I have always revered Margaret Thatcher. Her being the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the 20th century and the only woman who have held the office broke down the idea of gender stereotypes. So I was happy to hear that the Danube Institute was organizing a lecture about her and her foreign policy.
The lecture was given by Christopher Collins, the director of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. He had worked with Lady Thatcher since 1992 and edited her memoirs. The Foundation has funded the distribution of The Complete Public Statements of Margaret Thatcher 1945-2000, an Oxford University Press CD, offering the full text of every public statement Lady Thatcher has ever made, rendering her political thought and record in office the most accessible of any major political figure. They are also developing a website to place a significant proportion of the disk and other public papers online.
The lecture was based on newly-released documents from British, American and Hungarian archives to examine the policy of the British and US governments towards Hungary.
The Western world's interest in Hungary started to rise in the wake of the martial law introduced in Poland. They were wondering whether Hungary was going to be the next to propose similar actions. The West was divided: the U.S. wanted to take sanctions, while Thatcher harshly opposed them. The extraterritorial sanctions would have resulted in the bankruptcy of the Polish state. Thatcher said that in case one of the East European countries fell, the others would fall with it, and no one could predict how much damage this would do to the West. Instead, they should focus on Western-friendly countries in the Eastern Bloc.
After winning her second election, she decided to review British foreign policy, and became less strict. Because it was election year in the U.S, and the crisis was deepening in the Soviet Union, she realised that she now had a chance to exert influence on history. They arrested a KGB agent in the U. K., whose task was to find out if the West wanted to strike the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. Thatcher thought if the Soviets were this scared, maybe the West should recalibrate and promote greater contact with the East. She accepted the long-standing Hungarian invitation to visit the country in 1984. She was the first British Prime Minister to visit Hungary. Her view was that ideological differences between the East and the West should not mean that they could not learn to live with each other: these differences, nevertheless, had to be expressed clearly. She did not want to be another Kissinger whose idea of international politics was one of cynics playing a hide and seek game.
After her visit, Lady Thatcher gave a speech in Bruges, where she stated that the European Community did not only mean the West, which was but one manifestation of European identity, but not the only one. They should always look on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities, and never forget that European values have helped to make the United States of America the valiant defender of freedom which it has become.
Mr Collins's lecture was delivered in a very entertaining and "listener-friendly" way, and I think we all learned interesting new facts about this period of history.
Kitti Rózsa, undergraduate student, Political Science
