Rob Blackhurst

Review of Statecraft by Margaret Thatcher

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd (2 April 2002)

Global Thinking - the Foreign Policy Centre Newsletter

Statecraft shows that the Hard Right hasn't understood the consequences of Globalisation.

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Margaret Thatcher's Statecraft reads like a wish list dreamt up at a Republican Party hog-roast. This 500 page country-by-country guide to sorting out the world's problems marks her final transition from British patriot to cheerleader for the American Right. Strangely, for someone so obsessed with sovereignty, she now sees Britain as the 51st state with identical interests to those of the US. And after a decade in the company of Texan oil barons, the Heritage foundation and Richard Perle, she shares their world-view. American unilateralism is not only inevitable, it's desirable. Coalition building (like that assembled during the Gulf War) can only weaken American power and compromise its objectives. International law hands over power to the bad guys. Global warming is a ruse by the Anti-American left to tax consumption.

But though Statecraft occasionally feels like it has been assembled by committee (standard-issue anecdotes can be seen coming for miles), it is, in places, readable and stylish compared to the longuers of The Downing Street Years. And it's not all territory annexed by the hard right. Her criticisms of Clinton for refusing to allow bombing below 15 000 ft during Kosovo are justified. Equally persuasive is her warning that nuclear proliferation will allow rogue states to abuse human rights without fear of Western intervention.

Like the other Cold Warriors in the White House, Thatcher has a spring in her step. She is relishing the return to a world of realpolitik, of "risk, conflict and latent violence". All too conveniently she writes off the nineties as an era in which "internationalism" became a decadent distraction that blinded the West to its interests.

But she fails to acknowledge that the nation state alone cannot protect us from this dangerous world. Globalization does not, in her formulation, "prevent Governments from "doing what they shouldn't be doing anyway" - it stops them from protecting citizens against environmental degradation and conflict. And the Thatcher imagination is so pre-occupied with dictators polishing their weapons that she won't acknowledge that the biggest threat comes from groups within failed states – where Government is too weak rather than too strong. It is difficult to see how her call for a return to cold war levels of military spending would protect America from men on planes with wire-cutters. For all her criticisms of abstraction in international law and the politics of the continentals, she's prepared to follow the will'o the wisp that is the "war on international terrorism" without a murmur.

Most of the publicity (and advance) for Statecraft were inevitably earned by the chapters on Europe. Even here some of her attacks on a manufactured sense of European cultural identity are well made. Just because there a political reasons to have a European Union, there is no reason to pretend that "Beethoven and Debussy, Voltaire and Burke, Vermeer and Picasso, Notre Dame and St Paul's" are part of a unified heritage. But here again she refuses to acknowledge the EU's practical achievements: the sense of a wider European identity undeniably provided a stabilizing force for former soviet states after the fall of the iron curtain. Too often, her dislike for European political institutions seems inseparable from a dislike of Europeans. Germans, we learn, have a "marked inability to limit their ambitions or respect their neighbours", the Spanish "still have an inferiority complexity about the Armada" and, after all, "The Nazis spoke in terms that may strike us as eerily reminiscent of euro federalists".

This Spectatorish fogeyism prevents Statecraft from saying much that is valuable about the modern world. Even her evocations of America are based on an orderly society of entrepreneurs who go "hunting and trapping" rather than the contemporary reality of a land where more young Black men go to Prison than go to college and where the porn industry makes more money than Hollywood. In her failure to grasp the consequences of globalization, Thatcher demonstrates the same quality that she attributes to European politicians: "a particularly shallow understanding of what constitutes Western civilization and underpins Western progress".