Kontextmaschine

24th June 2014

Post with 87 notes

It’s commonly accepted that Reagan’s breaking the PATCO strike was a big deal, not for first-order reasons, as with Thatcher and the miners, but for the second-order effect of signaling that this was the new normal, and the private sector had the government’s blessing to break their own unions.

A parallel you don’t see mentioned often is the Falklands War. Margaret Thatcher’s best known for her domestic policies, but I’d argue that her most important legacy is in finally halting the erosion of the empire. The Falklands yes, but also rejecting accomodationism in Northern Ireland.

Even some of her most significant “domestic” actions - crushing the miners’ strikes, taking funding streams from the hands of dissident local authorities and concentrating them in Westminster - were in part an attempt to check Scottish autonomy in the face of a very real threat that the United Kingdom might shrink to a pre-1707 rump of England and Wales.

It’s not like the British had ever just accepted the postwar dissolution of their colonial empire in the first place. But American support for decolonization was a major check on British power in this regard, particularly in the tipping point of the Suez Crisis, where America wielded its financial influence to veto the attempt to retain control over the Suez Canal. (Some of the most important British colonies mattered less as sources of direct income than for the control they gave over strategically important naval choke points.)

Reagan’s said to have considered exerting a similar pressure on Thatcher. But he didn’t, the war went ahead. Thatcher couldn’t muster the support to go up against China so Hong Kong eventually slipped through Brittania’s fingers, but since then nothing else.

(Scotland’s holding a secession referendum soon, and as of now the result is anyone’s guess. I dunno though, a lot of the motivation seems to come from the fact that the north of Great Britain’s got a stronger leftist tradition than the south, and the expectation that independence would mean trading Tory austerity for social democratic bounty. Though without an empire at its back, the ability to milk The City - the British metonymic equivalent of “Wall Street” - for cash or favorable bond market terms, or even a strong enough navy to enforce claims on maritime resources, I don’t see where they expect to find the money from.)

Tagged: history british empire margaret thatcher ronald reagan falklands war