Demythologizing Thatcher
While the reaction to the death of their country’s former prime minister has been decidedly mixed in Great Britain, such conflicting perceptions of Margaret Thatcher have largely been missing in Estonian commentary.
With Postimees devoting almost the whole front page of Tuesday’s edition to an iconic image of the former British PM, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves led the Estonian tributes by stating, "Eastern European countries will always remember Baroness Thatcher’s fortitude in standing up to communist regimes and her fight for freedom and democracy in our part of Europe."
Writing for ERR News, journalist Abdul Turay argued Thatcher as showing "tenacity, guts, and bloody-mindedness" among other things in her foreign policy stance "against tyranny".
On Thatcher’s socio-economic policies, former prime minister Mart Laar was at hand to state that her positive influence stretched beyond foreign policy helping to redirect social development to a more "human-centred footing" in Estonia and many other places.
With death, there might be an onus on politicians and journalists to say such things. However, in terms of both Thatcher’s foreign and socio-economic policies these statements give a misleading impression of her debatable legacy and should be scrutinized.
Undemocratic bedfellows
To be mild, Thatcher’s foreign policy underwent serious lapses in its promotion of democratic freedoms.
Following his covert support of the British Falklands War effort in 1982, Thatcher later established a friendship with Chile’s notorious military dictator, Augusto Pinochet. She even supported him publicly as he was placed under arrest for war crimes in 1998.
She also once dubbed Indonesia’s former junta leader, General Suharto, "One of our very best and most valuable friends." British weapons sales during the Thatcher era partially enabled Suharto’s reign of terror, culminating in heinous human rights violations in East Timor among other places.
In 1985, based on the logic of my enemy’s enemy is my friend; Thatcher’s government supported the murderous Cambodian faction, the Khmer Rouge, in their war with the Vietnamese.
Moving to Central and Eastern Europe, Filip Mazurczak in New Eastern Europe makes the credible claim that Thatcher’s role in the collapse of communism has been over-exaggerated. Realpolitik was often deployed in preference to the perceived hard-line idealist stance for "freedom and democracy."
In Poland, once classified German diplomatic documents indicate Thatcher’s suspicion of Solidarity and its leader Lech Wałęsa. Thatcher was seen to give no more than moral support to Solidarity in public.
Moreover, behind closed doors, pragmatism prevailed. As German records reveal, Thatcher’s Foreign Minister, Peter Carrington, had been making the argument that if Solidarity’s dissent was to bring too much instability to Poland, it would then "make sense" for British interests to support what was a repressive Polish communist government.
This penchant for preserving regional stability in preference to the liberation demands of those behind the Iron Curtain was again seen in the failure of the UK to follow the US lead in imposing sanctions on Polish junta leader, Wojciech Jaruzelski, as he instilled a brutal period of martial law on the country from December 1981 to July 1983.
Realpolitik also dominated Thatcher’s thinking on the prospect of German unification. Thatcher initially perceived a united Germany as a possible threat to Britain’s then resurgent international role and a negative development likely to destabilize the European balance of power. These details should cast serious skepticism on those attempting to mythicize Thatcher’s foreign policy as based on idealist principles.
Gaps in the social fabric
Similar scrutiny should be paid to Thatcher’s socio-economic policies. Make no mistake: with an over-unionized and increasingly uncompetitive British economy humiliatingly needing an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan to stave off a public debt crisis only three years earlier in 1976, Thatcher faced a stark task as she first ascended to the premiership in 1979.
Reform was undoubtedly needed. However, Thatcher’s privatization policies were overzealous and ultimately produced only a mixed set of results for British society. Representing an almost cowardly abdication of the reformed potential of British industry, quick-fire privatization led to an irreversible decline in British manufacturing and produced high levels of unemployment in industry dependent regions of the UK.
Little was granted to these regions to help a transition towards replacement enterprises. To paraphrase former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, Thatcher’s austerity policies counter-productively destroyed British manufacturing with income once created by ‘decent jobs’ ultimately replaced by social welfare. For those seeing dignity in employment, this was hardly "human-centred." This dynamic also negatively transformed British society, pitting rich against poor like never before.
The star pupil
Laar positively credited Thatcher as the leader of the "world conservative revolution." In other words, Thatcher was a prominent advocate of what would later be unveiled as the irresponsible deregulation of international finance. With reduced moderation, greedy and unaccountable financiers took center stage. Most of the painful repercussions of this ‘revolution’ have now come home to roost and can be seen in the ongoing European debt crisis.
Linking this to the Estonian context, Laar’s right-wing policies of the early 1990s suited the environment of the time and hence deserve credit. However, with the economy accumulating more to lose during the 2000s, the consequences of continually following sometimes stringent neo-Thatcherite policies were laid bare during Estonia’s economic crash starting early in 2008. Minimal banking regulation unsustainably inflated the economy, meaning the crash was always going to be especially severe when it came (in Estonia the contraction was a huge 19.8 percent of GDP at the peak of the crisis).
Governing politicians are quick to claim credit for Estonia’s subsequent recovery. However, probable longer-term consequences of pre-crisis oversights should be remembered.
As Tallinn University of Technology’s Rainer Kattel and Ringa Raudla point out, this sudden sharp decline in GDP and the internal devaluation that was used to counter it likely increased emigration rates. Both argue that together with societal costs, this threatens to damage further economic enlargement as it risks reducing the future size of the Estonian labour force. Partially inspired by the Thatcher era, these troubling repercussions from sometimes reckless policies should once more be a cause for scepticism rather than unconditional praise.
Eoin Micheál McNamara is an Irish journalist and political scientist who lives in Tartu, Estonia, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tartu's Institute of Government and Politics