Britain Likely to Regain a European Orientation : Policy: Thatcher had held the nation back from march toward unity. Many believe a change is overdue.

The resignation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher seems certain to swing Britain into the mainstream of European politics in a crucial period of the Continent’s economic and political integration, battling to help shape its future rather than resisting it.

Although none of the three contenders for the leadership of the ruling Conservative Party is as stalwart a “European” as a French, Italian or German politician might be, each is committed to the concept of “Britain in Europe.”

In campaign statements on Friday, the three candidates--Douglas Hurd, John Major and Michael Heseltine--each declared his intention to keep Britain at the heart of decisions on European unity to guard its interests without sacrificing sovereignty.

“In Europe, Britain needs to protect her interests while continuing with our partners to hammer out the shape of the new Europe,” Hurd said. “There is no contradiction between the two. We have many supporters in Europe for a pragmatic approach, which is right for our country and for others, too.”

While calling for a gradual approach, Major confidently predicted that the results of the forthcoming European Community summit negotiations in Rome on further economic integration would be acceptable to the House of Commons--although Thatcher had virtually condemned them in advance.

None of the three contenders, in fact, shares Thatcher’s view of Europe as “positively teeming with ill-intentioned people,” as Geoffrey Howe, her former deputy, put it in his biting resignation speech earlier this month, and each sees an imperative for Britain to participate in the formation of a unified market planned for 1992.

“British irrelevance in Europe should cease with the election of a new Conservative Party leader,” said Ralf Dahrendorf, a leading commentator on European affairs. “Under Thatcher, Britain had lost its impact on Europe, except in terms of slowing things down and obstructing progress.

“She looked after Britain’s interests, but only those that mattered today and perhaps tomorrow. Britain consequently followed rather than preceded most developments. That should change, for the men who would succeed her do recognize and accept the reality of Europe, which Thatcher denied,” he said.

“And the lesson of Thatcher’s fall, which came as much on the issue of Britain in Europe as on any other, will not be lost on them. The political imperative will be to get European policy right.”

But that, analysts agree, means a reorientation of British foreign policy to emphasize the importance of Europe and, consequently, to reduce that of the “special relationship” with the United States that Thatcher made so central for Britain over the past decade.

To many here, a European orientation and such close ties with the United States are all but mutually exclusive, and to pursue one policy option means foreclosing the other.

“The special relationship does arise, simply and objectively, from the fact that Britain and America share a language and a culture,” said Kenneth R. Minogue, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, “but Thatcher took it much further because of her close personal relationship with (former President Ronald) Reagan.

“I won’t say that Britain’s policy was badly skewed, but it was affected by her personality. And it follows that when she departs, the policy will change, too.”

Of immediate concern to the United States is British support for the American-led forces confronting Iraq in the Persian Gulf. Two of the candidates to succeed Thatcher--Hurd and Major--have been members of her Cabinet and participants in the decisions to deploy British troops in the gulf. The third, Michael Heseltine, has not included it among his criticisms of Thatcher’s leadership.

“We are committed in the gulf, and we will remain committed there, I believe,” a senior British diplomat said Friday. “There are fundamental issues at stake, and none of the candidates differs from the prime minister on them in any significant way.

“But if you look to the future, you can see that an integrated relationship with Europe--decisions taken jointly at meetings of our foreign ministers, leaders in close consultation, collaboration among our diplomats--will mean that we will not be making policy with Washington first and foremost, but approaching Washington secondarily and as ‘outside ally’ and even, say on trade issues, as a rival.”

These changes are overdue, many here believe, for the conviction is strong that Britain’s future lies with Europe rather than as “Little England.”

“Europe is the most important issue that faces any British government today,” said Hugo Young, Thatcher’s biographer. “It is part of the everyday life of every person, and it comes into so many things now that Europe is a domestic and not a foreign policy issue.”

The authority of the European Community already extends well beyond major political and economic issues as its officials set legally binding standards for food products, environmental protection and commercial transport.

Minogue argued that Thatcher had valid points in her criticism of the European Community and its burgeoning bureaucracy.

“She was against delegating powers to European assemblies that had been swept by a lot of idiotic ideas in this century and could be again in the next,” Minogue said. “She was against adding another layer of government while she was battling to strip away some of those we have. And she did not want to commit this country to a lot of policies that were plainly idiotic, such as Europe-wide regulations on whether you can shoot magpies to get rid of them as pests.”

Still, the widespread view in Europe on her resignation was that her resistance to European integration was a major, even fatal flaw.

“There was one major flaw in Mrs. Thatcher’s historical realism--Europe,” the influential French newspaper Le Monde said on Friday. “Even so, certain fervent ‘European’ leaders, including ideological opposites to Thatcher . . . did not hide their secret admiration for a woman who had been known to show them up.

“Her ‘anti-Europeanism’ was due in part to her visceral distrust of a too-powerful Germany, the legacy on the other side of the channel of a long tradition of indirect, occasionally atavistic Germanophobia.”

Young, her biographer, largely agreed with this assessment. “Thatcher was skeptical, and she was franker in her skepticism than anyone else,” he said. “This came from beliefs that are deep inside her--beliefs in sovereignty, in the pound sterling, in nationhood, in our Parliament, even in the Bank of England.

“But Thatcher also had a bias on Europe, and not just one, but a whole set. She did not like Germans or trust them, because she remembers World War II. She does not want to rely on the Continent or entangle ourselves with them, because she felt they were and are unreliable and, in fact, different over there. . . . In fact, she looked for what alternatives to Europe she could find.”

There was also the question of her style in the European conferences. “In her early years, other European leaders were irritated by her; now, they just ignore her,” said Peter Ludlow, a specialist on European communism at the Center for European Political Studies in Brussels. “The chemistry will change, whoever comes next.”

Britain is now certain to play a more active role in formulating European Community policies, according to analysts here, and will pose a challenge to the Franco-German axis that now dominates it.

The community’s 12 members are facing major issues, including a common currency, a joint central bank and a unified financial policy, which must be resolved in the next two years if an integrated European market is to be achieved by the end of 1992.

“The British are going to have to work to cut themselves in,” said a former Italian ambassador, now a business consultant on European Community affairs, “because the game is rather settled now. Thatcher reduced the British to carping critics, writing pages of dissent that became just footnotes in the end, and her successor will have to be very collaborative and committed to establish (British) influence.”

But some diplomats see France and others as welcoming Britain as a counterweight to Germany, by far the largest and most powerful of the community members.

“I question whether Britain can catch up, whether it can reorient itself quickly enough to make a difference,” commentator Dahrendorf said. “That is the major challenge for the next prime minister, but his ‘gut feelings’ will, presumably, be different.”

Thatcher’s emphasis on a special relationship with the United States was also a “gut issue,” Young said.

“By language, ideas, customs, the dedication to a free market--by all that, she felt we were really closer to the Americans than anyone else. Her idea of the U.S. economy as a model of free enterprise was romanticized, for it ignored that crime, the poverty, the social tensions. But she went by instinct, by feel, more than any charted strategy.”

The U.S. relationship had been strengthened immeasurably by the Reagan Administration’s support during the Falklands War with Argentina and again when Thatcher allowed British bases to be used in the U.S. reprisal raid on Libya.

This relationship had a major impact on East-West relations. Thatcher’s willingness to accept the deployment of U.S. Pershing-2 intermediate-range missiles on British territory helped force an agreement with the Soviet Union to eliminate all such missiles. But she had continued to insist on the need to modernize short-range, tactical nuclear weapons despite German calls for their withdrawal and a U.S. belief that they were no longer necessary.

In a pivotal period in East-West relations, however, Thatcher used her relationship with Ronald Reagan and her position as a senior leader and avowed anti-Communist to open the way for some of the most fundamental changes in the postwar period. Meeting President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in December, 1984, just before he assumed the Soviet leadership, she declared: “I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together.”

“She introduced Gorbachev into polite society, as it were,” but she did not make him what he is as she prefers to assume, said Margot Light, a Soviet specialist at the London School of Economics. “The changes under way in the Soviet Union would have produced the agreements that have been reached, but Margaret Thatcher did hasten that day by getting the West to listen harder, sooner.”

Gorbachev, addressing a news conference in Moscow on Friday, recalled his old friend this way: “She was a major phenomenon in world politics, not just in the life of Britain. History has yet to do justice to this politician.”

WHO’S NEXT?: Three candidates to succeed Margaret Thatcher are busy seeking support. A22