Thatcher saw Soviets as allies against Germany

National Archives 1989-1990: Premier feared reunified Germany could dominate Europe

Margaret Thatcher’s relationship with German chancellor Helmut Kohl was so bad that the US feared she was preparing an entente cordiale with the Soviet Union to contain Germany, declassified files show.

The revelations underline how the then prime minister struggled to come to terms with European politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall and how, in her last months in office, she suspected a unified Germany could dominate the continent.

US diplomats were particularly alarmed by a phone call between Thatcher and President George H W Bush in February 1990, when she reportedly said the USSR was “an essential balance to German power”.

Mr Bush “could not conceive how you could think of the Russians as possible allies against Germany”, Thatcher was told in an ensuing briefing paper. At the time Washington viewed Moscow as a “deeply hostile” power.

Although British diplomats sought to play down Thatcher’s comments, the prime minister appears to have been unrepentant — writing “1941-45” in the margins of the briefing paper, a reference to the period when the USSR and Britain were allies during the second world war.

National Archives 1989-1990

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Cabinet Office papers reveal other occasions where she expressed scepticism about German intentions. At a private meeting at Chequers in March 1990, Thatcher and eminent historians discussed how Germans were characterised by “angst [underlined], aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex, sentimentality”.

The prime minister, who had become more Eurosceptic in the late 1980s, clashed with Douglas Hurd, her foreign secretary, who warned that Britain could not be “a brake on everything” in European integration. In response she proposed “a wider European association” that would rival or replace the European Community, and which the Soviet Union could join in the long term.

The exchanges illuminate how Thatcher sought to steer British foreign policy after her central role in supporting Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms. In contrast to her warm relationship with Mr Gorbachev, she was frequently wary of Mr Kohl.

She tried to obstruct German reunification, the chancellor’s grand project, fearing it would undermine Nato. In her memoirs, Thatcher said that was the “one instance in which a foreign policy I pursued met with unambiguous failure”. In his memoirs, Mr Kohl accused her of being “ice-cold” and “dangerous”.

The files show relations became so bad that Mr Kohl suggested he might use Mr Hurd as “a political point of contact”, instead of Thatcher. That was flatly rejected by the prime minister, who wrote “NO” in the margin of one document.

Although Germany and Britain were working together to complete the single market, Thatcher’s advisers opined that Britain “might one day need a closer relationship with the Soviet Union to balance an over-mighty Germany”.

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Her Chequers seminar on Germany included historians Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) and Timothy Garton-Ash. A minute taken by her private secretary Charles Powell concluded that the Germans were using “their elbows . . . in the European Community”, and that Britain should “be nice” while remaining wary. The “real credit” for German reunification “should go to the people of eastern Europe and to Mr Gorbachev” — not to the Germans themselves.

Norman Stone, a historian who was among the attendees, told the Financial Times that Thatcher’s thinking was influenced by her 1930s childhood, including her friendship with a Jewish girl in Vienna persecuted by the Nazis. He added that the prime minister’s opposition to European monetary union had proved “dead right”.

Thatcher and Mr Kohl were at the time seeking to dampen press rumours of difficulties in their relationship. Among their disagreements, the prime minister wanted less strict sanctions on South Africa, while the chancellor took offence to what he saw as rudeness. In February 1990, British diplomats reported that Mr Kohl “was not happy at the state of our official relations”, and was offended by Thatcher having accused him of nationalism.

Paddy Ashdown, the Liberal Democrat politician, said that “whenever Kohl used the word ‘Margaret’ he looked in the opposite direction and injected a certain steely tone into his voice”. However, relations between the two leaders did occasionally thaw — including a meeting in March 1990 when both leaders were “rather jovial”.

Documents: Powell’s note to Thatcher and the PM’s history seminar
Note to Margaret Thatcher, March 5 1990

SECRET AND PERSONAL

RELATIONS WITH PRESIDENT BUSH: GERMAN UNIFICATION

“We have had a slightly curious report from within the White House to the effect that President Bush is very worried about some of your views on German unification, and about the poor state of Anglo-German relations […]

The basic points are:

● That when you spoke to the president on the telephone before Kohl’s visit to Washington, you appeared to him to be proposing that the Soviet Union should be brought in to an entente cordiale as a counterbalance to a united Germany. The president is reported to have found this deeply worrying […] He could not conceive how you could think of the Russians as possible allies against Germany. My record shows that you were making two points: first, that it was important to develop the CSCE [Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe] framework so that the Russians did not feel isolated in discussions of the future of Europe: and second that, looking to the much longer term, the Soviet Union was the only country which would be of equivalent size to a united Germany in Europe, and therefore politically a balance to it. The president does not seem to have grasped the sophistication of the point […]

● That relations between Britain and Germany were unprecedentedly bad […] there is evidence that Kohl sees slights in almost everything we do at the moment.

● It is alarming that the White House should be so muddled. The problem is magnified by the absence of an effective American embassy here to explain and interpret our thinking. But it suggests a number of lessons:

● When you speak to the president on the telephone, you should explain your points in very simple language and repeat them […]  

● And it shows that we have a major problem in our relations with the Germans: it is caused much more by them than by us, but we need to be thinking how we can ease back into better relations with Kohl without surrendering any of the essential aspects of our policies.

CDP [Charles Powell]

Powell’s note on the Germany seminar with eminent historians, March 24 1990

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NOTE: SINCE THEN WE'VE HAD BREXIT.....

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On 16 July 2024, the German Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) banned the companies “Compact-Magazin GmbH” and “CONSPECT FILM GmbH”, with immediate effect. In consequence, all “products” of these two companies were also banned with immediate effect. The best known of these are the political magazine Compact (circulation around 40,000) and the political internet channel Compact-TV (around 345,000 subscribers).
  A press release issued by the ministry on the same day stated that the banned companies were “right-wing extremist” (a political fighting term, but not a term in the German constitution) and that the Compact magazine was a “central mouthpiece of the right-wing extremist scene”.
  Jürgen Elsässer, the editor-in-chief and publisher of Compact magazine, is also labelled a “right-wing extremist”. He says of himself that he used to be politically left-wing but was now a German patriot.
  Early in the morning, more than 300 police and intelligence officers searched the premises of the banned companies and private flats in Brandenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Hesse, confiscating various items.
  However, the ministry’s press release does not substantiate any of the politically highly charged but also colourful accusations. Instead, the ministry’s website points out that “Compact-Magazin GmbH” has been “in the focus of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution for a long time” and was “classified and observed as a verified right-wing extremist organisation in late 2021”. If you look at the Federal Office’s current report on the protection of the constitution for the year 20231, Compact magazine is mentioned several times, but here too you will find mostly the same claims and terms as in the Federal Ministry of the Interior’s press release. Here, too, there is largely no evidence – which is hardly surprising if you take a critical look at the mostly unobjective vocabulary.
  Of course, the ministry’s website emphasises: “Freedom of the press and freedom of opinion are fundamental prerequisites for a functioning democracy.” And then immediately adds: “Nevertheless, these freedoms also have limits.” In fact, Article 5 of the Basic Law formulates limits to freedom of expression and freedom of the press: the general laws, the protection of minors and the protection of personal honour. There is no mention of “imminent threats to the state, its existence and its constitutional order”, as the Federal Ministry of the Interior has accused the banned companies of doing. Why should there be? After all, how can the expression of opinions and freedom of the press pose such a threat?
  The German Federal Constitutional Court has rightly seen even the harshest, unobjective and polemical criticism of the prevailing political conditions as covered by the right to freedom of expression and freedom of the press. This interpretation of the mentioned freedoms was seen as constitutive of a free and democratic basic order. Fundamental rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of thought and religion, freedom of association and freedom of assembly have been very deliberately constituted as rights of protection and defence of the individual against the state, against the abuse and escalation of state power. The state does have a duty to protect against violent behaviour and incitements to violence – if they exist, i.e., if they are a concrete and proven violation of applicable law. State judgements and assumptions about other opinions and political demands, on the other hand, have no justification in a constitutional democracy. In a functioning democracy, the press in particular, often referred to as the fourth power, has the task of critically scrutinising government action and putting it up for discussion.
  I was also personally affected by the actions of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, having known Jürgen Elsässer for more than 20 years. I particularly appreciated and continue to appreciate his publications on the wars in former Yugoslavia. He has unflinchingly criticised Western policy towards Yugoslavia since the mid-1980s and has clearly named and characterised NATO’s crimes. For some time, he wrote a series of articles for Current Concerns. To this day, I remember his humanly touching title article about a 15-year-old girl, Sanja, who was murdered by NATO bombs in Varvarin, Serbia. We published the text in our special edition on the 10th anniversary of the NATO attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in spring 2009, which violated international law. Today I say: Jürgen Elsässer is still an important voice against war and war policy – even if I can very much understand the criticism of other content and the form of presentation in the Compact magazine. But a government agency like the Federal Ministry of the Interior must stay out of this intellectual debate within society!
  Above all, the actions of the Federal Ministry of the Interior do in no way serve to protect the free and democratic basic order. On the contrary, the ban on the two Compact companies is in line with the erosion of the free and democratic basic order, and particularly the rights under Article 5 of the Basic Law, which is being forced by the EU and pursued by German government policy. Karl Jaspersalready felt this in the 1960s, not least after the Spiegel affair, and therefore wrote his book “Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik?” [Where is the Federal Republic heading?].2 At that time, the disenfranchisement of citizens could still be averted halfway successfully. And today?
  At the end of 2023, a relative majority of respondents in a survey in Germany thought that it was dangerous to express one’s opinion freely and publicly. In consequence, people no longer do so.3 Such survey results should be taken very seriously. Germany is to become “ready for war”, its citizens’ desire for peace is to be weakened, the German economy is to be turned upside down – ideologically motivated – and the welfare state is to be undermined. And the Christian-humanist values of the Basic Law are to give way to dystopias such as those that the global public had to endure at the opening of the Olympic Games in Paris – free speech is no longer welcome there.

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