Thatcher told Gorbachev Britain did not want German reunification

by The_Cynic | September 10, 2009 at 08:51 pm

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The fact that Thatcher didn't want reunification is spoiled by the title - Thatcher was not Britain. I know many, many people and I know that they as well as millions of other Briton's stayed up that night when the wall came finally down.

Two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev that neither Britain nor Western Europe wanted the reunification of Germany and made clear that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it.

In an extraordinary frank meeting with Mr Gorbachev in Moscow in 1989 — never before fully reported — Mrs Thatcher said the destabilisation of Eastern Europe and the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact were also not in the West’s interests.

It was a night of celebration to us who lived in Europe - for many, like me, who lived through the 60s and 70s under the threat of the testosterone filled presidents and premiers of the both countries not laying waste to our continent.

You don't know how that feels unless you have lived it - I have said to many that it's all well and good, but Europe, especially the UK, would be hit first if a nuclear strike took place.

Even 20 years later, her remarks are likely to cause uproar. They are all the more explosive as she admitted that what she said was quite different from the West’s public pronouncements and official Nato communiqués. She told Mr Gorbachev that he should pay no attention to these.

“We do not want a united Germany,” she said. “This would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.”

Never a woman to shy away from her own ego - lest we forget her return to power with the death of over 200 British soldiers in the Falklands and the greater death of Argentinians.

I hope this does bring about some form of backlash - those who idolise her, think that she should still be PM may see how vile she actually was, and to me, still is.

Ever one for the Conservative right, this:

he was already courting controversy — especially among Solidarity supporters in Poland and the West — by telling Mr Gorbachev that she was “deeply impressed” by the courage and patriotism of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish Communist leader.

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