Europe's odd couple

On 11th December 1898 Prince Bernhard von Bülow addressed the Reichstag in Berlin. With uncharacteristic foresight, he warned the chamber that "in the new century Germany must be either the hammer or the anvil." The caution and calculation of Bismarck had been replaced by the restless ambition of his successors. Germany headed into the 20th century doomed to be both hammer and anvil. Rivalry between imperial Britain and imperial Germany became inevitable.

As we approach the end of our century, it is worth recollecting this unhappy history from the close of the last. Then, as now, assumptions were made about the inevitability of Anglo-German rivalry. In his speech at Leuven University in February 1996, Helmut Kohl restated his faith in the EU and his fear that unless the pace of integration is maintained, Europe could sink into conflict again. On the British side, even as robust an optimist about Anglo-German relations as Oliver Wright, the former ambassador in Bonn, has rung the tocsin of impending confrontation. In a lecture last year, he said: "Judging by ministerial speeches, Britain and Germany are on collision courses." Are old rivalries finding new resonance? And did the relationship between Helmut Kohl as chancellor and Margaret Thatcher as prime minister set both countries on a collision course into the 21st century? That the relationship was neither warm nor close is beyond dispute. But did differences of personality and policy really express endemic conflicts of national interest?

Margaret Thatcher certainly carried with her the intellectual and emotional baggage of hostility to Germany. There is less evidence of Kohl's wariness towards Britain-although within the German foreign office, scepticism about Britain's commitment to Europe remained acute throughout Thatcher's premiership. On occasions Kohl, too, was exasperated by what he saw as disdain for German interests.



Despite the difficulties of their relationship, they were both assisted by a more amicable one: that between Charles Powell and Horst Teltschik. Powell, seconded by the British foreign office to work with Thatcher, became in many ways its leading critic and her stoutest defender. His ability to read her mind and express her thoughts was rivalled only by Bernard Ingham, her press secretary. Teltschik, Powell's opposite number in Bonn, had an understanding of his chief to match. In his memoirs, Teltschik describes how on 9th February 1990 Powell spent three hours describing Thatcher's position on Germany and German reunification. He explained that she belonged to another generation; that there was a cultural gap between both countries; and that Thatcher would always feel "uneasy" about a strong Germany. Powell spoke of Thatcher's "wellspring of instinctive anti-Germanism."

This anti-Germanism may have led to the decision to hold the infamous Chequers seminar in March 1990, the minutes of which were subsequently leaked. Thatcher was so alarmed by the prospect of German power in Europe that she called together experts on Germany's history, economics and politics. The academics who attended were, on balance, positive. Fritz Stern, the German-born historian, said that the discussion acknowledged that "the Germans had changed profoundly since 1945." Charles Powell-whose summary of German characteristics caused most of the brouhaha-himself recalls the seminar as being "frank but very positive in its conclusions." He insists that there never was a specific list of German attributes. Instead, he had pulled together all the characteristics that had been attributed to the Germans into a single list at the end of a six-hour discussion. This list, however, was hardly flattering. In alphabetical order it read: "Aggressiveness, angst, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex, sentimentality." Little is known of Thatcher's own contribution, but, according to Powell, "she revelled in it and was affected by the positive conclusions although nothing could change her instinctive jumpiness about Germany."

This jumpiness stemmed from wartime memories and emotions. (Incidentally, her memoirs reveal that her family sheltered an Austrian Jewish girl for part of the war.) Karl-Günther von Hase, one of Bonn's former ambassadors in London, recalls his astonishment at the depth of her feelings. In 1990, Thatcher and Kohl attended the 40th annual Anglo-German Konigswinter conference held that year in Cambridge. Oliver Wright, who was in charge of seating arrangements, decided it was too risky to put them next to each other. On this strained and unhappy occasion, the prime minister gave Karl-Günther von Hase the full benefit of her anti-Germanism. It would be, she said, "at least another 40 years before the British could trust the Germans again."

What then of the German side? Were the old rivalries and prejudices endemic with them as well? Karl-Günther von Hase remembers the papers being discussed in the German foreign office in 1972-73, when British membership of the EEC was confirmed. It was thought that there might be four ways in which British membership would have an impact on Europe. The first was that the UK might take a lead in Europe. After all, it had a world position. The UK had emerged from the second world war as the sole European victor. Its special relationship with the US, its position in the UN, the reputation of its armed forces, the skills of its diplomatic service, all buttressed such a premier position. The second option was that the UK would become "a normal member." It would not lead, but nor would it follow. It would behave like France-proud of its history and careful of its sovereignty. The third option was that Britain would respond to membership in a minimalist manner. It would do what was necessary to stay in the club-but would obey the rules with reluctance and strive to put a brake on the process of integration. The fourth option was that the UK would use its membership to "torpedo" the enterprise from the inside. Perfidious Albion would enter the community to destroy it. Her real preference would be for a loose trading area, devoid of political ambition and stripped of all supranational power.

The German foreign office view at the end of the Thatcher years was that the UK had acted somewhere between the third and fourth options. It had done what was required to remain a member, but on occasion it had acted to torpedo the enterprise. The judgement is in some respects unfair. Under Thatcher's leadership, Britain was an enthusiastic exponent of the single market. It is acknowledged in Bonn that Britain has always implemented EU regulations-indeed, to an extent quite unknown in many of her partner nations. Yet the implementation of European directives pales as a test of Euro-fidelity beside the more critical issues of "widening and deepening" the union. Bonn has always believed that when Britain urges the widening of the union, it does so because it believes that wider will be looser.

This tale of instinctive anti-Germanism on Thatcher's side and suspicion of destructive Albion on Kohl's side did not lead to discourtesies. Both are intensely patriotic and conscious of their country's status. Kohl is a postwar politician. His pride in a Germany which existed before Nazism, survived that dreadful period and has succeeded since, is well known. It has sometimes made him insensitive to the sensibilities of others. But it also informed his leadership at the moment of reunification.

The one-often cited-example of discourtesy by Kohl towards Thatcher turns out to be apocryphal. The story has it that at a time when both Thatcher and Kohl were on holiday in Austria, they agreed to meet at Salzburg. Kohl came on his own; Thatcher was accompanied by several staff including Powell. After an unhappy exchange in which Thatcher lectured Kohl on his duties to Nato, the story has it that he made his apologies, saying that he had to return to Bonn. The British group, surprised at this sudden departure, went in search of a cafe. They eventually found one only to discover, to their embarrassment, Kohl sitting in the corner consuming a large cream cake. The story is denied by Powell.

Kohl has an old-fashioned view of women. He believed that Thatcher should do more to woo him and he was willing to do a great deal to woo her. But he simply could not read her. On a visit to Kohl's home town of Oggersheim, the chancellor went to great trouble to serve a gargantuan lunch from his own kitchen. According to Thatcher, it consisted of potato soup, pig's stomach, sausage, liver dumplings and sauerkraut. He consumed several helpings. Unenthusiastically she pushed the German equivalent of haggis around her plate with her fork. She thought her lunch was gemütlich ("that is, I think, the German word"). Later, they drove to the nearby cathedral of Speyer. There, Kohl urged Powell to emphasise to Thatcher that in such a place, which was both German and French, he was as much a European as a German. The cathedral was of little interest to Thatcher. On her flight back to London she poured a drink, kicked off her shoes and complained to Powell: "My God, that man is so German!"

These stories can be dismissed as little more than the tittle-tattle of the power circuit. But more was involved than incompatible chemistry. The inability of either to speak the other's language played a role, as did broader cultural differences. Thatcher's whole experience was of confrontational politics-of a House of Commons in which government and opposition implacably face each other across the floor. By contrast, Kohl came from a background in which coalition and consensus were the essential preconditions of power. She felt Kohl's style was overblown and vacuous. (She called him the "gasbag.")

They had a different sense of history, too. Thatcher's history was that of the island race. It was peopled by heroes and villains. It was specific. By contrast, Kohl, an historian by training, loved the broad sweep of history. He believed that Thatcher lacked a sense of history. He confided to friends that she was "pre-Churchillian" while he was "post-Churchillian": while Thatcher may have believed in the balance of power, she had not understood its actual operation in the 19th century-nor its potential for conflict.

There was also a sharp contrast in their interpretation of capitalism. Kohl's Christian Democracy was close to the "one nation" Toryism that Thatcher sought to destroy. Kohl believed that Thatcher was a Manchester liberal dedicated to the Ellbogengesellschaft-a society in which people elbow each other out of the way. His was the path of Mitbestimmung, in which workers and managers co-operate and in which a generous welfare state protects people from change. This was anathema to Thatcher, particularly when it manifested itself in European legislation. That was the burden of her speech in Bruges.

these differences fed into the three main policy clashes of Thatcher's premiership: the battle to win a refund on Britain's budget contribution to the EEC; Thatcher's resistance to the idea of postponing the introduction of new, short range nuclear missiles in Europe; and finally, the fundamental difference between Thatcher and Kohl on German reunification and European integration. It was this latter issue that led to her own downfall.

In the budget row, the difficulty lay not in the difference of interests, but in the misunderstanding borne of the process. Kohl agreed that Thatcher "had a point in getting her money back." Germany, as the biggest contributor to the EEC budget, needed to look after its money too. Kohl expected that he and the other member states would receive a "quid pro quo" for the budget settlement. He believed that Thatcher was now honour bound to be as sympathetic to German interests as he had been to those of Britain. But far from settling Thatcher's alleged anti-Europeanism, the budget settlement seemed only to encourage it.

The question of the deployment of modernised short range nuclear weapons in central Europe brought a sharper clash. The Germans, east and west, were only too aware of the misfortune of their front-line status: they would be the first victims in any tactical nuclear exchange. Kohl was willing to face down German public opinion on the issue while the cold war seemed to justify it. But the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev changed everything. While "Gorby-mania" gripped German crowds, the chancellor saw a vista of new possibilities.

For Thatcher, the issues of Nato and the contest with communism were simple. In her memoirs, she recalls urging Kohl at a meeting in Frankfurt in 1989 to put the case for short range nuclear forces to German public opinion by asking the question: did they value their freedom? She professed to understand his difficulties in dealing with public opinion, but left their meeting convinced that he and she were in basic agreement. She was wrong.

Over the next few months, it became clear that the German government wanted to delay modernisation and deployment and felt that Britain was being insensitive to Germany's national interest. This occasioned one of the unhappiest conversations recorded between Thatcher and Kohl. At the meeting (already described) at Oggersheim, Thatcher feared that Kohl was manoeuvring to negotiate away the third arm of Nato's nuclear defence: short range weapons. The Gemütlichkeit of the meeting evaporated when she reminded him that he had proposed an early Nato summit on modernisation and that she had supported him. There had been their joint statement in Frankfurt. In her words: "He began to get agitated. He said he did not need any lectures about Nato. The fact was that Germany was more affected than anyone else by short range nuclear weapons and that therefore German interest should be given priority. I retorted that short range nuclear forces did not affect Germany only. Our troops were on German soil... At this, he became still more worked up. He said that for years he had been attacked as the vassal of the Americans. Now he was suddenly being branded a traitor!"

In the event, the impasse was resolved by the new US president, George Bush. It was done in a way which confirmed Thatcher's worst fears. Kohl had appealed to the US and on 19th May 1989, the American line on short range nuclear weapons modernisation changed. The US was willing to concede the principal of negotiating on such weapons. President Bush and his secretary of state, Jim Baker, were not loyal Thatcherites as Reagan had been. In Thatcher's words: "The new American approach was to subordinate clear statements of intention about the alliance's defence to the political sensibilities of the Germans." Worse was to come. On 31st May of that year, President Bush spoke in Mainz, praising the Germans as "partners in leadership." In Thatcher's view, the Germans had proved themselves untrustworthy on the most crucial issue-yet they had won the ear of Washington.

Had Kohl ever expressed to Thatcher his view that she was pre-Churchillian while he was post-Churchillian, she would simply not have understood him. Winston Churchill was her hero, his defiance of continental dictatorship was her inspiration. Never was her nationalism more eloquently expressed than in the speech she made at Cheltenham after the Falklands war. "We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have a new confidence, borne in the economic battles at home, tested and found true 8,000 miles away. We rejoice that Britain has rekindled that spirit which fired her for generations past and which has begun to burn as brightly as before."

To Kohl, this glorification of war, this synthesis of martial and economic achievement, was anathema. He, like most Germans, was ashamed of Germany's military past and saw the future as an escape from nationalism. Kohl wondered openly how she could pour unlimited funds into the Falklands war and at the same time fight for every last penny of her money on Europe's budget. To her the contrast was self-explanatory. She believed in recapturing the Falklands and opposed much of the process of European integration. Her visceral instinct was that a federal Europe would be a vehicle for German power and that the extension of German power must be contrary to British interests.

On German unification, Thatcher had to concede defeat (in her own assessment her only real defeat in foreign affairs). But this only strengthened her determination to oppose further integration into a German-dominated Europe. To her dismay she was supported by neither France nor the US. President Bush, unlike her soulmate Ronald Reagan, failed to grasp the centrality of the transatlantic bond between Britain and the US which for her was the ark of the covenant: a community of "blood, language, culture and values." Gorbachev, too, had contributed to reunification by "selling the pass" for German gold. This left Thatcher in a minority of one-not a position that worried her. As Britain's later and somewhat Euro-sceptic foreign minister, Malcolm Rifkind, was to express it: if Britain had to choose between UK interests and UK influence she should opt for the former.

In her memoirs, Thatcher explained how the perils of German reunification and European integration coalesced. She did not believe in collective guilt, but argued that, since Bismarck, Germany had "veered unpredictably between aggression and self- doubt..." Because of innate character defects and because of their very size and geographic position, the Germans would always destabilise their neighbours. That threat was no longer military but economic and political. The German drive to dominance, however, had been consistent. The only way to contain it was through bilateral and trilateral alliances-the traditional power diplomacy of the 19th century which, as she so accurately foresaw, was inconceivable in a united Europe.

Her fear of German dominance was even greater than her repugnance at Soviet influence. At one point, Thatcher went so far as to tell President Bush, during a telephone conversation on 24th February 1990, that it would be best if at least some of the Soviet forces in eastern Germany be allowed to stay for a transitional period "without any specific terminal date..." She emphasised to a bewildered US president that: "One had to remember that Germany was surrounded by countries most of which it had attacked or occupied in the course of this century. Looking well into the future, only the Soviet Union-or its successor-could provide a balance to German dominance in Europe." As she comments in her memoirs: "President Bush failed to understand that I was discussing a long term balance of power in Europe rather than proposing an alternative alliance to Nato. It was the last time that I relied on a telephone conversation to explain such matters."

This most fundamental confrontation of German and British positions does not seem to have involved direct personal acrimony between Kohl and Thatcher. Only at one point did she become furious-on the occasion of Kohl's ten point speech to the Bundestag at the close of 1989. In it the chancellor spelt out the road to reunification, stating for the first time to the parliament that the goal was nothing less than the unity of the German state. For Thatcher, this development was "in clear breach of, at least, the spirit of the Paris summit." Kohl's fifth point had been the proposal to develop confederate structures between the two German states, with the goal of creating a federation; and his tenth point was a commitment by his government to work towards unity and reunification. Thatcher felt that this speech was a betrayal of his allies. In retrospect, advisers on both sides are less apocalyptic. Charles Powell remembers that his colleague Horst Teltschik in Bonn did not feel that the German government was steering events, but pursuing them. Reunification was being made on the ground in East Germany rather than being manoeuvred from Bonn.

Kohl may have had a more perceptive understanding of Thatcher's agony than was realised. Hermann von Richthofen, the ambassador to London, claims that the chancellor understood that Britain had sa-crificed her empire, her economy and her world position to stop Nazism. Given this, the re-emergence of a united and powerful Germany seemed a bitter outcome. What Kohl could not understand was the way in which Thatcher allowed this sentiment to overwhelm her own commitment to democracy and self-determination. But he was even more offended by the attitude of Francois Mitterrand-his friend and ally. Germany's most special relationship was with France; yet both in conversations with Thatcher and in his frantic consultations with political leaders in Poland, Russia and East Germany, Mitterrand displayed a deep disquiet about reunification. In Charles Powell's view, Mitterrand's opposition to the creation of the single German state made Thatcher's contribution "pale by comparison." It may be that the French president's fears, coupled with that of Thatcher's, confirmed Helmut Kohl in his determination to press ahead with the next stage of European integration. The Maastricht treaty was his answer. The wrong answer-so far as Margaret Thatcher was concerned.

were these genuine rivalries or simply old memories revisited? In retrospect, Thatcher's insistence on the budget rebate and on the modernisation of short range nuclear weapons on German soil did not represent critical British interests. She saw the nuclear issue as a test of German fidelity to Nato. Any weakness implied the Germans being soft on the Soviet Union, and possibly trading neutrality for unification. In the event, Kohl's greatest diplomatic achievement was to negotiate unification without compromising Nato membership. Indeed, unification was to mark the advance of Nato. In her memoirs, Thatcher simply notes the outcome of Kohl's talks with Gorbachev at the crucial meeting in the Caucasus in July of 1990. Yet this was an astonishing achievement: for decades, both sides in the cold war had been mesmerised by the possibility of German neutrality. Now the border had gone, yet Germany remained firmly anchored in the Nato alliance.

It is on reunification and European integration that the clash between Thatcher and Kohl expressed the most profound difference of perceived national interest. Yet the issue is far from clear cut. For example, one aspect of Thatcher's concern was Germany's position in eastern Europe. In her conversations with President Mitterrand in Paris on 20th January 1990, the president had, according to Thatcher, shared her worries about the Germans' so-called "mission" in central Europe. In the event, Germany's "mission" in eastern Europe has translated principally into an advocacy of these countries' membership of the EU. Britain and Germany both favour the enlargement of the EU, albeit for different reasons: the Germans fear chaos at their eastern borders; the British government favours expansion to stabilise those countries and at the same time somewhat dilute the EU. But eastern Europe is not a cockpit of conflicting German and British interests.

From a Thatcherite perspective, however, German reunification did damage Britain's standing in the world. It marked the central importance of the Franco-German "axis" in Europe and the declining importance of Britain's "special relationship" with the US. The difference between Mitterrand's position and Thatcher's was that he did not believe anything could be done to stop reunification, and that European union was the antidote. This view-that only a united Europe could check German power- was, according to Thatcher, "propagated by the French but swallowed by the US state department, too."

Thatcher's opposition to political integration in Europe was thus given a further twist by reunification. She saw the single European act and the creation of the single market in 1992 as the end point of integration. She did not wish to go further. Certainly, she was implacably opposed to all the objectives so often expounded by Kohl: the strengthening of the European parliament, the single currency, the expansion of Europe's influence to social and foreign policy issues. All this would erode the sovereignty of Westminster and nullify the proud defiance of 1940. Far from believing (as Kohl did) that any halt in Europe's integration could lead to disintegration and retreat, Thatcher's conviction was that further integration would lead to disharmony and eventual break-up. Towards the close of her premiership these differences became increasingly acute and public. They have now become so again.