Statecraft. Margaret Thatcher

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СКАЧАТЬ peoples. America led; but America had to persuade its friends to follow. This reality reflected a fundamental philosophical difference. The very essence of Western culture – and the heart of both the strengths and weaknesses of Western policy during the Cold War years – was recognition of the unique value of the individual human being.

      Put like this, it is easy to see why knowledge of the Cold War experience is important today. Still more important, though, is the fact that the struggle between two quite different approaches to the political, social and economic organisation of human beings has not ended and will never end.

      Neither the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor victory in the Gulf War, nor the collapse of the Soviet Union, nor the establishment of free markets and a measure of democracy in South-East Asia – none of these has resolved the tension between liberty and socialism in all its numerous guises. Believers in the Western model of strictly limited government and maximum freedom for individuals within a just rule of law often say, and rightly, that ‘we know what works’. Indeed, we do. But equally there will always be political leaders and, increasingly, pressure groups who are bent on persuading people that they cannot really run their own lives and that the state must do it for them. And, sadly but inevitably, there will always be people who prefer idleness to effort, dependency to independence, and modest rewards just as long as nobody does better. There is always a danger that, as Friedrich Hayek put it in his Road to Serfdom, ‘the striving for security tends to become stronger than the love of freedom’.* It mustn’t.

      Otherwise we will find ourselves in the circumstances of which that far-sighted French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, warned, when considering how democracies might incrementally lose their liberty:

      Over [the citizens] stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, father like, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood … Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living? Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choices less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. Equality has prepared men for all this, predisposing them to endure it and often even regard it as beneficial …

      I have always thought that this brand of orderly, gentle, peaceful slavery which I have just described could be combined, more easily than is generally supposed, with some of the external forms of freedom, and that there is a possibility of its getting itself established even under the shadow of the sovereignty of the people.*

      Only if we remain convinced that freedom – the freedom for which we strove in those Cold War years of struggle with socialism – is of abiding value in its own right will we avoid wandering down the inviting but dispiriting cul-de-sac which de Tocqueville describes.

      That is why my old sparring partner, Mikhail Gorbachev, was wrong in what he said in Prague about the alternative to communism which the West offered in the past and which we still have to offer today. The politics and economics of liberty are not a kind of lucky dip from which one treat may be drawn out and enjoyed without tasting the others.

      In truth, the Western model of freedom is something positive and universally applicable, though with variations reflecting cultural and other conditions. The theologian Michael Novak has christened that system ‘democratic capitalism’.* It is a good phrase, because it emphasises the link between political and economic liberty. And it is significant that it comes from someone whose profession is more associated with supernatural doctrines than political programmes. Later in this book I shall try to describe the Western model of liberty more fully.† But perhaps its most important defining feature is that it is based upon truth – about the nature of Man, about his aspirations, and about the world he can hope to create.

CHAPTER 2

       The American Achievement

      MY AMERICA

      The America that I encountered on my first speaking tour after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington was more sombre, reserved and intense than the America I had known. Six weeks after the outrage, with the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban entering a new phase, there was only one issue on everyone’s minds, only one message it was imperative to convey:

      In Britain we know how much we owe to America. We understand how close our countries are. America’s cause is, and always will be, our cause. The message I bring to you today is that Britain is united with America in the war against terrorism.*

      I have now been paying regular visits to the United States for more than thirty years. But there is something more subtle and less explicable than mere experience that binds me to America. I have reflected upon what this ‘something’ is.

      Charles de Gaulle famously remarked that he had ‘a certain idea of France’.† In fact, more accurately, he said that he had ‘created for himself’ that idea. To have an idea of a country is not necessarily to have a distorted view of it. It is, if the idea is a true one, to gain an insight into the mystery of a nation’s identity.

      I too have a certain idea of America. Moreover, I would not feel entitled to say that of any other country, except my own. This is not just sentiment, though I always feel ten years younger – despite the jet-lag – when I set foot on American soil: there is something so positive, generous and open about the people – and everything actually works. I also feel, though, that I have in a sense a share in America. Just why is this?

      There are two reasons. First, in an age of spun messages and fudged options I am increasingly conscious that Winston Churchill was right about this – as about other things – in his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri in 1946:

      We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

      Consciousness of the underlying commonalities of that ‘English-speaking world’ and of its values has never been more needed.

      But the second reason for my sense of belonging to America is that America is more than a nation or a state or a superpower; it is an idea – and one which has transformed and continues to transform us all. America is unique – in its power, its wealth, its outlook on the world. But its uniqueness has roots, and those roots are essentially English. Already at the time of their foundation, the settlements across the Atlantic were deeply affected by religious, moral and political beliefs.

      This fact is unforgettably recalled by the words of John Winthrop delivered in 1630 upon the deck of the tiny Arbella off the coast of Massachusetts to his fellow pilgrims:

      We must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities СКАЧАТЬ