Thatcher told Gorbachev Britain did not want German reunification
September 11, 2009
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.
In an extraordinary frank meeting with Mr Gorbachev in Moscow in 1989 — never before fully reported — Mrs Thatcher said the destabilisation of Eastern Europe and the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact were also not in the West’s interests. She noted the huge changes happening across Eastern Europe, but she insisted that the West would not push for its decommunisation. Nor would it do anything to risk the security of the Soviet Union.
Even 20 years later, her remarks are likely to cause uproar. They are all the more explosive as she admitted that what she said was quite different from the West’s public pronouncements and official Nato communiqués. She told Mr Gorbachev that he should pay no attention to these.
“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.” [...]
They also show the complete bemusement in the Kremlin in the face of riots across Eastern Europe and the flight of thousands of East Germans to Hungary and Czechoslovakia. And they make vividly clear Mr Gorbachev’s hatred of the old East European Communist leaders — he referred once to East Germany’s Erich Honecker as an “arsehole”,and his naive belief that if they were removed from office, East Europeans would be grateful to the Russians for promoting perestroika. [...]