British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sought to block the reunification of Germany, and by extension the demise of communism across Eastern Europe according to documents gathered by a researcher working at the personal foundation set up by former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev after he left office.
The Times of London reports the amazing details (h/t Andrew Sullivan):
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. She noted the huge changes happening across Eastern Europe, but she insisted that the West would not push for its decommunisation. Nor would it do anything to risk the security of the Soviet Union.
The article goes on to indicate that President George HW Bush was in accord, and quotes Thatcher as telling Gorbachev:
“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.”
In some respects this is not that surprising a viewpoint. For the postwar leadership in Europe and the US, maintaining a divided Germany was a fundamental policy precept (after all, Germany had caused two major wars within a 30 year period), and this was a goal that the Soviet Union was also happy to support. But the realpolitik of the quote above does stand in stark contrast to the stated Western goal of spreading freedom to the captive nations of Eastern Europe.
