Major

Abstract

Mrs Thatcher waited for the results of the first ballot of the leadership contest on 19 November 1990 in Paris. The conference she was attending was one of great symbolic significance. Agreements were being signed to mark a new era in European security: a revitalized conference on security and cooperation in Europe, with revitalized conciliation and conflict-prevention mechanisms, an arms control treaty to cut back conventional forces in Europe, and a confirmation of German unification within NATO. It included an idea she had particularly favoured for a ‘European “Magna Carta” guaranteeing political rights and economic freedom’. Mrs Thatcher observed that this marked ‘the formal — though sadly not the actual — beginning of that new era which was termed by President Bush a “new world order”’¹

This chapter originally appeared as ‘Defence Policy’, in Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldom (eds), The Major Effect (Macmillan, 1994) pp. 269–82.