No winners in Athens
Christopher Hitchens
Athens
The cause of redistribution is not one which has, hitherto, been much asso- ciated with the name of Margaret Thatcher. But this week in Athens she has been a positive zealot for fair shares and equality. On the same day that it was announced that Christina Onassis would pay the Greek state well over a billion drachmas in back taxes, as well as a $30 million endowment of a car- diac hospital as compensation for her tar- diness, the Prime Minister swept into the Zappeion Hall to demand only a. slightly larger figure in the form of a rebate for the United Kingdom. As all the world knows, she didn't get it. As I write this, a fierce Parisienne is typing angrily for her readers and from over her shoulder I copy the following:
'On pourrait dire que l'Europe est noye ce matin dans la tasse de the que Margaret Thatcher a offert a Francois Mitterrand au petit dejeuner. Comme un cadeau empoisonne, elle laisse a la France....'
Magnificent stuff. Anglo-French rela- tions are now at the point where they might easily be-depicted in the manner of an anti- que Punch cartoon. Monsieur Grenouille would be depicted with his pince nez and scrofulous little beard, piggy eyes narrow with guile and alight with greed. John Bull would be standing in an attitude of resolu- tion, arms folded and stout legs planted firmly apart. In the person of Bernard In- gham, Mrs Thatcher's spokesman, the perfect embodiment of John Bull has been found. He looks like a bulldog and sounds like one of the rougher characters in a John Braine novel. The mention of the name Mitterrand does something to his grizzled hackles. Forget the Soviet Union and Argentina — Mr Ingham knows the real historic enemy when he sees it.
In point of fact, the French position was much more moderate than most British staff or spokesmen would allow. On the morning of the fateful breakfast, they came Up with a compromise text and I managed to obtain a copy. The first point on the memo, which is headed, `Politique Agricole Commune', or CAP, rather surprisingly reads: 'Acceptance de l'amendement: Britannique concernant Le texte relatif a la Politique d'importation.' Admittedly, French spokesmen in private have the ir- ritating habit of saying that the surpluses are a sign of the success of CAP rather than its failure. But this egotism is not unman- ageable.
Mrs Thatcher at her press conference displayed all her familiar contempt for Compromise. I lost count of the number of times that she employed the words 'tackle' and 'fundamental'. Like Miss Pross, she succeeded in vanquishing Madame Defarge, but only at the cost of going deaf.
All of this can only get worse. The only thing that approximates to a political suc- cess at the summit — a consensus on the admission of the young democracies of Spain and Portugal — will have the effect of adding to the strain on agricultural pro- duction. Already, there is marked French alarm at the prospect of their subsidised communist peasantiy having to compete with Spanish produce. There is a gradual emergence of a 'North-South' problem within the EEC: the poorer and more radical countries of the Mediterranean lit- toral versus the fatter and more centrist regimes of the Atlantic and the North Sea.
There are exceptions to this pattern — Ireland belongs more with the first category, France has its own North-South division, and Portugal is strictly speaking an Atlantic nation. But the distinction is still a useful one, and will be the model for the 1980s.
It is, of course, quite extraordinary to realise the extent to which Europe is a hostage to its yeomen and peasantry. In the most expensive restaurant in Athens there was a contingent of 50 Irish farmers brows- ing and sluicing without thought for the morrow. Ruddy with prosperity and flow- ing with retsina, they gave us a stirring chorus of 'The Croppy Boy' and 'A Nation Once Again'. It turned out that they had come to Athens in order to lobby for the maintenance of the Irish milk subsidy — though milk seemed the last thing on their minds. The able Doctor FitzGerald, whom I later saw deftly taking a press conference, is powerless to flout them. No more can Francois Mitterrand, whose memoirs breathe a love for the bucolic, afford to risk a Jacquerie. Four jumbo-jet loads of Italian cultivators — the flying pickets of the modern age — arrived to make the same point to Signor Craxi, who seemed duly im- pressed.
It was a conference without victors. The only hero, by extensive consent, was An- dreas Papandreou, whose stature as a Euro- pean politician has greatly increased and who laboured mightily for a reconciliation. In a piece of unpardonable rudeness to her host, Mrs Thatcher arranged her press con- ference to clash directly with his — a viola- tion of protocol and a vast inconvenience. When asked if she had had a meeting with him, or discussed Britain's role as a treaty- bound guarantor of Cyprus, Mrs Thatcher replied that she had not had time. I didn't have the strength, after that, to ask her about the British hijacking of the Elgin Marbles.
No soyereign state, and no independent business, would conduct its affairs as the EEC does. In that limited sense, Mrs That- cher is justified in making her housewifely criticism of the way the books are kept. But the whole point of the Common Market is that it is multinational. At different times Britain, Germany and France have all been net donors and net recipients. Meanwhile, the Community has subsidised the political evolution and the economic development of its poorer members and former neighbours.
It is the only serious essay in internation- alism that the modern world has to offer, and its members have far more in common than they do with either the Soviet Union or the United States, neither of whom insist (as does the EEC) that members of their clubs should be democracies. There is reason, then, to doubt the wisdom of a British policy which, like the other famous Punch cartoon of 1940, yells, 'Very well then — alone'.
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