Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [473]
For my part I was opposed to political union of either kind. But the only way that I could hope to stop it was by getting away from the standard Community approach whereby a combination of high-flown statements of principle and various procedural devices prevented substantive discussion of what was at stake until it was too late. Within the Community I must aim to open up the divisions between the French and the Germans. At home I must point out in striking language just what ‘political union’ would and would not mean if it was taken at all seriously. Far too much of the Community’s history had consisted of including nebulous phrases in treaties and communiqués, then later clothing them with federal meaning which we had been assured they never possessed. Consequently, I decided that I would go to Dublin with a speech which would set out what political union was not and should never be. This seemed the best way of having all concerned define — and disagree about — what it was.
There was no doubt about how determined the French and Germans were in their federalist intentions. Shortly before the Council met in Dublin at the end of April President Mitterrand and Chancellor Kohl issued a joint public statement calling for the Dublin Council to ‘initiate preparations for an Inter-Governmental Conference on political union’. They also called on the Community to ‘define and implement a common foreign and security policy’. President Mitterrand and Chancellor Kohl chose at about the same time to send a joint letter to the President of Lithuania urging temporary suspension of that country’s declaration of independence in order to ease the way for talks with Moscow. As I took some pleasure in pointing out in my subsequent speech at the Council, this was done without any consultation with the rest of the Community, let alone NATO — it demonstrated that the likelihood of a common ‘foreign and security policy’ was somewhat remote.
I made my speech early on in the proceedings over a working lunch. I said that the way to dispel fears was to make clear what we did not mean when we were talking about political union. We did not mean that there would be a loss of national identity. Nor did we mean giving up separate heads of state, either the monarchies to which six of us were devoted or the presidencies which the other six member states favoured. We did not intend to suppress national parliaments; the European Parliament must have no role at the expense of national parliaments. We did not intend to change countries’ electoral systems. We would not be altering the role of the Council of Ministers. Political union must not mean any greater centralization of powers in Europe at the expense of national governments and parliaments. There must be no weakening of the role of NATO and no attempt to turn foreign policy co-operation into a restriction on the rights of states to conduct their own foreign policy.
To deliver a ten-minute speech with one’s tongue in one’s cheek is as much a physical as a rhetorical achievement. For of course this was precisely the route which political union, if taken seriously, would go. Perhaps only my remarks about heads of state — which were widely reported — added a new element to the barely hidden agenda of the European Commission and those who thought like it. My speech did also have some immediate effect, for it rapidly became clear in the discussion that heads of government were either unable — or perhaps at this stage unwilling — to spell out precisely what political union meant for them. Top marks for calculated ambiguity, however, must surely have gone to Sig. Andreotti, who suggested that although we must set up an IGC on political