We further found that Thatcher's narrativization of Britain's past was strongly influenced by her deliberations with Hugh Thomas at the formative stages of the speech, considered earlier in the article. For example, the Mongol Empire was alluded to in the speech's opening joke about Genghis Khan (see above). References to the frontiers of the state being re-imposed at a European level and a new European super-state exercising power from Brussels proved to be dynamite by sending explosive shock waves around the EC (Wall 2008, 81). Imperial violence was nowhere to be seen in this benign account of what empires could achieve. 
Registered in England & Wales No. With the Conservative Party's transition from the party of Europe to the party of Brexit, the dilemma remains. In February 1989 the first major new Eurosceptic organization, the Bruges Group, was formed to continue the challenge to European centralization that Thatcher had initiated at Bruges, using a selective reading of her words as a Eurosceptic manifesto. Without confronting the counter-narrative openly, this claim marginalized what Ian Manners and Philomena Murray have called the Nobel Narrative (Manners and Murray 2016, 185). Moreover, Thatcher's formative role in negotiating the heavily British-influenced (Von Bismarck 2016) SEA the first significant alteration to the 1957 Treaty of Rome seemed to confirm the view that integration was primarily an economic project and a bulwark against continental statism.
Encouraging Change. The third section provides new insights from the archives into the thought that went into positioning the address to target multiple audiences in the speech's vital formative months. The fourth section explores the battle over policy direction, centring on Thatcher's disagreements with Howe and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Such a framing imported a dominant English view of history into nascent right-wing Euroscepticism, only weeks after Thatcher's Sermon on the Mound in Edinburgh on 21 May 1988 and just months before the controversial and short-lived introduction of the Poll Tax in Scotland, which re-energized Scottish nationalism in both its unionist and secessionist guises. Very quickly, a strong narrative took hold about the Bruges speech, that it was Eurosceptical from start to finish, a narrative in part moulded by Thatcher's increasingly questioning attitude to the Community after the speech which gathered momentum and acclaim from Eurosceptics after her resignation in 1990 (see Powell 2017).
It was those aspects of the speech that were briefed to the press by Bernard Ingham, Thatcher's Press Secretary (Wall 2008, 79). We did this by depicting Thatcher as a situated agent exerting powerful but not definitive agency over the framing and content of British European policy at this time. The language in the speech surrounding America's relationship to Europe constantly sought to bind the West through common ideals from outside as well as inside Europe. This, we suggest, was history with a purpose, a performative framing of the past that, as Thatcher herself admitted, was no arid chronicle of obscure facts from the dust-filled libraries of history (Thatcher 1988). It opens by giving an essential recap of the main contents of the speech. How did we design the research to explain why she said it and how she framed it? We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels. Despite Howe and the FCO's efforts to moderate such a polarizing interpretation and notwithstanding the claim that the British were as much heirs to the legacy of European culture as any other nation (Thatcher 1988) the theme of a certain and lasting incompatibility between Britain and Europe ran throughout the speech. As often happens to lengthy orations of this nature, however (Broad and Daddow 2010), the speech is as popular and well known as it is misconstrued. There are three things article is not. But before we turn to the two main battlegrounds being fought over by the different agents involved in drafting the Bruges speech, we detail the initial skirmishes during the speech's formative months, which provide rich context for making sense of the contents of the final product. People also read lists articles that other readers of this article have read. Powell replied in short order, the next day, that Thatcher was willing to commit and asking for a very good draft for the speech by the second half of July (Powell 1988a). The Bruges speech as it became known (the contents of which are summarized below) would come to have a dramatic impact across UK and European politics in many ways, not all of which were foreseen at the time. Deregulation and fewer constraints on trade (the Thatcherite model in Britain) should be the focus for the Community she said, not the establishment of a European Central Bank. She evoked an idealized America, such as that on offer in Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (2010), constructing it as a place where people went to avoid intolerance and constraints and to seek liberty and opportunity (Thatcher 1988, 4). The Western European Department, Southern European Department, News Department and Policy Planning Staff were all reportedly supportive. This meeting between Thatcher and Thomas proved pivotal to what was said at Bruges in three regards. By closing this message, you are consenting to our use of cookies. For all these reasons, the Bruges speech has come to play a potent role in the UK collective memory of Thatcher and Thatcherism, as well as in public and elite thinking about British European policy (Oliver 2018, 44). We then process trace to the two main battles publicly rehearsed at Bruges: over the Conservative Party's approach to European integration (fourth section); and, reinforcing this, over the desirability of an Anglo-American reading of British history in which Europe occupied a subordinate place (fifth section). The assumption behind situated agency in the study of political decision-making is that even powerful (or seemingly all powerful), conviction politicians such as Thatcher or, after her, Blair (Dyson 2009; Daddow 2011) do not have complete freedom of action to do or say as they wish (applied to Donald Trump's foreign policy-making in Porter 2018). The Bruges speech was a powerful intervention in the emerging conflict over the direction of the second wave of integration from the SEA onward (the first wave being Treaty of Rome to SEA). Third, the Bruges speech came to serve as a lightening rod for Euroscepticism within the Conservative Party (Smith 2017, 34), as well as popularizing the British Eurosceptic tradition more generally (Daddow 2015a; Gifford 2014). The British Approach concluded the address by emphasizing the importance of (a classically British) pragmatism grounded in hard international political realities, as opposed to being distracted by Utopian goals, the aim being to create a European family of nations in which each retains its distinctive characteristics. See also Thatcher 1993) and has served as a template both for modern Euroscepticism (Kenny and Pearce 2018, 117) and many of her successors speeches on Europe from across the main parties (Daddow 2015a, 2015b). There are no overriding reasons why the Prime Minister should make a speech in Europe at present.
It stuck closely to Wall's script with one notable addition. By 1988 the Delors Commission was driving the agenda for further European integration, and there was much work to be done at the time to fill what was perceived at home and abroad to be a strategic vacuum at the heart of British European policy. Margaret Thatcher - Speech to the College of Europe (\"The Bruges Speech\") - September 21 1988\"We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level\"\"Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. On 6 July 1988 Delors had told the European Parliament that he expected 80% of economic and social legislation to be of community origin within ten years (Delors 1988a). The references in the speech to 1688 (the Glorious Revolution) and 1215 (Magna Carta), rather than 1690 (Battle of the Boyne) or 1320 (Declaration of Arbroath), gave centrality to English, rather than British or four nation history, by recalling the political compromise between Crown and Parliament that became the hallmark of the English and later British system of government. (Baker, Gamble, and Seawright 2002, 414). Drawing on newly released archival material, this article reassesses Margaret Thatchers 1988 Bruges speech, widely depicted to have instigated Britain's drift towards Brexit. It occupies pride of place in the historical lineage of modern Euroscepticism (Geddes 2004, 195. Process tracing from the pre-history of the Bruges speech to its final contents permitted us, first, to confirm a lot of what is already known about the address, and, second, to take the analysis in new directions by showing how the government's European policy skirmishes were taken from backstage to front-stage in a sustained assault on Delors's vision for European integration. In the FCO, Wall sought advice on what to include in the speech from two main sources. Sovereignty, whether in small or large amounts, bit by bit, or one fell swoop, was not to be surrendered. For example, she said European values have helped make the United States of America the valiant defender of freedom which she has become and portrayed the West as that Europe on both sides of the Atlantic (Thatcher 1988). Tellingly, Kerr wrote that the criticisms of European federalism were based on a non-sequitur because if anything federalist theory implies decentralisation and economic liberalism: look at the US (1988b, 25). The Europe's Future part reiterated that Britain's future was inside the Community but highlighted the dilemmas the speech sought to address: the practical means by which Europe could remain the preserve of all its members and how the organization could, as Thatcher saw it, forestall becoming ossified by endless regulation. The letter noted that the College of Europe was funded by contributions from member states, including a small sum of 2500 from the FCO (around 4000 today). First, it became the source of the policy battles that erupted between Thatcher and the FCO covered in the following section of the article. In this regard, Howe's view was consistent with a large section of the political class that fully recognized the importance of new systems of governance beyond the nation-state in line with an open regionalism: regional blocs such as the EU are not mere protectionist fortresses, but part of a wider system of new and essentially healthy forms of governance and regulation of the global economy. We begin by recapping the main contents of the speech on the one hand for those new to it and on the other as a refresher for those already familiar with it. It was part of the Europe open to enterprise principle of Thatcher's vision for Europe and an implicit agreement from the FCO drafters that she go with tide of deregulation (Harrison 1988). For Howe, Bruges represented a volte face; he bemoaned that Thatcher had began readopting arguments which she and I had had no difficulty in rebutting in debates over the SEA only a couple of years before (Howe 1994, 538). Although it was not solely responsible (Bale 2011, 22), Bruges contributed to Nigel Lawson's resignation from the Treasury in 1989 (Millar 1993, 342343) and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe's departure from the Cabinet in 1990 (Crines, Heppell, and Dorey 2016, 104), when he accused Thatcher of running increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation (Britology 2018). We contend, therefore, that the intense exchanges over the drafting of the speech encapsulated the two opposing visions at the centre of government over Britain's place in Europe and the world that, to 1988, had coexisted uneasily within the Conservative Party. Thatcher struck an initially conciliatory tone by saying that Too often, the history of Europe is described as a series of interminable wars and quarrels. In short, Thatcher's account of international history at Bruges was designed to persuade audiences of the achievements and merits of the English-speaking peoples. On 22 April 1988, Stephen Wall (Head of the European Community Department in the FCO and Howe's Principal Private Secretary) went back to Kerr with the suggestion that Thatcher accept on the grounds that the occasion would be a suitable one for a speech. What follows is a piece of interpretivist (Yanow 2000; Finlayson 2017) foreign policy analysis centring on the ways in which leaders use political rhetoric to agenda-set in an ongoing national conversation about a given policy dilemma. Although it is beyond the purview of this article to explore the English-British question in detail, it is worth noting that, by anticipating the strength of Eurosceptic sentiment amongst English-identifiers, as opposed to those who saw themselves as British (Henderson et al. In what would prove to be an influential thought in the speech proper, the PPS argued that Progress today rests on moving with world tide of deregulation, openness and competition, not going against it (Harrison 1988, original emphasis). In the Introduction, Thatcher opened with a joke about the courage of those who invited her to deliver the address: it must seem rather like inviting Genghis Khan to speak on the virtues of peaceful coexistence!1 She knew better than anyone the incendiary potential of the speech because, as we will show below, she had worked with her Downing Street wordsmiths to make it so. Most importantly, it allowed an Atlanticist memory of twentieth-century conflict to inform the vision for Europe's future which, for Thatcher, should be the most important pillar of the European edifice. Annexed to the schedule was a two-page document titled Where is Europe Going?, part of a speech Thomas had recently given to Spanish businessmen (most of whom were asleep because it was delivered after lunch) (Thomas 1988). He urged that NATO and the Atlantic Alliance remain the bedrock of European security, but under that protective umbrella the EC should enhance its role and capabilities through the Western European Union (WEU) (Lever 1988). This line was part of a general attack on federalism, evidently reflecting Thatcher's soundings with Hugh Thomas, described in the previous section, which was embodied in the supranational institutions of the Community, namely the Commission and European Court of Justice. She had several speechwriters during her career, one constant throughout 19791990 being Edward Heath's former speechwriter, West End playwright and director Ronald (Ronnie) Millar. In addition, market liberty also enabled cultural diversity, as states diminish in power but variety of peoples, cultures and languages enriched (Harrison 1988). It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality.\"This video was uploaded to YouTube for educational purposes and is part of a series of videos intended for students in the academic course Introduction to International Politics. Our historically-informed rendering of the speech makes it clear that contingency as well as strategy went into the writing of this speech, which became a process for managing Conservative Party tensions over Europe as much as an exercise in staking out fixed or long-standing ideals. In contrast, state power was conceived in terms of a European tradition of dirigisme, which constrained market freedoms. In fact, the Bruges Speech ushered in a more extensive Eurosceptic mobilization within the Conservative Party than had been seen in the early debates on membership. Reflecting the balance of power tradition that emerged in British foreign policy during the Wars of Spanish Succession at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Black 2000, 179), Thatcher (1988) told her audience, using an idea straight from Thomas, that: Over the centuries we have fought to prevent Europe from falling under the dominance of a single power. Despite being notionally independent from the Conservative Party, the Group provided a platform for Thatcher's supporters to mount sustained attacks on the European project at critical junctures (Lamont 1999, 10; Crines, Heppell, and Dorey 2016, 100101).
It is important to reflect on the contingency that the Bruges speech may never have been delivered had Thatcher's diary not permitted. In this sense, the draft should be read as a direct political intervention attacking Jacque Delors, Commission President, and his agenda for further integration (Gowland 2017, 102). Britain And Europe. As Green has argued, therefore, the appropriation of the speech meant that Bruges quickly found itself adopted as a shorthand badge of hostility to Europe (Green 2018). Theoretical framework: Thatcher's foreign policy decision-making, Initial skirmishes: the pre-history of the Bruges speech, Policy battlegrounds in the Bruges speech, Historical battlegrounds in the Bruges speech, https://www.britpolitics.co.uk/speeches-sir-geoffrey-howe-resignation, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/E8008D507B0843D2A10FD4F03205D5E0.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/7C4B2DDEB5CE4B4AB639943D78A556E6.pdf, https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/conservative-party/news/98683/jeremy-hunt-sparks-furious-backlash, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_XsSnivgNg, https://www.ft.com/content/64adcb7e-bfef-11e8-84cd-9e601db069b8, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/26F1D867D16445529C9334B3BEDBAF3A.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/423A5CF9096D4638869E7D4CE326FA9C.pdf, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/03/margaret-thatcher-would-not-have-supported-brexit, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/9C8C0E55501145EC8809E73D71A0D54F.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/38349E198E944BDA9C5D894855B1F275.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/1592F1E9BC524083BD1C8EAFBA14EA96.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/F8FD8C609E71485FA347B079F9FE6AE2.pdf, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/CPS2.asp, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/37A37E4F6F3C453F9F08EE8A11CE0A73.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/94137C5743C54FCC8D7C17FCDF5A3285.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/62B14C5909234221BC9682649A9378AB.pdf, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111049, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/charles-powell-margaret-thatcher-had-failure-and-success-in-europe-but-she-was-right-to-stand-up-for-britain, http://oxfordre.com/internationalstudies/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.001.0001/acrefore-9780190846626-e-255?print=pdf, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/14/boris-johnson-interview-we-can-be-the-heroes-of-europe-by-voting/, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107332, https://www.brugesgroup.com/events/10-events/1297-30th-anniversary-dinner-of-margaret-thatcher-s-bruges-speech, https://www.116ae215f57b47bc40bd-32276aa0a4a9ef306defd1327a583a38.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/880602%20Hugh%20Thomas%20note%20EUROPE%20SPEECH%20THCR%202-11-3-6%20part2%20f18.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/E205690B518E4B7FBAEC8839533ECEE5.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/4F766517443C43DF880C2641EFE76E5A.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/2E24215B28D94335A7BDDEA1D136F46A.pdf, https://116ae215f57b47bc40bd-32276aa0a4a9ef306defd1327a583a38.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/880606%20Whittingdale%20cnv%20HUGH%20THOMAS%20MTG%20THCR%202-11-3-6%20part2%20f16.pdf, Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing & Allied Health. Kerr's comments clearly informed Foreign Secretary Howe's intervention. The over-extension of their powers (insidious in the case of the Commission) was viewed as an attack on the political independence of national governments (Powell 1988b, 27). Second, it showed Thatcher how she could stage her account of a heavily Anglicized version of British history in support of her preferred direction for British European policy, examined in the final section of the article. Our use of archives triangulated against memoirs from the key players fleshes this out in full. Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab. Shifting the focus from Europe's officially sanctioned account of its achievements to NATO so early in the speech signalled the extent to which the Bruges speech was, equally with European integration, an expression of Thatcher's Atlanticism, her credentials as a Cold War warrior and a critique of the limitations of European integration inspired by the founding fathers. The first battle Thatcher managed to win in terms of the historical framing of the Bruges speech was to impose a binary reading of British and European identity/history on the final draft. The Bruges speech was replete with history, which was put to work in the service of an Anglicized reading of British and European history that justified the controversial future vision for integration set down in the straight policy elements of the speech. Ben Wellings http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4621-2431. The theme here was practical change to engender reform in Community practices, particularly on spending and the Common Agricultural Policy to retain public support for the Community's future development. Conversely, much of the Conservative Party, including Thatcher herself, was ideologically drawn to a more traditional conception of national sovereignty, with Britain free to pursue an open seas policy as part of Anglo-America rather than being locked into an organized Europe (Baker, Gamble, and Ludlam 1993, 424). Presaging both the eastern enlargement of the EU, but also the fault-line between old and new Europe as the Cold War ended and security challenges shifted away from central Europe (Levy, Pensky, and Torpey 2003), Thatcher reminded her audiences that beyond that east of the Iron Curtain, people who once enjoyed a full share of European culture, freedom and identity have been cut off from their roots and that we shall always looks on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities (Thatcher 1988). This was inspired by, and reinforced, distaste for any continental scheme prefaced upon harmonization; Britain preferred the retention of national differences and diversity in unity. This article's primary purpose is to use newly released archive material to examine what the Bruges speechwriting process can tell us about how the Thatcher government went about resolving its growing European policy dilemmas in 1988. Instead, or as well as, taking our word for it, readers are encouraged to peruse the speech for themselves or to watch or listen to it online (see Gendler 2017). He maintained (Howe 1994) that she had positioned herself with the gallant but misguided back-bench group of Enoch Powells, Robin Tutons and Derek Walker Smiths, who had fought so long and hard against the European Communities Bill in 1971. We then analyse the battles publicly rehearsed at Bruges. Third, we do not measure the speech's impact on UK public attitudes to the European Community before and after its delivery. The Cold War strategic context and aversion to Soviet political economy loomed large for Thatcher in the Bruges speech (we summarize this as the Bruges speech's Soviet imaginary) as they have continued to do for Conservative politicians since. Thatcher also reflected on the connection between national borders and national sovereignty, saying we cannot totally abolish frontier controls if we are also to protect our citizens from crime and stop the movement of drugs, of terrorists and of illegal immigrants. In other words, we are operating at the nexus between the inside and outside of the speech to promote informed discussion about Bruge's contested place in the post-war history of the Conservative Party and British European policy. 5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG. Europe Open To The World was just a few lines about Europe's role in the global political economy emphasizing that Europe should not be protectionist by removing barriers to trade and promoting the ideal of liberalization to developing countries. Accounts of how Thatcher penned her speeches, including Bruges, did, nevertheless, persuade us of the appropriateness of putting Thatcher front and centre of this account, even as a situated agent. Drawing on some of the key language and imagery running through the Bruges speech, these movements developed a populist narrative of Euroscepticism (Tournier-Sol 2015), aided by the penchant for Brussels bashing (Heath 1998, 710) already circulating in the UK media, tabloids and some broadsheets (see Daddow 2012). It operated as a strategic narrative (Miskimmon, OLoughlin, and Roselle 2014) the strongly framed the prime minister's guiding British principles for the future of European integration that ran throughout the speech in toto. The first piece of advice from the FCO policy unit for the speech neatly summarized the nature of the compromise regarding Europe on which Thatcher appeared to have settled prior to the Bruges speech.
However, opined Kerr in a letter to the FCO Permanent Under Secretary, Patrick Wright, (1988) we can delay no longer (Kerr 1988a). Reworking the Eurosceptic and Conservative Traditions Into a Populist Narrative: UKIPs Winning Formula? Generic allusions to imperial pasts were, therefore, liberally sprinkled through the speech: Thatcher was no Empire apologist. Populism and Sovereignty: The EU Act and the In-Out Referendum, 20102015. The dominant FCO narrative of the Community as a highly effective vehicle for liberalization was overshadowed by a language of threat that echoed Thatcher's Cold War and anti-Soviet priorities, supporting David Green's observation (2018) that To the extent that many Tories thought much about Europe at all in the 1980s, it was more about the Warsaw Pact than the European Economic Community (confirmed in Powell 2017). Thomas's critique of the European project is, we contend, foundational to an interpretation of the Bruges speech for two reasons. However, we suggest it represented an important staging post in this story that remains well worthy of critical reflection. The following section explains how we used the inside of a speech to investigate how Thatcher made foreign policy decisions. As we shall see, the final address resolved these dilemmas in distinctive ways, some of which become apparent from the speech's earliest days in the wordsmiths pipeline. Europe, it suggested, was changing the role of the state, allowing the expansion of liberty against might of member-states. To learn about our use of cookies and how you can manage your cookie settings, please see our Cookie Policy. Treating Thatcher as a situated agent therefore meant we needed to get a feel for how Thatcher went about speechwriting in general and how she tackled the Bruges speech in particular. Conservative Party divisions were evident in the frank debate that played out over Bruges between Howe and Thatcher's team. To illustrate how far Thatcher took on board these views, on his record of the 9 June meeting, the prime minister's Political Secretary, John Whittingdale, flagged up her take-home points: (i) must be positive in order to knock down federalist ideas and (ii) United Europe not European Union National provincial cultures v[ery] important-must not be lost (Whittingdale 1988).
Registered in England & Wales No. With the Conservative Party's transition from the party of Europe to the party of Brexit, the dilemma remains. In February 1989 the first major new Eurosceptic organization, the Bruges Group, was formed to continue the challenge to European centralization that Thatcher had initiated at Bruges, using a selective reading of her words as a Eurosceptic manifesto. Without confronting the counter-narrative openly, this claim marginalized what Ian Manners and Philomena Murray have called the Nobel Narrative (Manners and Murray 2016, 185). Moreover, Thatcher's formative role in negotiating the heavily British-influenced (Von Bismarck 2016) SEA the first significant alteration to the 1957 Treaty of Rome seemed to confirm the view that integration was primarily an economic project and a bulwark against continental statism. Encouraging Change. The third section provides new insights from the archives into the thought that went into positioning the address to target multiple audiences in the speech's vital formative months. The fourth section explores the battle over policy direction, centring on Thatcher's disagreements with Howe and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Such a framing imported a dominant English view of history into nascent right-wing Euroscepticism, only weeks after Thatcher's Sermon on the Mound in Edinburgh on 21 May 1988 and just months before the controversial and short-lived introduction of the Poll Tax in Scotland, which re-energized Scottish nationalism in both its unionist and secessionist guises. Very quickly, a strong narrative took hold about the Bruges speech, that it was Eurosceptical from start to finish, a narrative in part moulded by Thatcher's increasingly questioning attitude to the Community after the speech which gathered momentum and acclaim from Eurosceptics after her resignation in 1990 (see Powell 2017).
It was those aspects of the speech that were briefed to the press by Bernard Ingham, Thatcher's Press Secretary (Wall 2008, 79). We did this by depicting Thatcher as a situated agent exerting powerful but not definitive agency over the framing and content of British European policy at this time. The language in the speech surrounding America's relationship to Europe constantly sought to bind the West through common ideals from outside as well as inside Europe. This, we suggest, was history with a purpose, a performative framing of the past that, as Thatcher herself admitted, was no arid chronicle of obscure facts from the dust-filled libraries of history (Thatcher 1988). It opens by giving an essential recap of the main contents of the speech. How did we design the research to explain why she said it and how she framed it? We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels. Despite Howe and the FCO's efforts to moderate such a polarizing interpretation and notwithstanding the claim that the British were as much heirs to the legacy of European culture as any other nation (Thatcher 1988) the theme of a certain and lasting incompatibility between Britain and Europe ran throughout the speech. As often happens to lengthy orations of this nature, however (Broad and Daddow 2010), the speech is as popular and well known as it is misconstrued. There are three things article is not. But before we turn to the two main battlegrounds being fought over by the different agents involved in drafting the Bruges speech, we detail the initial skirmishes during the speech's formative months, which provide rich context for making sense of the contents of the final product. People also read lists articles that other readers of this article have read. Powell replied in short order, the next day, that Thatcher was willing to commit and asking for a very good draft for the speech by the second half of July (Powell 1988a). The Bruges speech as it became known (the contents of which are summarized below) would come to have a dramatic impact across UK and European politics in many ways, not all of which were foreseen at the time. Deregulation and fewer constraints on trade (the Thatcherite model in Britain) should be the focus for the Community she said, not the establishment of a European Central Bank. She evoked an idealized America, such as that on offer in Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (2010), constructing it as a place where people went to avoid intolerance and constraints and to seek liberty and opportunity (Thatcher 1988, 4). The Western European Department, Southern European Department, News Department and Policy Planning Staff were all reportedly supportive. This meeting between Thatcher and Thomas proved pivotal to what was said at Bruges in three regards. By closing this message, you are consenting to our use of cookies. For all these reasons, the Bruges speech has come to play a potent role in the UK collective memory of Thatcher and Thatcherism, as well as in public and elite thinking about British European policy (Oliver 2018, 44). We then process trace to the two main battles publicly rehearsed at Bruges: over the Conservative Party's approach to European integration (fourth section); and, reinforcing this, over the desirability of an Anglo-American reading of British history in which Europe occupied a subordinate place (fifth section). The assumption behind situated agency in the study of political decision-making is that even powerful (or seemingly all powerful), conviction politicians such as Thatcher or, after her, Blair (Dyson 2009; Daddow 2011) do not have complete freedom of action to do or say as they wish (applied to Donald Trump's foreign policy-making in Porter 2018). The Bruges speech was a powerful intervention in the emerging conflict over the direction of the second wave of integration from the SEA onward (the first wave being Treaty of Rome to SEA). Third, the Bruges speech came to serve as a lightening rod for Euroscepticism within the Conservative Party (Smith 2017, 34), as well as popularizing the British Eurosceptic tradition more generally (Daddow 2015a; Gifford 2014). The British Approach concluded the address by emphasizing the importance of (a classically British) pragmatism grounded in hard international political realities, as opposed to being distracted by Utopian goals, the aim being to create a European family of nations in which each retains its distinctive characteristics. See also Thatcher 1993) and has served as a template both for modern Euroscepticism (Kenny and Pearce 2018, 117) and many of her successors speeches on Europe from across the main parties (Daddow 2015a, 2015b). There are no overriding reasons why the Prime Minister should make a speech in Europe at present.
It stuck closely to Wall's script with one notable addition. By 1988 the Delors Commission was driving the agenda for further European integration, and there was much work to be done at the time to fill what was perceived at home and abroad to be a strategic vacuum at the heart of British European policy. Margaret Thatcher - Speech to the College of Europe (\"The Bruges Speech\") - September 21 1988\"We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level\"\"Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. On 6 July 1988 Delors had told the European Parliament that he expected 80% of economic and social legislation to be of community origin within ten years (Delors 1988a). The references in the speech to 1688 (the Glorious Revolution) and 1215 (Magna Carta), rather than 1690 (Battle of the Boyne) or 1320 (Declaration of Arbroath), gave centrality to English, rather than British or four nation history, by recalling the political compromise between Crown and Parliament that became the hallmark of the English and later British system of government. (Baker, Gamble, and Seawright 2002, 414). Drawing on newly released archival material, this article reassesses Margaret Thatchers 1988 Bruges speech, widely depicted to have instigated Britain's drift towards Brexit. It occupies pride of place in the historical lineage of modern Euroscepticism (Geddes 2004, 195. Process tracing from the pre-history of the Bruges speech to its final contents permitted us, first, to confirm a lot of what is already known about the address, and, second, to take the analysis in new directions by showing how the government's European policy skirmishes were taken from backstage to front-stage in a sustained assault on Delors's vision for European integration. In the FCO, Wall sought advice on what to include in the speech from two main sources. Sovereignty, whether in small or large amounts, bit by bit, or one fell swoop, was not to be surrendered. For example, she said European values have helped make the United States of America the valiant defender of freedom which she has become and portrayed the West as that Europe on both sides of the Atlantic (Thatcher 1988). Tellingly, Kerr wrote that the criticisms of European federalism were based on a non-sequitur because if anything federalist theory implies decentralisation and economic liberalism: look at the US (1988b, 25). The Europe's Future part reiterated that Britain's future was inside the Community but highlighted the dilemmas the speech sought to address: the practical means by which Europe could remain the preserve of all its members and how the organization could, as Thatcher saw it, forestall becoming ossified by endless regulation. The letter noted that the College of Europe was funded by contributions from member states, including a small sum of 2500 from the FCO (around 4000 today). First, it became the source of the policy battles that erupted between Thatcher and the FCO covered in the following section of the article. In this regard, Howe's view was consistent with a large section of the political class that fully recognized the importance of new systems of governance beyond the nation-state in line with an open regionalism: regional blocs such as the EU are not mere protectionist fortresses, but part of a wider system of new and essentially healthy forms of governance and regulation of the global economy. We begin by recapping the main contents of the speech on the one hand for those new to it and on the other as a refresher for those already familiar with it. It was part of the Europe open to enterprise principle of Thatcher's vision for Europe and an implicit agreement from the FCO drafters that she go with tide of deregulation (Harrison 1988). For Howe, Bruges represented a volte face; he bemoaned that Thatcher had began readopting arguments which she and I had had no difficulty in rebutting in debates over the SEA only a couple of years before (Howe 1994, 538). Although it was not solely responsible (Bale 2011, 22), Bruges contributed to Nigel Lawson's resignation from the Treasury in 1989 (Millar 1993, 342343) and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe's departure from the Cabinet in 1990 (Crines, Heppell, and Dorey 2016, 104), when he accused Thatcher of running increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation (Britology 2018). We contend, therefore, that the intense exchanges over the drafting of the speech encapsulated the two opposing visions at the centre of government over Britain's place in Europe and the world that, to 1988, had coexisted uneasily within the Conservative Party. Thatcher struck an initially conciliatory tone by saying that Too often, the history of Europe is described as a series of interminable wars and quarrels. In short, Thatcher's account of international history at Bruges was designed to persuade audiences of the achievements and merits of the English-speaking peoples. On 22 April 1988, Stephen Wall (Head of the European Community Department in the FCO and Howe's Principal Private Secretary) went back to Kerr with the suggestion that Thatcher accept on the grounds that the occasion would be a suitable one for a speech. What follows is a piece of interpretivist (Yanow 2000; Finlayson 2017) foreign policy analysis centring on the ways in which leaders use political rhetoric to agenda-set in an ongoing national conversation about a given policy dilemma. Although it is beyond the purview of this article to explore the English-British question in detail, it is worth noting that, by anticipating the strength of Eurosceptic sentiment amongst English-identifiers, as opposed to those who saw themselves as British (Henderson et al. In what would prove to be an influential thought in the speech proper, the PPS argued that Progress today rests on moving with world tide of deregulation, openness and competition, not going against it (Harrison 1988, original emphasis). In the Introduction, Thatcher opened with a joke about the courage of those who invited her to deliver the address: it must seem rather like inviting Genghis Khan to speak on the virtues of peaceful coexistence!1 She knew better than anyone the incendiary potential of the speech because, as we will show below, she had worked with her Downing Street wordsmiths to make it so. Most importantly, it allowed an Atlanticist memory of twentieth-century conflict to inform the vision for Europe's future which, for Thatcher, should be the most important pillar of the European edifice. Annexed to the schedule was a two-page document titled Where is Europe Going?, part of a speech Thomas had recently given to Spanish businessmen (most of whom were asleep because it was delivered after lunch) (Thomas 1988). He urged that NATO and the Atlantic Alliance remain the bedrock of European security, but under that protective umbrella the EC should enhance its role and capabilities through the Western European Union (WEU) (Lever 1988). This line was part of a general attack on federalism, evidently reflecting Thatcher's soundings with Hugh Thomas, described in the previous section, which was embodied in the supranational institutions of the Community, namely the Commission and European Court of Justice. She had several speechwriters during her career, one constant throughout 19791990 being Edward Heath's former speechwriter, West End playwright and director Ronald (Ronnie) Millar. In addition, market liberty also enabled cultural diversity, as states diminish in power but variety of peoples, cultures and languages enriched (Harrison 1988). It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality.\"This video was uploaded to YouTube for educational purposes and is part of a series of videos intended for students in the academic course Introduction to International Politics. Our historically-informed rendering of the speech makes it clear that contingency as well as strategy went into the writing of this speech, which became a process for managing Conservative Party tensions over Europe as much as an exercise in staking out fixed or long-standing ideals. In contrast, state power was conceived in terms of a European tradition of dirigisme, which constrained market freedoms. In fact, the Bruges Speech ushered in a more extensive Eurosceptic mobilization within the Conservative Party than had been seen in the early debates on membership. Reflecting the balance of power tradition that emerged in British foreign policy during the Wars of Spanish Succession at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Black 2000, 179), Thatcher (1988) told her audience, using an idea straight from Thomas, that: Over the centuries we have fought to prevent Europe from falling under the dominance of a single power. Despite being notionally independent from the Conservative Party, the Group provided a platform for Thatcher's supporters to mount sustained attacks on the European project at critical junctures (Lamont 1999, 10; Crines, Heppell, and Dorey 2016, 100101).
It is important to reflect on the contingency that the Bruges speech may never have been delivered had Thatcher's diary not permitted. In this sense, the draft should be read as a direct political intervention attacking Jacque Delors, Commission President, and his agenda for further integration (Gowland 2017, 102). Britain And Europe. As Green has argued, therefore, the appropriation of the speech meant that Bruges quickly found itself adopted as a shorthand badge of hostility to Europe (Green 2018). Theoretical framework: Thatcher's foreign policy decision-making, Initial skirmishes: the pre-history of the Bruges speech, Policy battlegrounds in the Bruges speech, Historical battlegrounds in the Bruges speech, https://www.britpolitics.co.uk/speeches-sir-geoffrey-howe-resignation, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/E8008D507B0843D2A10FD4F03205D5E0.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/7C4B2DDEB5CE4B4AB639943D78A556E6.pdf, https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/conservative-party/news/98683/jeremy-hunt-sparks-furious-backlash, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_XsSnivgNg, https://www.ft.com/content/64adcb7e-bfef-11e8-84cd-9e601db069b8, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/26F1D867D16445529C9334B3BEDBAF3A.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/423A5CF9096D4638869E7D4CE326FA9C.pdf, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/03/margaret-thatcher-would-not-have-supported-brexit, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/9C8C0E55501145EC8809E73D71A0D54F.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/38349E198E944BDA9C5D894855B1F275.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/1592F1E9BC524083BD1C8EAFBA14EA96.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/F8FD8C609E71485FA347B079F9FE6AE2.pdf, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/CPS2.asp, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/37A37E4F6F3C453F9F08EE8A11CE0A73.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/94137C5743C54FCC8D7C17FCDF5A3285.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/62B14C5909234221BC9682649A9378AB.pdf, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111049, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/charles-powell-margaret-thatcher-had-failure-and-success-in-europe-but-she-was-right-to-stand-up-for-britain, http://oxfordre.com/internationalstudies/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.001.0001/acrefore-9780190846626-e-255?print=pdf, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/14/boris-johnson-interview-we-can-be-the-heroes-of-europe-by-voting/, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107332, https://www.brugesgroup.com/events/10-events/1297-30th-anniversary-dinner-of-margaret-thatcher-s-bruges-speech, https://www.116ae215f57b47bc40bd-32276aa0a4a9ef306defd1327a583a38.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/880602%20Hugh%20Thomas%20note%20EUROPE%20SPEECH%20THCR%202-11-3-6%20part2%20f18.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/E205690B518E4B7FBAEC8839533ECEE5.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/4F766517443C43DF880C2641EFE76E5A.pdf, https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/2E24215B28D94335A7BDDEA1D136F46A.pdf, https://116ae215f57b47bc40bd-32276aa0a4a9ef306defd1327a583a38.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/880606%20Whittingdale%20cnv%20HUGH%20THOMAS%20MTG%20THCR%202-11-3-6%20part2%20f16.pdf, Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing & Allied Health. Kerr's comments clearly informed Foreign Secretary Howe's intervention. The over-extension of their powers (insidious in the case of the Commission) was viewed as an attack on the political independence of national governments (Powell 1988b, 27). Second, it showed Thatcher how she could stage her account of a heavily Anglicized version of British history in support of her preferred direction for British European policy, examined in the final section of the article. Our use of archives triangulated against memoirs from the key players fleshes this out in full. Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab. Shifting the focus from Europe's officially sanctioned account of its achievements to NATO so early in the speech signalled the extent to which the Bruges speech was, equally with European integration, an expression of Thatcher's Atlanticism, her credentials as a Cold War warrior and a critique of the limitations of European integration inspired by the founding fathers. The first battle Thatcher managed to win in terms of the historical framing of the Bruges speech was to impose a binary reading of British and European identity/history on the final draft. The Bruges speech was replete with history, which was put to work in the service of an Anglicized reading of British and European history that justified the controversial future vision for integration set down in the straight policy elements of the speech. Ben Wellings http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4621-2431. The theme here was practical change to engender reform in Community practices, particularly on spending and the Common Agricultural Policy to retain public support for the Community's future development. Conversely, much of the Conservative Party, including Thatcher herself, was ideologically drawn to a more traditional conception of national sovereignty, with Britain free to pursue an open seas policy as part of Anglo-America rather than being locked into an organized Europe (Baker, Gamble, and Ludlam 1993, 424). Presaging both the eastern enlargement of the EU, but also the fault-line between old and new Europe as the Cold War ended and security challenges shifted away from central Europe (Levy, Pensky, and Torpey 2003), Thatcher reminded her audiences that beyond that east of the Iron Curtain, people who once enjoyed a full share of European culture, freedom and identity have been cut off from their roots and that we shall always looks on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities (Thatcher 1988). This was inspired by, and reinforced, distaste for any continental scheme prefaced upon harmonization; Britain preferred the retention of national differences and diversity in unity. This article's primary purpose is to use newly released archive material to examine what the Bruges speechwriting process can tell us about how the Thatcher government went about resolving its growing European policy dilemmas in 1988. Instead, or as well as, taking our word for it, readers are encouraged to peruse the speech for themselves or to watch or listen to it online (see Gendler 2017). He maintained (Howe 1994) that she had positioned herself with the gallant but misguided back-bench group of Enoch Powells, Robin Tutons and Derek Walker Smiths, who had fought so long and hard against the European Communities Bill in 1971. We then analyse the battles publicly rehearsed at Bruges. Third, we do not measure the speech's impact on UK public attitudes to the European Community before and after its delivery. The Cold War strategic context and aversion to Soviet political economy loomed large for Thatcher in the Bruges speech (we summarize this as the Bruges speech's Soviet imaginary) as they have continued to do for Conservative politicians since. Thatcher also reflected on the connection between national borders and national sovereignty, saying we cannot totally abolish frontier controls if we are also to protect our citizens from crime and stop the movement of drugs, of terrorists and of illegal immigrants. In other words, we are operating at the nexus between the inside and outside of the speech to promote informed discussion about Bruge's contested place in the post-war history of the Conservative Party and British European policy. 5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG. Europe Open To The World was just a few lines about Europe's role in the global political economy emphasizing that Europe should not be protectionist by removing barriers to trade and promoting the ideal of liberalization to developing countries. Accounts of how Thatcher penned her speeches, including Bruges, did, nevertheless, persuade us of the appropriateness of putting Thatcher front and centre of this account, even as a situated agent. Drawing on some of the key language and imagery running through the Bruges speech, these movements developed a populist narrative of Euroscepticism (Tournier-Sol 2015), aided by the penchant for Brussels bashing (Heath 1998, 710) already circulating in the UK media, tabloids and some broadsheets (see Daddow 2012). It operated as a strategic narrative (Miskimmon, OLoughlin, and Roselle 2014) the strongly framed the prime minister's guiding British principles for the future of European integration that ran throughout the speech in toto. The first piece of advice from the FCO policy unit for the speech neatly summarized the nature of the compromise regarding Europe on which Thatcher appeared to have settled prior to the Bruges speech. However, opined Kerr in a letter to the FCO Permanent Under Secretary, Patrick Wright, (1988) we can delay no longer (Kerr 1988a). Reworking the Eurosceptic and Conservative Traditions Into a Populist Narrative: UKIPs Winning Formula? Generic allusions to imperial pasts were, therefore, liberally sprinkled through the speech: Thatcher was no Empire apologist. Populism and Sovereignty: The EU Act and the In-Out Referendum, 20102015. The dominant FCO narrative of the Community as a highly effective vehicle for liberalization was overshadowed by a language of threat that echoed Thatcher's Cold War and anti-Soviet priorities, supporting David Green's observation (2018) that To the extent that many Tories thought much about Europe at all in the 1980s, it was more about the Warsaw Pact than the European Economic Community (confirmed in Powell 2017). Thomas's critique of the European project is, we contend, foundational to an interpretation of the Bruges speech for two reasons. However, we suggest it represented an important staging post in this story that remains well worthy of critical reflection. The following section explains how we used the inside of a speech to investigate how Thatcher made foreign policy decisions. As we shall see, the final address resolved these dilemmas in distinctive ways, some of which become apparent from the speech's earliest days in the wordsmiths pipeline. Europe, it suggested, was changing the role of the state, allowing the expansion of liberty against might of member-states. To learn about our use of cookies and how you can manage your cookie settings, please see our Cookie Policy. Treating Thatcher as a situated agent therefore meant we needed to get a feel for how Thatcher went about speechwriting in general and how she tackled the Bruges speech in particular. Conservative Party divisions were evident in the frank debate that played out over Bruges between Howe and Thatcher's team. To illustrate how far Thatcher took on board these views, on his record of the 9 June meeting, the prime minister's Political Secretary, John Whittingdale, flagged up her take-home points: (i) must be positive in order to knock down federalist ideas and (ii) United Europe not European Union National provincial cultures v[ery] important-must not be lost (Whittingdale 1988).