Thatcher's Cold War: The Battle of Ideas

Organisation : AGORA (CY Cergy Paris Université), BABEL (Université de Toulon), CREW (Sorbonne Nouvelle), ICD (Université de Tours) et TIL (Université Bourgogne Europe)

Programme :
While Margaret Thatcher’s embrace of the ‘Special Relationship’ with the United States and the overall trajectory of her foreign policy are well known, I explore the less familiar story of how she used the Cold War to take on her (largely domestic) opponents and to advance her own political agenda. Defining the Cold War as a ‘battle of ideas’, Thatcher saw it as a global fight against Socialism and state control and for both the market economy and political democracy. Tracing the development of her arguments over time, I consider Thatcher’s views on: the Empire and Commonwealth; the European Community/Union (including the centre-right grouping of political parties in the European Democrat Union); nuclear weapons and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; nationalism; and religion. I set Thatcher’s position fully in the connected context of inter- and intra-party politics, and the longer-term development of Conservative ideas, including interwar anti-Socialism. I also provide a detailed examination of a succession of advisors, comprising academics, writers and journalists as well as party figures, civil servants and diplomats, in helping to formulate Thatcher’s position.

Paul Corthorn is Professor of Modern British History at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain (Oxford University Press, 2019) and the Principal Investigator (PI) of the research project on ‘Conservatism and Unionism in the UK, 1968-1997’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and running from 2023 to 2026. His next book, Thatcher’s Cold War: The Battle of Ideas, will be published by Oxford University Press.