Thatcher’s vision of Europe still casts a shadow

Other European leaders have faded from view, yet Margaret Thatcher’s legacy still shapes the thinking of British and European politicians.

Little Englander who promoted a larger Europe

‘She believed in knocking down walls’

It is more than 22 years since Margaret Thatcher attended a meeting of the European Council. The names of other national leaders attending that Council meeting are redolent of a bygone era: François Mitterrand and Charles Haughey are dead. Helmut Kohl is still alive, though in very poor health. Giulio Andreotti faded from the scene, tainted by more than one trial over links with the Mafia. Felipe González, Ruud Lubbers, Jacques Santer and Wilfried Martens can no longer be counted active players on their domestic political scenes. The one exception is Aníbal Cavaco Silva, who was then Portugal’s prime minister and is now its president.

So for the European Union, the passing of Margaret Thatcher, whose death was announced on Monday (8 April), is in some ways irrelevant. She stopped being an actor in the EU’s proceedings at that Council in Rome, with what was a solo performance. The dry presidency conclusions bear silent witness to her isolation. The opening paragraphs on closer political union are littered with cross-references to a repeated footnote: “On these points the United Kingdom delegation prefers not to pre-empt the debate in the Intergovernmental Conference.” After three pages on “the final phase of economic and monetary union”, the conclusions record: “The United Kingdom is unable to accept the approach set out above.”

But what makes Thatcher unique among those attending the Council meeting – with the possible exception of Jacques Delors, who was president of the European Commission – is that people ascribe to her a vision of Europe that is still the subject of fierce political debate today. People still, in British politics, define themselves as Thatcherite and they include in that a view of the UK’s role in Europe. John Major, Thatcher’s successor as prime minister and as leader of the British Conservative Party, could not contain the tensions that broke out over ratification of the Maastricht treaty, which turned into a proxy battle over Thatcher’s political legacy.

The battle allowed the Labour Party to keep the Conservatives out of government from 1997 to 2010 (albeit while appropriating much of Thatcher’s free market thinking), but David Cameron, the current UK prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, is still struggling to resolve, or at least manage, those tensions within his own party.

That continues to have an impact on the EU. Cameron’s promise to end the affiliation of the Conservatives with the European People’s Party, his refusal to participate in the 2011 fiscal compact treaty, and his promise of a referendum on UK membership of the EU, can all be attributed to difficulties with Thatcher’s legacy.

A greater degree of historical perspective would complicate this simplistic take on Thatcher’s relations with the EU. It would, for a start, suggest that she was not even the most unreasonable and badly behaved member of a European Council – Charles de Gaulle must still be ahead. It would recall that in the earlier years of her premiership she supported a good deal of European economic integration. (The appointment of Arthur Cockfield as a European commissioner may have been her greatest contribution to the single market, but it was not the only one.) It would recognise that her vision – before the fall of the Berlin Wall – of a European future for countries under the grip of communism was prescient.

Yet those contributions are the ones that the European Union has already banked and assimilated. The contribution that is still very much alive is her bitter opposition in 1989-90 to greater political and economic union. She became prime minister six years after the UK had joined the Common Market and four years after a referendum had endorsed membership. When she left office, the UK had been part of the Common Market for almost 18 years. A further 22 years have elapsed since. Yet the issue of the UK’s membership of the EU is still in doubt. Her death this week does not change that.

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