PARIS – British prime minister Margaret Thatcher warned France’s ambassador months before German’s 1990 reunification of a domineering chancellor, Helmut Kohl, who “sees himself as the master”, diplomatic notes reveal.
In secret archives unveiled to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989, French diplomats describe an “obsessed” and “bitter” Thatcher’s fear of a united Germany and her proposal to join forces with Russia to contain the threat.
“Kohl is capable of anything,” France’s ambassador to Britain, Luc de La Barre de Nanteuil, quoted Thatcher as telling him during a dinner with French business- men at his residence in London on March 13th, 1990.
“He has become a different man, he does not know himself any more, he sees himself as the master and begins to act like that. You have to see for example how he behaves with [then Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev,” she said according to the report.
Nanteuil was struck by Thatcher’s bitterness, noting that while she was pleased with the end of communism, she did not express any joy over eastern Europe’s new-found freedom.
“The 1990s begin with euphoria, they risk ending in catastrophe,” said Thatcher, whose anti-European Union stance culminated in her forced resignation in 1990. France and Britain, western Europe’s two nuclear powers, needed to link up in the face of the “German danger”, but this alone would not be enough, she told Nanteuil. Once Russia was transformed into a free-market democracy, it could act as a necessary counterweight, she said.
Nanteuil’s report confirmed Thatcher’s increasing isolation as the Iron Lady lost the power to convince others. “Mrs Thatcher was, as usual, attentive, reflective and combative, but she was basically much more negative than imaginative. She spoke of Germany with a striking anxiety and passion,” Nanteuil wrote. “She wanted to be right and be right on all points, even when her worry did not suggest any solution. She was, as always, convinced that her instinct was right.”
– (Reuters)