As soon as the Wall came down in November 1989 she knew that Kohl would lose no time in pressing for reunification of the two Germanies; but she believed that the four wartime allies, if they were resolute, could still prevent it, or at least delay it for ten or fifteen years. Unification was not a matter for the Germans alone, she insisted, but affected NATO, the EC, the Russians and the whole balance of power in Europe. She even tried to argue that the Helsinki Agreement precluded any alteration of borders. In Paris she hoped to form an Anglo-French axis to contain Germany, but found Mitterrand unhelpful. A week later she flew to Camp David to share her fears with the President directly. ‘She particularly worried that talk of reunification or changing borders would only frighten the Soviets,’ Bush recorded:
‘The overriding objective is to get democracy throughout Eastern Europe,’ she told me. ‘We have won the battle of ideas after tough times as we kept NATO strong’… She added that such change could take place only in an environment of stability.16
‘The atmosphere,’ Mrs Thatcher acknowledged, ‘did not improve as a result of our discussions.’17 In fact, Brent Scowcroft felt ‘some lingering sympathy for Thatcher’s position’, believing that she ‘had her eyes on some very important priorities’.18 But from the moment Kohl had telephoned him to describe the ‘festival atmosphere [like] an enormous fair’ as the Wall came down, the President was firmly on Kohl’s side.19 ‘We don’t fear the ghosts of the past,’ he assured the Chancellor. ‘Margaret does.’20 For his part Kohl was exasperated by Mrs Thatcher’s obstruction. ‘I think it is a great mistake on Maggie’s part to think this is a time for caution,’ he complained.21 Her ideas were ‘simply pre-Churchill. She thinks the post-war era has not come to an end. She thinks history is not just. Germany is so rich and Great Britain is struggling. They won a war but lost an empire, and their economy. She does the wrong thing. She should try to bind the Germans into the EC.’
Kohl still professed to see reunification as a long process over several years, with West Germany meanwhile remaining in NATO and the GDR in the Warsaw Pact – as Mrs Thatcher wanted.22 Bush suspected that Kohl really hoped for unification much sooner than this, but did not want to prejudice it by seeming to press too fast. Nevertheless he was happy to give Kohl ‘a green light. I don’t think I ever cautioned him about going too fast.’ In his relaxed view ‘self-determination was the key, and no one could object to it’.23
Brent Scowcroft still shared Mrs Thatcher’s worry about Gorbachev’s response. ‘It was still possible that the Soviets would conclude that a united Germany was intolerable and oppose it, by force if necessary. Or they would successfully impose conditions on it taking place which would render it unacceptable to us.’24 The difference was that while the Americans, determined that the new Germany should be a member of NATO, were working to overcome Soviet opposition, Mrs Thatcher was trying to deploy Gorbachev’s objections as a brake. From their private conversations she believed that Mitterrand also shared her alarm and hoped that he would join with her to slow the process down; but whatever he may have said in private, Mitterrand was realistic. He had no intention of opposing the cherished project of his friend Helmut Kohl, but still put the preservation of the Franco- German axis before her idea of a Franco-British one. ‘He made the wrong decision for France,’ she asserted in her memoirs.25
The diplomatic method eventually agreed was the ‘Two-plus-Four’ process, whereby the two Germanies negotiated the domestic details of unification in an international context approved by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France. This met Mrs Thatcher’s wish to involve the Russians, despite American fear that it would give them a chance to be obstructive. But Bush gambled that Gorbachev could be won over, and he was right.
Mrs Thatcher’s other concern was that premature euphoria about the end of the Cold War would lead to reductions in defence spending. When she met Bush at Camp David – just before he was due to meet Gorbachev in Malta for the latest round of arms-limitation talks – she was adamant that he should give nothing away. ‘We had a good visit,’ Bush wrote, ‘but she did not want to see any defense cuts at all of any kind.’ Once again, however, she recognised the limits of her influence. ‘In the end… Margaret sent me a nice telegram pledging her full support in very comforting words.’26
At the NATO summit in Brussels in December she was very unhappy about American proposals for cutting conventional forces in Europe, fearing that the Russians would simply pull their forces back beyond the Urals, from where they could easily sweep west again at a moment’s notice. Despite Kohl’s repeated assurances that neutralisation was out of the question, he was under strong domestic pressure to reduce the number of allied troops and NATO missiles on German soil; she was afraid that Gorbachev might exploit this weakness to make neutralisation his condition for accepting unification. In the end, however, Scowcroft noted, ‘it became apparent that, while not happy, she would acquiesce in what we wished to do’.27
By February 1990 she accepted that she was losing the battle, but was still anxious to save Gorbachev’s face. ‘I fear that Gorbachev will feel isolated if all the reunification process goes the West’s way,’ she told Bush by telephone. ‘He’s lost the Warsaw Pact to democratic governments.’ Then Bush’s account went on:
Margaret’s fears of a united Germany, however, came ringing through. She darkly perceived that Germany would be ‘the Japan of Europe, but worse than Japan. Japan is an offshore power with enormous trade surpluses. Germany is in the heart of a continent of countries most of which she has attacked and occupied. Germany has colossal wealth and trade surpluses. So we must include a bigger country, the Soviet Union [or] you, in the political area.’
‘It was not enough to anchor Germany in the EC,’ she believed. ‘That might become Germany’s new empire: the future empires will be economic empires.’28 On this occasion Scowcroft found her arguments becoming more sophisticated and her tone ‘much improved’, but still found her fears ‘worrying’.29 He was ‘dismayed’ that her anxiety not to upset Gorbachev led her to back a ‘demilitarised East Germany’, outside NATO, instead of a united Germany in NATO as the Americans wanted. Meeting Bush in Bermuda in April, she still argued that ‘we should allow Soviet troops to remain for a transitional period – it would help Gorbachev with his military’. ‘I don’t agree,’ Bush replied, ‘I want the Soviets to go home.’30
In fact she had already accepted the inevitable at the end of March when Kohl came to Britain. Heaping insincere encomiums on the Chancellor, Mrs Thatcher formally gave her blessing to the new Germany, so long as it was in NATO and retained ‘sizeable’ British, French and American forces, including short-range nuclear weapons, on its soil.
Her acceptance was made easier by the results of the first free elections held in the old GDR. One of her arguments for delay had been that the East had lived under authoritarian rule for so long – first under the Nazis, then under Communism – that it could not be expected to adapt quickly to democracy. In fact the voters confounded her by voting heavily for Kohl’s CDU, giving a clear endorsement both to his policy of rapid unification and to broadly free-market economic policies (the former Communists won only 16 per cent) and allaying her fears of neutralism. Visiting Moscow in June, Mrs Thatcher played her part in helping to secure Gorbachev’s acquiescence that the reunited Germany could join NATO – in return for badly needed Western credits to shore up the Soviet economy. In July Gorbachev survived a last-ditch challenge from his own hardliners; and Kohl flew to Moscow to receive the Soviet blessing in person. The new Germany came into being on 3 October 1990, less than eleven months after the opening of the Wall.
Even with Germany locked into NATO she still worried that facile talk of a ‘peace dividend’ from the ending of the Cold War would lead to a short-sighted lowering of the West’s nuclear guard. Washington was pressing for an early NATO summit, eventually held in London in July, to bring forward cuts in both nuclear and conventional forces in Europe. To her dismay Mrs Thatcher found herself once again ‘at odds with the Americans’. As Bush relates, she still objected to weakening nuclear deterrence by diluting the doctrine of flexible response:
She argued that we were abandoning the fundamentals of solid military strategy for the sake of ‘eye- catching propositions’… She saw the move to declare nuclear weapons ‘weapons of last resort’ as undermining our short-range forces and as slipping us to a position of ‘no first use of nuclear weapons’, leaving our conventional forces vulnerable… She demanded an entirely new draft.31
