The media have been comparing Angela Merkel to Margaret Thatcher. For some, Angie is Germany’s "Iron Lady" who will bring much-needed reforms to Germany with a hard fist:
»Margaret Thatcher hat damals massive Reformen in England gemacht. Sie hatte einen starken Willen und Überzeugungen. Ich kann mir vorstellen, dass Frau Merkel ebenfalls weiß, was sie will und vielleicht sogar in ihr ein Vorbild sieht.«
Others, like Kuch, believe that Merkel will have to be modern-day Ronald Reagan, restoring dignity and honor to Germany as she cuts taxes.
But are Thatcher and Reagan the right models for Germany? For that matter, was the decade of the 1980’s a golden era of capitalism and freedom? I thought about this decade while reading Karen Armstrong’s book The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. Karen Armstrong – "God’s Historian" – entered a convent as a teenager and struggled to find God for seven years. She renounced her vows and made a long and painful reentry into secular society, where she continued her quest – through writing and historical research – to find God. The Spiral Staircase is the story of that long struggle, and much of the book takes place against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Here is how Armstrong describes the Thatcher era:
"Margaret Thatcher went into Downing Street with the prayer of Saint Francis on her lips: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. In fact, she was highly combative and played on tabloid fears of internal decay. In her very first press conference, she issued a stinging attack on those “who gnaw away at our self-respect, rewriting British history as centuries of gloom, oppression, and failure.” She was going to put the “Great” back into Great Britain. To many she seemed the answer to the long decline of the seventies, but to me she was a symbol of the dangers of certainty. With her hectoring rhetoric, upholstered, buttoned-up clothes, rigidly upswept hair, and unfaltering propriety, she seemed to epitomize an attitude of unquestioned and unquestioning superiority. I remembered my flickering distaste when confronted with certainty in the person of poor, ineffective Miss Franklin. But watching Mrs. Thatcher, I knew that I wanted no such certainty in my own life. Under the influence of Thatcherism, British people became preoccupied by money as never before; some prospered, but others were impoverished. For the first time, large numbers of homeless men and women started sleeping rough on the streets of London. An underpass near Waterloo station, where people erected shelters out of boxes, became known as CardboardCity; there was a soup kitchen for the destitute on the South Bank. In the Middle East, religious certainty led to such atrocities as the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in October 1981; in Britain, Thatcher’s economic and political certainty had pushed people onto the streets
As far as I could see, certainty made people heartless, cruel, and inhuman. It closed their minds to new possibilities; it made them complacent and pleased with themselvesIt also did not work. The new regime in Iran seemed just as oppressive as that of the shah, the murder of Sadat did not lead to a new era in Egypt, and Thatcherism too would prove to be an expensive mistake. This type of certainty was unrealistic, and out of step with the way things really worked. Religious people seemed particularly prone to this dogmatism, and even though there was nothing remotely religious or Christian about Mrs. Thatcher’s regime, the experience of living in “Maggie’s Britain” made me even more leery of faith, dogmatism, and orthodoxy, which so often – even in a good cause – made people ride roughshod over other people’s sensitivities. That kind of certainty had damaged me in the past, and I wanted no more of it."
Armstrong’s recollection of the Thatcher years parallels my memories of the Reagan years. I lived in New York City through the entire presidency of Ronald Reagan, and it was truly a Tale of Two Cities, or the beginning of what John Edwards has called The Two Americas. Unprecedented wealth was being created in the glass towers of Park Avenue and on Wall Street for corporate CEOs and criminal junk bond traders, while the homeless, the destitute and the mentally ill wandered the streets of Manhattan in growing numbers. The 1980s was a decade of greed where the social contract between business owners and employees was broken for good, and would never be restored. Now the main achievements of the Bush administration – tax cuts for the wealthy, preemptive war, the dismantling of the New Deal programs – can be seen as a culmination of the Reagan/Thatcher era. Let’s hope that Angela Merkel finds other models to inspire her.
