes exasperated by my habit of talking nonstop about issues which fascinated me and felt that he ought to have been leading the discussion. More important than all of this, perhaps, was the fact that, as President, George Bush felt the need to distance himself from his predecessor: turning his back fairly publicly on the special position I had enjoyed in the Reagan Administration’s counsels and confidence was a way of doing that. This was understandable; and by the time of my last year in office we had established a better relationship. By then I had learned that I had to defer to him in conversation and not to stint the praise. If that was what was necessary to secure Britain’s interests and influence, I had no hesitation in eating a little humble pie.

Unfortunately, even then the US State Department continued to put out briefings against me and my policies – particularly on Europe – until the onset of the Gulf crisis made them hastily change their stance. To some extent the relative tilt of American foreign policy against Britain in this period may have been the result of the influence of Secretary of State James Baker. Although he was always very courteous to me, we were not close. Yet that was not crucial. Rather, it was the fact that Jim Baker’s many abilities lay in the area of ‘fixing’. He had had a mixed record of this, having as US Treasury Secretary been responsible for the ill-judged Plaza and Louvre Accords which brought ‘exchange rate stability’ back to the centre of the West’s economic policies with highly deleterious effects. Now at the State Department Jim Baker and his team brought a similar, allegedly ‘pragmatic’ problem-solving approach to bear on US foreign policy.

The main results of this approach as far as I was concerned were to put the relationship with Germany – rather than the ‘special relationship’ with Britain – at the centre.

At the end of 1988 I could foresee neither the way in which Anglo-American relations would develop nor the scale of the difficulties with the Germans over SNF. My basic position on short-range nuclear weapons was that they were essential to NATO’s strategy of flexible response. Any potential aggressor must know that if he were to cross the NATO line he might be met with a nuclear response. If that fear was removed he might calculate that he could mount a conventional attack that would reach the Atlantic seaboard within a few days. And this, of course, was the existing position. But once land-based intermediate-range nuclear weapons were removed, as the INF Treaty signed in Washington in December 1987 took effect, the land-based short-range missiles became all the more vital. So, of course, did the sea-based intermediate missiles.

At the Rhodes European Council in early December 1988 I discussed arms control with Chancellor Kohl. He was keen for an early NATO summit which would help him push through agreement within his Government on the ‘comprehensive concept’ for arms control. I agreed that the sooner the better. We must take decisions on the modernization of NATO’s nuclear weapons by the middle of the year, in particular on the replacement of LANCE. Chancellor Kohl said that he wanted both of these questions out of the way before the June 1989 European elections.

By the time of the next Anglo-German summit in Frankfurt the political pressure on the German Chancellor had increased further and he had begun to argue that a decision on SNF was not really necessary until 1991–92.

Certainly, the Soviets were in no doubt about the strategic importance of the decisions which would have to be made about SNF. Mr and Mrs Gorbachev arrived at 11 o’clock at night on Wednesday 5 April in London for the visit which had had to be postponed the previous December as a result of an earthquake in Armenia. I met them at the airport and returned to the Soviet Embassy where the number of toasts drunk suggested that the Soviet leader’s early crackdown on vodka was not universally applicable. In my talks with Mr Gorbachev I found him frustrated by – and surprisingly suspicious of – the Bush Administration. I defended the new President’s performance and stressed the continuity with the Reagan Administration. But the real substance of our discussions related to arms control. I raised directly with Mr Gorbachev the evidence which we had that the Soviets had not been telling us the truth about the quantity and types of chemical weapons which they held. He stoutly maintained that they had. He then brought up the issue of SNF
modernization. I said that obsolete weapons did not deter and that NATO’s SNF would certainly have to be modernized. The forthcoming NATO summit would confirm this intention. Mr Gorbachev returned to the subject in his speech at Guildhall which contained a somewhat menacing section about the effect on East-West relations and arms control talks more generally if NATO went ahead with SNF modernization.

All this pressure was by now having an effect. In particular, Chancellor Kohl was retreating. In April a new German position on SNF modernization and negotiation was extensively leaked before any of the allies – other than the Americans – were informed. The German position paper did not rule out a ‘third zero’, did not call on the Soviet Union unilaterally to reduce its SNF levels to those of NATO, and cast doubt on SNF modernization.

I had acrimonious discussions with Chancellor Kohl behind the stage-managed friendliness of our meeting at Deidesheim at the end of April. Chancellor Kohl said that it was simply not sustainable politically in Germany to argue that those nuclear weapons which most directly affected Germany should be the only category not subject to negotiation. I repeated that Britain and the United States were absolutely opposed to negotiations on SNF and would remain so. Even if a decision to deploy the Follow-On to LANCE were postponed, there must be clear evidence at the forthcoming summit of NATO support for the US development programme. In fact, the German Government’s actions had put NATO under severe strain. Chancellor Kohl said he did not need any lectures about NATO, that he believed in flexible response and repeated his opposition to a ‘third zero’.

In the run-up to the NATO summit the newspapers continued to focus on splits in the alliance. This was particularly galling because we should have been celebrating NATO’s fortieth anniversary and highlighting the success of our strategy of securing peace through strength. Apart from the Americans only the French fully agreed with my line on SNF and in any case, not being part of the NATO integrated command structure, they would not be of great importance in the final decision. I minuted on Tuesday 16 May: ‘If we get a “no negotiations” SNF section this will be reasonable, combined with a supportive piece on SNF research.’ I was still quite optimistic.

Then on Friday 19 May I suddenly learned that the American line had shifted. They were now prepared to concede the principle of negotiations
on SNF. Jim Baker claimed in public that we had been consulted about this US change of tack, but in fact we had not. Without in any way endorsing the American text, which I considered wrong-headed, I sent two main comments to the Americans. It should be amended to make the opening of SNF negotiations dependent upon a decision to deploy a successor to LANCE. It should include a requirement of substantial reductions in Soviet SNF towards NATO levels. Jim Baker replied that he doubted whether the Germans would accept this. The attitude of Brent Scowcroft – the President’s National Security Adviser – was sounder. But I could not tell what the President’s own view would be. In any case, I now found myself going to Brussels as the odd man out.

In fact, at the last minute the Americans brought forward proposals calling for conventional forces reductions and for not just further deep cuts but accelerated progress in the CFE talks in Vienna, so that those reductions could be accomplished by 1992 or 1993. This sleight of hand permitted a compromise on SNF by enabling the Germans to argue that the prospect of ‘early’ SNF negotiations was preserved. However, I emphasized in my subsequent statement to the House of Commons the fact that only after agreement had been reached on conventional force reductions, and implementation of that agreement was under way, would the United States be authorized to enter into negotiations to achieve partial reductions in short-range missiles. No reductions would be made in NATO’s SNF until after the agreement on conventional force reductions had been fully implemented.

I felt that I had done as much as was humanly possible to stop our sliding into another ‘zero’. I could live with the text which resulted from the tough negotiations which took place in Brussels. But I had seen for myself that the new American approach was to subordinate clear statements of intention about the alliance’s defence to the political sensibilities of the Germans. I did not think that this boded well.

In the late summer of 1989 the first signs appeared of the imminent collapse of communism in eastern Europe. Solidarity won the elections in early June in Poland and General Jaruzelski accepted the result. Liberalization proceeded in Hungary, which opened its borders to Austria in September across which flooded East German refugees. The haemorrhage of population from East Germany and demonstrations at the beginning of October in Leipzig led to the fall of Erich Honecker. The demolition of the Berlin Wall began on 10 November. The following
month it was the turn of Czechoslovakia. By the end of the year Václav Havel, the dissident playwright who had been jailed in February, had been elected President of Czechoslovakia and the evil Ceausescus had been overthrown in Romania.

These events marked the most welcome political change of my lifetime. But I was not going to allow euphoria to extinguish either reason or prudence. I did not believe that it would be easy or painless to entrench democracy and free enterprise. It was too soon to be sure precisely what sort of regimes would emerge. Moreover, central and eastern Europe – still more the Soviet Union – was a complicated patchwork of nations. Political freedom would also bring ethnic disputes and challenges to frontiers, which might have moved several times in living memory. War could not be ruled out.

The welcome changes had come about because the West had remained strong and resolute – but also because Mr Gorbachev and the Soviet Union had renounced the Brezhnev doctrine. On the continued survival of a moderate, reforming government in the USSR would depend the future of the new democracies. It was too early to assume that the captive nations were permanently free from captivity: their Soviet captors could still turn ugly. It was therefore essential to go carefully and avoid actions which would be deemed provocative by either the Soviet political leadership or the military.

And nothing was more likely to stir up old fears in the Soviet Union – fears which the hardliners would be anxious to exploit – than the prospect of a reunited, powerful Germany.

There was – and still is – a tendency to regard the ‘German problem’ as something too delicate for well-brought-up politicians to discuss. This always seemed to me a mistake. The problem had several elements which could only be addressed if non-Germans considered them openly and constructively. I do not believe in collective guilt: it is individuals who are morally accountable for their actions. But I do believe in national character, which is moulded by a range of complex factors: the fact that national caricatures are often absurd and inaccurate does not detract from that. Since the unification of Germany under Bismarck Germany has veered unpredictably between aggression and self-doubt. Germany’s immediate neighbours, such as the French and the Poles, are more deeply aware of this than the British, let alone the Americans; though the same concern often leads Germany’s immediate neighbours to refrain from comments which might appear insensitive. The Russians are acutely conscious of all
this too, though in their case the need for German credit and investment has so far had a quiescent effect. But perhaps the first people to recognize the ‘German problem’ are the modern Germans, the vast majority of whom are determined that Germany should not be a great power able to exert itself at others’ expense. The true origin of German
angst
is the agony of self-knowledge.