Thatcherism across the Channel

Paris—On Friday, October 6, some two hundred people gathered in a stuffy committee room of the French National Assembly in Paris. Magistrates, politicians, academics, publicists; British, French, German, Spanish—these people, representative of the diversity of Europe, were devoting a whole afternoon to tackling, in a series of brief presentations, the juridical, economic, and cultural aspects of the topic: “Uniformity or Pluralism in Europe.”

Such an event would be routine, scarcely worth mentioning, were it not for the fact that the participants— hosts and guests alike—were linked together by a common allegiance to the ideas developed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in her famous “Bruges speech.” In this speech, delivered in the antique Belgian city which epitomizes the memory of Europe, Mrs. Thatcher had set forth the series of guiding principles which, in her view, would “ensure that Europe does succeed, not just in economic and defense terms but in the quality of life and the influence of its people.”

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Jean-Marie Benoist

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Paris—On Friday, October 6, some two hundred people gathered in a stuffy committee room of the French National Assembly in Paris. Magistrates, politicians, academics, publicists; British, French, German, Spanish—these people, representative of the diversity of Europe, were devoting a whole afternoon to tackling, in a series of brief presentations, the juridical, economic, and cultural aspects of the topic: “Uniformity or Pluralism in Europe.”

Such an event would be routine, scarcely worth mentioning, were it not for the fact that the participants— hosts and guests alike—were linked together by a common allegiance to the ideas developed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in her famous “Bruges speech.” In this speech, delivered in the antique Belgian city which epitomizes the memory of Europe, Mrs. Thatcher had set forth the series of guiding principles which, in her view, would “ensure that Europe does succeed, not just in economic and defense terms but in the quality of life and the influence of its people.”