ABSTRACT
Thatcher’s lack of knowledge about the intricacies of foreign affairs helps to explain why many senior Conservatives underestimated her in the early years. Though she travelled abroad regularly as leader of the opposition, her background, education and earlier political experience had given her none of that breadth of vision that her Conservative predecessors enjoyed. As education secretary in the Heath government, she had acquired no experience in foreign affairs. She was not a linguist and tended to be suspicious of foreigners first because, for a frontranking politician, she did not know many of them and second because she usually could not speak their language. Her simple patriotism was nourished much more in the East Midlands and the home counties than through those broader imperial contacts that were part of the family connections of all her predecessors, except Edward Heath. At the beginning of her premiership, she seemed to be a ‘little Englander’. What was Britain’s position in world affairs when Thatcher became
prime minister? It is tempting to characterise it in terms of rampant decline. Britain had, after all, given up almost all of its early twentiethcentury empire, that largest agglomeration of territories upon which ‘the sun never set’ and that had been the source of such patriotic pride. The ‘retreat from Empire’ was, in fact, a more protracted affair than is often realised, although ceding independence to what had once been the ‘black empire’ took place largely over a twenty-year period from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. The process of adjustment was, therefore, abrupt, the more so since Britain had been laggard in moves towards establishing closer ties with Europe. When Britain was invited in 1955 to participate in the negotiations that led in 1957 to the establishment of a ‘Common Market’ of six leading Western European
powers, including France and Germany, it held aloof. The chancellor of the exchequer, R. A. Butler, argued that Britain should remain involved in free-trade initiatives only. Proposals for ‘the creation of a common organization for the peaceful development of atomic energy and the establishment of a common market in Europe, seemed likely to involve duplication with other arrangements or were fraught with special difficulties’.1 Culturally and emotionally, close links with the Empire remained, for many, a more eligible alternative than closer relations with continental Europe. Perceptions changed as imperial possessions dwindled and the EEC
established itself as a formidable organisation with great potential for future development. As early as 1961, under Macmillan, Britain applied to join the organisation of which it could have been a leading – if not the dominant – partner four or five years earlier. However, both his application and that of Harold Wilson in 1967 fell foul of a veto by French President Charles de Gaulle, who feared that British entry would massively, and dangerously, increase US influence in Europe. De Gaulle’s fears were not irrational. As Winston Churchill had noted in 1948, Britain’s overseas interests could be represented as three interlinked circles – the British Empire and Commonwealth, the wider English-speaking world, and what he called a ‘United Europe’, in reality anti-Communist Western Europe, which was being supported economically and militarily by US aid.2 At least until the 1960s, only a small minority of British people considered the European ‘circle’ as important as the other two. Nevertheless, the decline of Empire and some sharp lessons from the US (not least over its lack of support for the Anglo-French invasion of Suez in 1956) that its ‘special relationship’ with Britain should no longer be considered an equal one promoted a deal of querulous introspection. Edward Heath’s government signed the Treaty of Accession to the
Common Market in January 1972 and Britain became a full member of the EEC on 1 January 1973. Thatcher was not involved in the negotiations but, as a Cabinet minister, she supported membership. Patronisingly, she told her Finchley constituents that Britain had much to contribute: ‘Our experience, our calm, will add a great deal’ to no doubt excitable foreigners. Incongruously, perhaps, she also warned that ‘we have a tendency in this country to be slightly isolationist in some things’.3
