No, it isn't News

Various people are going ga-ga over a story in the London Times about Margaret Thatcher's reaction to the possibility of German re-unification in 1989:

Two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev that neither Britain nor Western Europe wanted the reunification of Germany and made clear that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it. . . .

“We do not want a united Germany,” she said. “This would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.”

Details about what was said have just been released from the Russian archives. But Thatcher's uneasiness about German unification, which she shared with the British foreign policy establishment and most of the British press, was no secret at the time, and I read in detail about it years ago, in George H.W. Bush's joint memoir with Brent Scowcroft. Of all the major non-German figures involved, only Bush was a strong supporter of unification from beginning to end. It was his finest hour. Scowcroft admitted in the memoir to his own grave doubts. The whole thing was an exercise in how a big change of any kind, even a really good change, makes people very, very nervous. Although I suppose you have to factor in the historical reasons Europeans had to distrust a powerful German state.

Today's reaction to the Times story is a lesson in how quickly people forget. Now that eastern Europe has been peacefully re-integrated with the west, nobody remembers how scary it seemed at the time, and how many thoughtful people opposed it. "But Thatcher is our hero!" you can hear the young Tories saying. "How could she ever have been against such a good thing?" Because she, unlike them, did not know the future.