Lady Thatcher’s coffin yesterday, in the Crypt Chapel of St. Mary Undercroft beneath the Houses of Parliament in London. (Neal Leon/PA Photos/ABACA)
With Margaret Thatcher’s funeral today, the generation of leaders who played decisive roles in bringing an end to communism and the Cold War shrinks still further.
Millions of anonymous dissidents behind the Iron Curtain helped to bring their system down too — many of them died doing so in countries such as Lithuania, Georgia and Azerbaijan at the last — just as millions of anonymous “peace marchers” in Western Europe tried unknowingly to shore it up.
But the leaders who did the most to challenge Soviet communism were Ronald Reagan, John Paul II and Thatcher.
Mrs. Thatcher’s most significant contribution to the revolutions of 1989 and 1991 (which brought down first the Soviet Empire, then the Soviet Union itself) was her economic revival of the British economy through free-market policies ofeconomic deregulation,sound money and privatization.
Those policies were rooted in the practical economics of a Grantham corner shop and in English provincial Methodism, as well as in the intellectual revival of economic liberalism pioneered by the Institute of Economic Affairs. It was about freedom and opportunity as well as about economic efficiency.
In the early 1960s Thatcher told an IEA meeting of Tory members of Parliament dispirited by the party’s leftward drift that they were in the wrong job if they couldn’t convince voters that the private-sector retailer Marks and Spencer gave them better value than the Co-op or the Post Office. Her favorite quotation from John Wesley was: “Earn all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can.”
The quickest way to provoke her into a passionate tirade was to suggest that capitalism was immoral. She believed that both democracy and free markets rested on the freedom of people to make vital choices about their own lives — and that, given a choice (plus a helping hand where needed), they would choose opportunity, self-reliance and a better life for their children.
That is one reason why extremists of the Left are celebrating her death today. She challenged them not only on practical and patriotic grounds, but on what they believed to be their monopoly on compassion and solidarity. Her attacks stung. She drew many “natural” Labor voters into the Tory column.
The beneficial effects of her reforms, which were to make Britain the world’s fourth-largest economy after a decade, were already evident by the mid-’80s. Because of Britain’s international standing, they had a world-wide impact and demonstration effect, showing that free markets could quite quickly revive the enterprise and “vigorous virtues” (as Shirley Letwin called them in her study of Thatcherism) that had previously seemed suffocated by a comforting blanket of socialism.
Reagan was her great (if subordinate) partner in this market evangelism, as he was John Paul’s partner in defending religious liberty and human rights. Thatcher and the pope moved closer too as the 1980s wore on. John Paul even moderated the Vatican’s traditional hostility to economic liberalism in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus in the light of the market’s revival.
Reagan was the necessary link between both persons and causes. He put America’s strength behind both in a conscious policy of strategic competition with the Soviet Union. His White House adopted a series of national-security directives expanding the policy of applying political, economic and human-rights pressures from Poland to all of Eastern Europe so as to weaken links to Moscow.
Thatcher in Downing Street helped in this endeavor; she was by far the strongest critic in Western Europe of communist repression in Poland and throughout the Soviet bloc. She played an even more decisive role in getting US missiles stationed in Western Europe, encouraging other governments to resist the peace movement and accept them. Their installation in 1984 convinced the Soviets that they could no longer win the Cold War by military intimidation and set the stage for a progressive Soviet surrender on arms control at the Geneva, Reykjavik and Washington summits.
All these pressures squeezed the Soviet Union to the point that it faced a choice between major reform and falling ever further behind the West. It chose a reforming leader in Mikhail Gorbachev, who chose glasnost and perestroika — which soon caused chaos that brought the entire Soviet edifice crashing down.
Gorbachev shares credit with Boris Yeltsinfor closing down the Soviet empire without massive bloodshed. But he wasa consequenceof Reagan, Thatcher and the pope rather than a main cause of the collapse of communism, which he never intended and sought to avoid. As the pope said at the time, “Gorbachev is a good man, but communism is unreformable” — until he, Reagan and the great Mrs. Thatcher reformed it from outside.
Margaret Thatcher is the last of the three to leave the stage. We salute her memory.
John O’Sullivan is a former Post editorial-page editor and former speechwriter for Mrs. Thatcher.