Thatcher Did Not Want Germany Unified

This volume comprises a collection of diplomatic documents covering British reactions to, and policy towards, the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and the unification of Germany in 1989-90.

The peaceful unification of Germany in 1989-90 brought a dramatic end to the Cold War. This volume documents official British reactions to the collapse of East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the evolution of British policy during the 'Two plus Four' negotiations that provided the international framework for the merger of the two German states.

All of the documents fall within the UK's 30-year rule and have therefore not previously been in the public domain. Most are drawn from the archives of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but there are also a large number of Prime Ministerial files from the Cabinet Office archives. These are of particular interest for the light they throw on the views of Margaret Thatcher.

Taken together, the documents show that despite Mrs Thatcher's well-known reservations about German unity, the UK played a vital and constructive role in the negotiations that helped to bring it about.

Do Germans have any prejudicial feelings towards the Turkish guest workers? If yes, then prejudice might just be part of the human condition, and Thatcher is just a human.

From The Sunday Times September 6, 2009

Listen up, Limey, the special’s off the menu.
Our uniquely close relationship with the US is a myth " America has always played hardball with us. Max Hastings.

It is fortunate for the national blood pressure that few British people read American newspapers. The release of the Libyan Lockerbie bomber has received massive and brutal coverage. The New York Daily News published an editorial obituary of the special relationship under the headline “In a word, gone”.

There is real anger over there. Dogged British efforts year after year to “do our bit” for the Atlantic alliance do not rouse correspondingly positive American passions. Britain’s chief purpose in sending soldiers to fight in George W Bush’s wars was " and in Afghanistan remains " to fulfil its commitment to the Anglo-American relationship.

Unfortunately, however, while our role looms large in British minds, it is nowhere near big enough to buy a real voice in US policy-making. Within the US army, there is a widespread perception that British forces failed to stabilise Basra. President Barack Obama’s troop “surge” in Afghanistan is seen partly as a rescue mission for flagging British efforts in Helmand. A Washington policy-maker said to me in May: “Your army is not what it was 20 years ago. British attitudes about Afghanistan seem frankly defeatist.”

The Obama White House is sincerely grateful for our contribution. But it seems to some British politicians, diplomats and soldiers cause for frustration that, when we think we are trying hard in Afghanistan, we gain little recognition from the American people, or payback from their rulers on contentious bilateral issues.

It was ever thus. In 1951, a British contingent was fighting alongside the Americans in the brutal, bloody Korean war. Major Gerald Rickord of the Royal Ulster Rifles erected a board above the entrance to his unit’s tent lines, bearing the words Britannia Camp. A passing American soldier poked his cigar at the sign and demanded: “Britannia? What’s that?” Rickord asked in astonishment: “Haven’t you ever heard of Britannia rules the waves?” The American said: “That’s a bit out of date, isn’t it?” Rickord said: “I was saddened by how far we had come down in the world.”

The Korean conflict began a mere five years after allied triumph in the greatest of all shared Anglo-American experiences, the second world war. This created the legend of the “special relationship”, which still means so much to anxious British prime ministers and commands lip service from polite US presidents. Yet study of 1939-45 government documents, newspapers and diaries on both sides of the Atlantic reveals chronic tensions, indeed considerable antipathy, between the two nations.

In 1940-41, most British people were bitterly resentful of American neutrality, and especially of Washington’s insistence on cash payment for arms and supplies. President Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease programme kicked in only when Britain had exhausted its gold and foreign currency reserves. British assets in America were sold at knockdown prices to meet the demands of congressional sentiment. The Viscose rayon-manufacturing company, jewel in the overseas crown of Courtaulds and possessing assets worth $120m, went for a mere $54m.

Many British people, especially aristocrats, actively disliked Americans. Lord Halifax, who became Britain’s ambassador to Washington in December 1940, wrote: “I have never liked Americans, except odd ones. In the mass I have always found them dreadful.”

Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy of India, commiserated with Halifax: “The heavy labour of toadying to your pack of pole-squatting parvenus! What a country, and what savages those who inhabit it!”

Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, later commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, was the RAF’s representative in Washington. He wrote with characteristic intemperance in September 1941: “Up to date they have had a damn fine war. On British dollars. Every last one of them ... They lose no opportunity of impressing upon us how magnificently they are fighting (sic) and how inept, and cowardly, is our conduct of those few miserable efforts we ourselves are making in battle and in industry ... They will come in when they think that we have won it. Not before. Just like they did last time. They will then tell the world how they did it. Just like they did last time.”

Much of this resentment was reflected by Americans’ scepticism about their ally. Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana asserted sourly that “there was little point in supplying the British with war material since they invariably lost it all”. During one of the prime minister’s American visits, an Ohioan wrote to the White House: “Tell that Churchill to go home where he belongs ... All he wants is our money.”

This view was atypical " most Americans retained warm respect for Churchill. But they reflected widespread doubts about his nation’s will to fight. “She didn’t pay her war debts after the last war. She refuses to grant India the very freedom she claims to be fighting for. She is holding a vast army in England to protect the homeland while her outposts are lost to the enemy,” wrote an analyst for the US Office of War Information.

In the autumn of 1942, the Foreign Office minister Richard Law reported that the US chiefs of staff “were about as friendly to the British as they would be to the German general staff if they sat round a table with them”.

It is against the background of exchanges of transatlantic abuse that Winston Churchill’s wartime achievement must be viewed. I argue in my new book that only he could have performed the extraordinary feat of forging an effective Anglo-American working relationship. From May 1940, he perceived with a clarity that eluded even some of the most exalted of his fellow countrymen that only through partnership on whatever terms were available might Britain emerge from the war among the victors.

By 1945, however, Churchill had become deeply embittered by the ruthlessness of US conduct towards Britain. He never allowed his feelings to show, but he had learnt from painful experience that sentiment exercised no influence upon Washington’s behaviour.

This remains a perennial reality, although our leaders have short memories. Forever expecting more from the relationship, they are disappointed. When we join the Americans at war, we become subordinates in conducting operations we cannot control. Critics challenge the Brown government about its lack of a clear Afghan policy. In truth, this depends on the Obama administration, which has yet to chart a coherent course.

It is a painful irony, that the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi has inflicted more damage upon Britain’s popular standing in America than our efforts in Helmand have gained credit. The decision is regarded as evidence of British infirmity of purpose in the struggle against terrorism, and it will not be quickly forgotten.

Winston Churchill might have told Gordon Brown that there is scant purpose in enduring, for the cause of Atlantic solidarity, military funeral processions through Wootton Bassett, if Britain frees onto the streets of Tripoli a man perceived in the US as a mass murderer and public enemy.

Max Hastings’s new book Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45 is published by HarperCollins

Foofie wrote:

Do Germans have any prejudicial feelings towards the Turkish guest workers? If yes, then prejudice might just be part of the human condition, and Thatcher is just a human.

Well, I haven't read the book (did you read it?), but according to what is published, Thatcher didn't mention our Turkish born co-patriots or the former guestworkers.

And as far as I know and could out, there hadn't been any in the former GDR, at least not in a notable number.
Do you have different informations?

I did not read the book. Most books I read are related to American politics, and the position of the U.S. in the world. I do not read about European politics. Nor do I have any "different information."

Foofie wrote:

I did not read the book. Most books I read are related to American politics, and the position of the U.S. in the world. I do not read about European politics. Nor do I have any "different information."

In that case, why do you want again to derail the thread?