Restoring Britain to the heart of Europe – and acquiring a key ally too: John Major’s March 11, 1991 Bonn speech

Ludlow, N. Piers ORCID: 0000-0002-4883-4536 (2024) Restoring Britain to the heart of Europe – and acquiring a key ally too: John Major’s March 11, 1991 Bonn speech. In: Gehler, Michael, Guasconi, Maria Eleonora and Pierini, Francesco, (eds.) Narrating Europe: Speeches and Speakers on European Integration II from 1947 – 2022. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft. ISBN 9783756001026

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Abstract

John Major’s Bonn speech is best remembered for its soundbite about putting Britain ‘at the very heart of Europe’ but also, more generally, for seeking to demonstrate how much the new Conservative government’s approach to the European Community (EC) was going to diverge from that of its predecessor. So this chapter will assess Major’s speech partly by measuring how it departed from Margaret Thatcher’s much more famous – if not notorious – Bruges speech in September 1988, but also picking up on a number of striking similarities. But as I will go onto argue, the speech was not only about signalling a change of approach in terms of Britain’s European policy, important though this was. It was also a very deliberate attempt to build a much stronger link between Britain and Germany in general and the Conservative Party and the German Christian Democrats (CDU) in particular. As such I will also cast a backward glance at a much earlier and less well-known Thatcher speech, namely the one that she gave in Hannover in May 1975. This also constituted an attempt to forge better ties between the two centre-right parties, then both in opposition. Here too, though, there are vital differences between the two speeches and their consequences that will be important to explore. Major, I will suggest, approached the task of building bridges to Bonn with a seriousness that was very different from that of Thatcher. It is thus all the more striking that this bid to forge a lasting intra-party alliance has now been so expunged from British collective memory that the Bonn speech itself does not feature in Major’s well-curated online collection of speeches.

Item Type:	Book Section
Official URL:	https://www.nomos-shop.de/en/p/narrating-europe-gr...
Divisions:	International History
Subjects:	J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) > JN101 Great Britain J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Date Deposited:	02 Dec 2024 13:21
Last Modified:	02 Dec 2024 13:27
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/126213

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