The Downing Street Years (139 page)

Back in Prague I had discussions with President Havel. I had met him before when he came to Britain and though his politics were to the left of mine it was impossible to avoid liking and admiring him. He for his part shared my views about the need to have the eastern European countries in the Community as soon as that was practically possible. He also liked my ideas about a European Magna Carta and
the development of the CSCE. I felt that he would be an ally in the course on which I had embarked in Europe.

Then I went on to Hungary. Among the eastern European countries Hungary had three important advantages. First, substantial economic and a large amount of political reform had occurred under the previous communist regime. So the transition was less difficult and painful. Second, in Jozsef Antall, the Hungarian Prime Minister, the country was in the safe hands of a genuine Conservative. I had met Mr Antall on several previous occasions and he and I shared very much the same political approach. Third, the Hungarians had held together their governing coalition rather than splitting up in divisions on minor points. Mr Antall had the skills and was quickly developing the authority to give Hungary the leadership and continuity it needed.

Yet the task of economic reform was still daunting. The Hungarians were tackling the key questions relating to property — both the ownership of land, which exiles and their families wanted back, and the privatization of industry. There was also a wider strategic issue. Even more than Czechoslovakia and Poland, the Hungarians were keen to break free once and for all from Soviet influence. Mr Antall had announced that Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact and wanted closer relations with NATO or at least the Western European Union (WEU). Poland and Czechoslovakia were toying with the same idea. He assured me that the Warsaw Pact was indeed on its last legs. When it finally expired I favoured a special associate membership of NATO being offered to the eastern Europeans.

Another problem which the Hungarians, Czechs and Poles faced was that their security services were deeply penetrated by the KGB and this was a major obstacle to their taking a full role in intelligence co-operation with the West. In Czechoslovakia the Government had expelled Communist Party members from the old Intelligence Service altogether. My discussion with Mr Antall in his office in the Parliament building — which I was delighted now to see used for its intended purpose, unlike the time of my visit in 1984 — illustrated just how careful they had to be. At one point he pointed across to a statue presented to his liberal communist predecessor, Mr Nemeth, by the Soviet Prime Minister, Mr Ryzhkov. Apparently, on close examination it had turned out to be bugged. I said that I hoped it was still being monitored. On further inspection it seemed so ugly that I suggested he throw it away altogether. If only disposing of the rest of communism’s legacy were so easy.

However fascinated I was by events in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, I could not forget that the strength and security of the West ultimately depended upon the Anglo-American relationship. For reasons I have explained — partly personal chemistry and partly genuine differences of policy — that relationship had become somewhat strained. I regarded it, therefore, as essential that the talks I was due to have with President Bush in Bermuda in April 1990 should be a success. This would be as much a matter of tone as substance. Generally speaking, I now waited for the President to set out his views before explaining mine. In Bermuda we deliberately sought to create the kind of relaxed atmosphere which I now knew he preferred. It was almost a ‘family’ affair and concluded with the President and Denis playing eighteen holes of golf in the pouring rain — a very British occasion.

It was the future of NATO and decisions about the defence of Europe which were in the forefront of my and the President’s minds. I sought to leave him in no doubt about my strong commitment to NATO which my earlier telephone conversation about the CSCE and the reasons for retaining the Warsaw Pact had apparently somewhat scrambled. The President was keen to have an early NATO summit. So, it seemed, was the NATO Secretary-General, Dr Woerner. I would have preferred one in the autumn in order to allow for more preparation. But it was clear that the President wanted a June summit and would like Britain to host it. (In fact it took place in early July.) He had also concluded that Congress was going to withhold funds for the development of a Follow-On to LANCE. He therefore wanted to announce its cancellation. I accepted that there was very little which could be done about this, but I thought it crucial to secure firm assurances about the future stationing of nuclear weapons in Germany, in particular TASM. The real question was how we were most likely to achieve this. In fact, this approach turned out to be a key to the Americans’ thinking in the run-up to the NATO summit. Their aim was to make it a public relations success, so that we could win German support for SNF and Soviet acceptance that Germany should remain in NATO. When I got back to London I set in hand the arrangements for us to host a NATO summit. There was only one complication, which was that a meeting of the North Atlantic Council — that is NATO Foreign ministers — was scheduled for June at Turnberry, a
few miles south of Ayr on the west coast of Scotland. I wanted this to go ahead because it was where the more significant decisions were likely to be made about how NATO’s forces might be reshaped.

Not for the first time, I found myself at odds with the Americans and indeed with the NATO Secretary-General about how we should approach the NATO summit. The Americans were keen to announce a range of initiatives, proposing deep cuts in conventional forces and still deeper cuts in the nuclear stockpile. Messages flew back and forth between me and President Bush and some of the more eye-catching and less considered proposals were dropped. Not that I disagreed with everything the Americans wanted from the summit. In particular, I was strongly in favour of Jim Baker’s ideas about strengthening political consultation, as opposed to just military planning, as one of the functions of NATO. I believed — as did the Americans — that the importance of NATO as a means of avoiding friction between America and Europe was greater than ever.

What I was unhappy about was the American proposal formally to change in the communiqué the traditional NATO strategy of flexible response. They were insistent on the insertion of the phrase that nuclear weapons were ‘weapons of last resort’. This, I felt, would undermine the credibility of NATO’s SNF. We should continue to resist any qualification of the role of nuclear weapons in NATO, just as we had always done. We were slipping towards — though we had not reached — that fatal position of undertaking that there would be ‘no first use of nuclear weapons’, on which Soviet propaganda had always insisted. Such an undertaking would leave our conventional forces vulnerable to attack by their superior numbers. In the end the first phrase did appear hedged around in the following form:

I cannot say that I was satisfied with this unwieldly compromise. But in the end military strategy is not dependent upon pieces of paper
but on the commitment of resources to practical military objectives. The review which was begun at Turnberry and which in Britain’s case would be put into effect through the ‘Options for Change’ exercise that Tom King conducted as Defence Secretary had to concentrate on where the priorities for inevitably decreased expenditure would now be.

A month before the NATO summit I set out in my speech to the North Atlantic Council my own views on the matter. The stress I placed on preservation of the United States’ military presence in Europe and the continuing role of updated nuclear weapons would not have surprised my audience. But I also emphasized that NATO must consider an ‘out of area’ role. I asked the question:

This passage reflected my thinking over a number of years. I had seen for myself how important a western presence could be in securing western interests in far-flung areas of the world, not least the Middle East. I did not believe that even if the military threat from the Soviets had diminished, that from other dictators would not arise. But of course I could not know that within two months we would be confronted by an explosive crisis in the Gulf.

As I look back on the international developments of the late 1980s, they seem to be overwhelmingly positive. Communism was defeated, freedom restored to the former satellites, the cruel division of Europe ended, the Soviet Union launched onto the path of reform, democracy
and national rights and the West, in particular the United States, left in possession of the field as its political values and economic system were embraced both by its former adversaries and, increasingly, by the countries of the Third World.

The credit for these historic achievements must go principally to the United States and in particular to President Reagan, whose policies of military and economic competition with the Soviet Union forced the Soviet leaders, in particular Mr Gorbachev, to abandon their ambitions of hegemony and to embark on the process of reform which in the end brought the entire communist system crashing down. But this would never have been accomplished without the long and courageous resistance of the peoples of the Soviet Union and central and eastern Europe. We will never know the names of all who suffered and perished in that struggle but we can celebrate their leaders from Vladimir Bukovsky to Václav Havel, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Cardinal Mindszenty, and the four young heroes who gave their lives defending the Russian White House in the last dying days of the old regime.

As that old order crumbled and its people emerged blinking into the light, President Bush managed the dangerous and volatile transformation with great diplomatic skill. Nor should credit be withheld from the steadfast European allies of America who resisted both Soviet pressure and Soviet blandishments to maintain a strong western defence: in particular, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand and … but modesty forbids.

The world is a better place. But in some ways it is an old-fashioned place. The Europe that has emerged from behind the Iron Curtain has many of the features of the Europes of 1914 and 1939: ethnic strife, contested borders, political extremism, nationalist passions and economic backwardness. And there is another familiar bogey from the past — the German Question.

If there is one instance in which a foreign policy I pursued met with unambiguous failure, it was my policy on German reunification. This policy was to encourage democracy in East Germany while slowing down the country’s reunification with West Germany. With the first half of that policy no one disagrees. Nor at the time did everyone disagree with the second, to which indeed frequent lip service was paid. Most observers were unaware of the nationalist passion for German unity that burned in the East. Indeed, even the dissident leaders of the East German demonstrations that led to freedom were themselves unaware of it, being in favour of a free, reformed, independent East Germany, rather than a larger Federal Republic. And Germany’s
neighbours all hoped to avoid this latter outcome because they saw it as destabilizing an already unsettled continent.

In the event, the desire for unity among Germans on both sides of the Elbe proved irresistible. So the policy failed.

But was the policy wrong? That is a more complex question requiring a more nuanced reply. Look first at the consequences of the rapid reunification as they worked themselves out. West Germany’s absorption of its next-door relation has been economically disastrous, and that disaster has spread to the rest of the European Community via the Bundesbank’s high interest rates and the ERM. We have all paid the price in unemployment and recession. East German political immaturity has affected the whole country in the form of a revived (though containable) neo-Nazi and xenophobic extremism. Internationally, it has created a German state so large and dominant that it cannot be easily fitted into the new architecture of Europe.

Look also at the incidental benefits that the policy brought about. It forced the German Government to clarify the border question with its eastern neighbours. More generally, it provided the occasion whereby the CSCE framework was established to ensure that existing borders would not be changed by unilateral action or without general agreement. It strengthened the relationship between Britain and the other countries of central and eastern Europe who now, to some extent, see us as attentive guardians of their interests. But the fundamental argument for slowing German reunification was to create a breathing space in which a new architecture of Europe could be devised where a united Germany would not be a destabilizing influence/over-mighty subject/bull in a china shop. Arriving prematurely as it did, a united Germany has tended to encourage three unwelcome developments: the rush to European federalism as a way of tying down Gulliver; the maintenance of a Franco-German bloc for the same purpose; and the gradual withdrawal of the US from Europe on the assumption that a German-led federal Europe will be both stable and capable of looking after its own defence.