Thatcher's Speech to the Czech Federal Assembly

Margaret Thatcher’s Speech to Czechoslovak Federal Assembly
September 18, 1990

Mr President Havel, Mr Chairman Dubcek, Your Excellencies,
Members of the Federal Assembly.

Thank you for your warm welcome and for giving me this
opportunity to address the Federal Assembly. I should like to say a
few words to you first as an ordinary Member of Parliament.

A free Parliament and the rule of law are at the very heart of what
we understand by democracy. We in Britain have had the good
fortune to enjoy them for some eight hundred years. Our liberties
have grown steadily over the centuries and we are sometimes
flattered by being called the Mother of Parliaments.

The history of your Assembly has been different. You have not
inherited your freedom, your fight has been to keep it from being
extinguished, first by Nazi tyranny and later by communist
dictatorship.

There were brief flashes of sunlight—the Prague Spring of 1968 in
which you, [ Alexander Dubcek] Mr Chairman, played such a
memorable role before hope was so cruelly snuffed out. The
pictures of that brave venture are etched on our memory and our
inability to help remains a burden on the conscience of the
free world.

Later, we admired the fearless way in which you, [Vaclav Havel] Mr
President, exposed and opposed, through your plays, the deceits
and injustices of totalitarian rule, and with your colleagues in
Charter 77 fought against overwhelming odds for basic human
rights. That fight was long, hard and triumphant. It paved the way
for the downfall of communism and oppression and for those few
brief weeks last autumn when the people of Czechoslovakia, not
relying on help from outside, but by their own unquenchable
resolve to be free, at last regained their liberty.

It is with a very great sense of respect that I congratulate you on
restoring a free Parliament and on returning your country into the
mainstream of Europe's democracies, where you truly belong.

May I also say, as the British Prime Minister, how much it matters to
Britain to be able to look once again to Czechoslovakia as a partner
and a friend. There is a lot of history between us. President Masaryk
used to trace our relationship back to 1382 and the marriage of our
King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia.

But even then the links were not only dynastic but practical as well,
because in the 1350s it seems that silver-miners came from
Bohemia to demonstrate their skills in England—an earlier version,
one might say, of the Know-How Fund.

The ties between our philosophers, our historians, our writers, have
always been strong, from John Huss and Comenius, to the many
Czechoslovak academics and scientists who found a home in British
universities during this troubled century.

In the arts, we owe you an enormous debt. To cite one example, the
finest record of London as it was before the Great Fire of 1666 is
found in the engravings of the celebrated artist, Vaclav Hollar.
We admire the music of Dvorák and Janácek and Smetana, with
its echoes of the deepest feelings of your country and your people.

In this century the fate of our two nations became even more
closely linked. Two great statesmen—Masaryk and Benes—built the
foundations of an independent Czechoslovakia while in exile during
the First World War in London. Masaryk, who always looked kindly
on his adopted home, wrote in his memoirs:

"English culture I hold to be the most progressive and the most
humane, not that I think all the English are angels. But in their
civilisation, the Anglo-Saxons have expressed humanitarian ideals
the most carefully in theory and have practised them in higher
degree than other nations."

Mr Chairman, I am afraid we have not always lived up to that
tribute. We failed you in 1938 when a disastrous policy of
appeasement allowed Hitler to extinguish your independence.
Churchill was quick to repudiate the Munich Agreement, but we still
remember it with shame.

Fortunately from 1939 on, we followed the advice of President
Benes who wrote:

"When the fate of dynasties, regimes, states or nations is at
stake, half-measures and compromises have never helped and
never will."

Under Churchill we rose up against tyranny and oppression and
fought from the very first day of the Second World War until the
very last, a war in which many Czechoslovak airmen and soldiers
came to Britain and fought valiantly alongside us.

We were honoured and delighted that some of those brave men or
their widows were in Britain last week for the Battle of Britain
celebrations. And thanks to your revolution, many of them are now
honoured in their own country for the first time.

I was also proud to lay a wreath yesterday at the Memorial to some
of our forces who fought and gave their lives in your country. Your
decision to commemorate that wartime association by re-naming
one of the squares in this beautiful town after Winston Churchill will
be a lasting memory of our wartime comradeship which we cherish,
for it expressed the true spirit of both nations.

It is in that spirit that Britain wants to help you through the difficult
period which lies ahead, as you restore free institutions and a free
economy to your people.

When your President came to Britain on a very successful visit in
March, he said that Czechoslovakia needed ideas, cooperation and
investment rather than charity. We can and will provide those things
and a start has been made through the know-How Fund.

And I hope my visit will encourage our businessmen to come here
and invest. They will have in mind the tremendous reserves of skill
and enterprise which made Czechoslovakia in the 1930s one of the
great industrial powers of Europe, reserves which will now be
harnessed to renew your strength.

But what gives us the greatest pleasure, Mr Chairman, is to see
Czechoslovakia, and indeed Poland and Hungary, return once more
to their rightful place in Europe.

In 1948, as he watched the Iron Curtain come down, Winston
Churchill spoke of the need for a new unity of Europe from which
no nation would be permanently outcast.

We never accepted during the Cold War years that Eastern Europe
should be permanently outcast, although none of us, myself
included, expected to see the collapse of communism come so
swiftly and so dramatically.

Now that the Cold War is dead, and the barriers down, we must not
lose time. The momentum which brought your freedom must now
be harnessed to the task of reuniting Europe.

This is no time for the European Community to say that it is too
concerned with its own development to take the longer view. We
must grasp the opportunity which these great events in Eastern
Europe give us to build afresh.

We should also pay due tribute to the courage of President
Gorbachev, without whose vision these events could not have
happened. But victory is not an end, it is a beginning. The first task
is to ensure that democracy takes root.

It is not just a matter of establishing Parliamentary institutions, the
powers of government must be limited, the rule of law must be
firmly established, and people need to become accustomed once
more to exercising personal responsibility.

In your celebrated New Year's Address, Mr President, you said, and
it could not be put more eloquently:

"The best government in the world, the best Parliament and the
best President cannot achieve much on their own and it would be
wrong to expect a general remedy from them only. Freedom and
democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from
us all."

That is the real challenge. And I am sure that Czechoslovakia's
people, with their long-established democratic traditions, are well
placed to meet it.

The second essential is the market economy. The lessons we have
all learned from experience since the last war is that regulation and
central control of an economy do not lead to prosperity. It is
ordinary enterprising people, given the freedom to follow their
natural instincts in a system where markets are allowed to operate,
who make themselves and their country prosperous.

Czechoslovakia has chosen this route and we admire the bold
economic reforms which you are undertaking, painful as their
short-term consequences may be. But then reform that is effective
is usually painful. People will always preserve and endure hardship
if they understand that it will lead to a better life. And they see the
way people live, the freedom, the prosperity they enjoy, in the
countries which practise the economies of liberty. As they see that,
they will surely feel that a measure of sacrifice is worthwhile if it
brings a better future for their children.

Your friends will help. Last week a team from Britain arrived in
Prague to advise on privatisation on the basis of our own
experience of its benefits over the last eleven years. We have been
pioneers in this field and I can tell you—it works.

But in case you should conclude from this that uniting Europe
requires you and the other countries of Eastern Europe to make all
the effort while we in Western Europe sit comfortably and wait, let
me make clear that it cannot and must not be like that.

A few weeks ago in the United States, I proposed—and I repeat
today—that the European Community should declare unequivocally
that it is ready to accept all the countries of Eastern Europe as
members if they want to join, when their democracies are strong
enough and when democracy has taken root. The Association
Agreements which we have offered are intermediate steps but there
must be the prospect of full—and I mean full, not second-class—
membership for all European countries who wish to join us
(applause) and just as the Community reached out in the 1970s to
strengthen the new democracy in Greece, in Spain and in Portugal
by offering them membership, so in the 1990s we should be ready
to open our doors to the countries of Eastern Europe and that
means that we for our part must create the sort of Community
which you and the others in Eastern and Western Europe truly want
to join, a European Community which is fair, which is open, which
preserves the diversity and nationhood of each of its members.

No-one can travel in Eastern Europe without experiencing the
desire to get away from bureaucracy and central control and
without experiencing the strength of national feeling.

There is a very good historical analogy. When, in 1848, plans were
being discussed in Frankfurt to unite all German-speaking peoples,
the Czech historian, Frantisek Palacky, refused to take part saying:
"We Czechs existed before Austria and we shall continue to exist
after she has gone!" One could repeat today those words in a
slightly different context:

"Czechs and Slovaks existed before Communism and will be there
long after it has become a memory!" (prolonged applause and
cheers)

The other institution which can help us to unite Europe is the
Helsinki Accords. They brought hope to you and gave the West the
legal basis on which to insist that Communist governments honour
their commitments to human rights. Today, political reform is
progressing so fast, that we should strengthen and extend the
Helsinki Process first to ensure those rights and second, to enlarge
political consultation throughout the whole of Europe, including
also the United States and the Soviet Union. A year ago, who would
have thought I could stand here and make that statement?

Mr. Chairman, I have made a proposal for a European Magna Carta
to be agreed at the Summit in Paris this Autumn. Like its great
predecessor in the year 1215, this would be a landmark of freedom
from tyranny and a guarantee of fundamental liberties and I hope
the proposal will have wide support in Eastern Europe. If we can
create a great area of democracy stretching from the West coast of
the United States right across to the Soviet Far East, that would
give us the best guarantee of all for security because democracies
do not go to war with each other! (applause)

The CSCE is the only body which brings together all the European
countries as well as the United States and the Soviet Union and we
should fashion it into an institution where regular political
consultation takes place not only about Europe's problems but
those of the wider world as well.

We should also look for permanent sites for the Helsinki
institutions. Your offer to host one of them in Prague is welcome
and for my part, I should be happy to see it taken up.

I do not see the CSCE as offering a defence for Europe. Security is
founded not only on ideals but on the will and the capacity to
defend them with adequate military strength and for that we in the
West will continue to rely on NATO, which has proved its worth, but
that does not mean we have to stand fast on the status quo. The
London Summit last June looked ahead to changes in NATO's
strategy and force structures and to further far-reaching
conventional arms control.

One key objective is this and one that Czechoslovakia knows only
too well: it is to prevent any nation having disproportionate military
power on our Continent. Limiting the offensive capability of forces
in Europe will make it a safer and more stable place for all of us.

Mr. Chairman, my theme has been the need for unity and nothing
better illustrates its benefits than the world's response to Iraq's
invasion of Kuwait. Czechoslovakia of all countries needs no
reminding that nations have to stand up to bullies and do so at
once.

In contrast to 1938, the United States, Europe and indeed the wider
world, have responded with an impressive display of unity to
Saddam Hussein's aggression. The United Nations Security Council
has acted swiftly and effectively in the way that its founders
intended and the other day, we saw the [ George Bush] President of
the United States and the the [ Mikhail Gorbachev] President of the
Soviet Union stand together in Helsinki to demand Iraq's withdrawal
and the restoration of Kuwait's legitimate government. In that new
willingness to act together lies great hope for future peace,
particularly here in Europe.

Mr. Chairman, it is a privilege to be invited to come here and talk to
you and I could go on and make many more points but as a
parliamentarian, I know very well the virtue of short speeches
(applause) so may I put to you one final thought:

Over the past forty years, we have grown accustomed to a divided
Europe in which nothing much changed. There was little impetus to
think constructively or adventurously about the future of our
Continent. Now, all of a sudden, we have an opportunity to do just
that but let us do it in a way which is true to Europe's traditions, not
according to some abstract intellectual concept.

At the time when the world was divided into great empires—Sung
China, the Ottoman Empire, the Mogul Empire—Europe developed
the small state, sometimes based on the city, sometimes on the
kingdom. While the empires I have referred to imposed a uniform
system on all their peoples, it was the diversity of these small states
that accounted for Europe's great artistic and intellectual
renaissance, its Industrial Revolution, its love of freedom.

Europe's tradition is of the questioning spirit in the arts, the
sciences and in politics, not as arid or destructive criticism
but always seeking positive answers. That spirit of variety, of love
of freedom and justice, of variety rather than monotony, of active
debate rather than passive acceptance, is very much part of
Czechoslovakia's history—it was there in the year 1618 just as
much as 1968 and 1989—so let us preserve our diversity; it is what
gives life its colour, its originality and its meaning. Let us be united
not by building new bureaucratic empires but by our attachment to
democracy and the rule of law, by our desire to preserve Europe's
heritage, by our resolve never again to see Europe sundered into
two hostile camps.

Mr. President, I have spoken today of a new Magna Carta for
Europe. It was our Magna Carta drawn up nearly eight hundred
years ago. It dealt with the grievances of the time in a practical way.
It gave legal redress for the wrongs of a feudal age, but it was
expressed in language which has had its impact on future
generations. It put into words the spirit of individual liberty which
has influenced our people ever since.

In its thirty-ninth clause, perhaps the most important of all, we find
the guarantee of freedom under the law. This is what it said but
remember it was nearly eight hundred years ago:

"No free man shall be taken, imprisoned, outlawed, banished or in
any way destroyed, nor will we proceed against or prosecute him,
except by the lawful judgement of his peers and by the law of the
land." (applause)

These words have echoed down the centuries and their constant
repetition helped powerfully to shape our national character.

You yourself have said, Mr. President, that Magna Carta was a
source of inspiration for Charter 77 and for your long campaign for
human rights in Czechoslovakia and so today, I would like to
present you and leave with you a facsimile copy of the Magna Carta,
to you, Mr. President, in recognition of the role you and many other
men and women of fearless spirit and dauntless courage have
played in the transformation of your country and through you, to
the Czech and Slovak peoples as we welcome you back into the
family of free nations, to be held in safe keeping by this Federal
Assembly as you, the elected representatives of your people, set
about your great task of creating lasting freedom and democracy in
your beloved country. Thank you for the honour of addressing you
(prolonged applause).

Margaret Thatcher. "Speech to Czechoslovak Federal Assembly," speech, Prague, Czechoslovakia, September 18, 1990, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, Archive, Thatcher Foundation (accessed May 15, 2008).