Apart from a perfunctory concluding section on the Middle East, the rest of the speech was about Europe and NATO. It was here that Margaret Thatcher came fully into her own, delivering a series of unrepentant hammer blows for the cause that was largely responsible for her downfall. In fact, here we find embedded within the sprawling survey the guts of a genuine theme speech. And the unambiguous theme was this: Stay with the tried and the tested—national sovereignty, NATO, American leadership, free trade—and be not tempted by the dangerous utopian notion of a European superstate.
Not only does Mrs. Thatcher spurn the idea that NATO’s role is over with the end of the cold war, but she argues for its enlargement. Those Eastern European countries which have left the Warsaw Pact should be given associate membership in NATO, she said, and the Organization should assume out-of-area responsibilities. As for the European Community, its true political mission is not to press for unity but “to anchor new and vulnerable democracies more securely to freedom and to the West,” and to that end it should offer full membership to any country of Eastern or Central Europe that opts for democracy and the free market. In the realm of foreign, defense, and economic policies, Mrs. Thatcher believes that the call for a united, single European policy is a call for exclusiveness, self-absorption, and protectionism, at the expense of cooperation with the United States and openness to the world.
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