A comparative essay with citations that combines my research from this trimester and my research from last trimester to compare the stories, perceptions and legacies of female leaders from ancient history and the 20th century.
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher was born in 1925, in the small town of Grantham, England. Thatcher’s father was a grocer and local politician and Methodist preacher. Thatcher was raised on Christian Methodist values and the strong anti-Nazi sentiment of middle-class Britain at the time. At twelve, she won a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school, and another to study chemistry Somerville College at Oxford University. Thatcher was an ambitious and studious child who was often marginalized by classmates because she was too serious. During college, she became involved in Conservative political groups on campus, and was not entirely devoted to chemistry because she had already become interested in the law and politics. Thatcher joined a grassroots conservative group called the “Vermin Club” (a response to a derogatory phrase used by a classmate to describe Conservatives) and quickly found her cause. She attempted to combine her sensible middle class upbringing with her scientific education to define conservatism for herself: “The essential corollary to intellectual skepticism is an empirical approach to practical problems.” Her beliefs were also rooted in the essence of Conservatism: she believed that Britain needed to restore the greatness of the Victorian Era, a time where the country not only made huge scientific advances, but also held many territories and exercised significant cultural and moral influence. After three unsuccessful campaigns between 1951 and 1959, Thatcher successfully won elected office. She served as a radical Conservative Education Secretary between 1970 and 1974, Leader of the Opposition from 1975 to 1979, and was elected Prime Minister by the Conservative Party in 1979. Thatcher won three consecutive Prime Minister elections, the most by any Prime Minister of England, and served as PM for 11 years. Her radical ideology combined with her strong conception of the nation she served gave her a clear outline of right and wrong, and made her a strong, decisive leader in times of social, political, and economic upheaval in both Britain and the world. Margaret Thatcher viewed her nation as the British people who had historically inhabited Great Britain and additional territories that needed to be preserved for them in the midst of increasing foreign competition and the country’s diminishing role in the postcolonial world.
FALKLAND ISLANDS
The Falkland Islands are a small archipelago in the South Atlantic, located to the east of the Argentinian coast. Almost all the residents of the territory are British, not native Argentinian or Spanish, and the British crown has officially claimed the territory as part of the Commonwealth since 1833. The Argentine government had long maintained their claim over the islands, and the British Parliament had even had confidential conversations to negotiate a transfer of power to the Argentinians in the 1970’s. However, the Falkland Islanders expressed their discontent at the arrangement because they identify as British subjects with a strong sense of nationality. In 1982, tensions between the British authority in the Falklands and the militant Argentine government reached a climax, and the Argentine military invaded the islands on April 2nd. As soon as the House was alerted, Thatcher called for a task force and set up a War Cabinet. Thatcher called for and fought a bitter war in the Falkland Islands because she believed the territory belonged to the British living there, and that it must be protected from Argentine nationalists who laid claim to it.
Margaret Thatcher’s decision to defend the Falkland Islands with military force would be arguably the most important and impactful decision of her eleven-year career as PM. She defeated naysayers in both the British and American State Departments. Although President Reagan supported his closest ally, the US attempted to calm the conflict because it worried that the USSR would support the Argentine “liberation.” Many of her own Conservatives believed the British army incapable of counter-attack because of the distance between the UK and the Falklands. The US Navy even claimed that a British victory would be “a military impossibility.” But Thatcher and her government and military prevailed, and brought security to the Falkland Islands. She believed so strongly in the need to protect and serve the Falkland Islanders because she saw them as British people, and the islands themselves as a crucial British stronghold in the Southern Hemisphere. In a speech to Parliament the day after the Argentinian invasion, she stressed the importance of addressing the conflict: “We have absolutely no doubt about our sovereignty, which has been continuous since 1833. Nor have we any doubt about the unequivocal wishes of the Falkland Islanders, who are British in stock and tradition, and they wish to remain British in allegiance. We cannot allow the democratic rights of the islanders to be denied by the territorial ambitions of Argentina.” The victory proved that Thatcher, a woman with no military experience, was capable of military victory. The win was also a win for her radical conservative agenda, which now had a foreign policy victory to back it up. The case of the Falkland Islands was particularly advantageous to Thatcher because the territory’s inhabitants identified solely as British subjects who were under attack by a foreign power. This sentiment gave credit to Thatcher’s Victorian-like foreign policy, which aimed to secure British rule of overseas territories in a desperate manner that could only be equated with a sort of modern colonialism. It strengthened and encouraged her “Liberal Imperialism,” which would become the defining ideology of Thatcherism.
HONG KONG
The territory of Hong Kong is a peninsula and collection of islands off of south-eastern China. The densely populated port city has been central to global trade for centuries, and the surrounding New Territories are Hong Kong’s source of water and natural resources. Hong Kong belonged to Britain absolutely from 1842, and the New Territories had been rented from China in a lease that would terminate in 1997. Hong Kong was strategically important to Britain as a stronghold in the East, even after India gained independence. Hong Kong was also a flourishing capitalist city, a model of what the East might become under the influence of the West. Margaret Thatcher and her government knew that maintaining sovereignty over Hong Kong would require a renewal of the lease on the New Territories. But bordering Hong Kong was Communist China, which perceived the British involvement in Hong Kong as an extension of colonialism and did not recognize treaties made before the Communist revolution. Thatcher, riding high after reelection and her victory in the Falklands, was determined to hold onto the territory and secure freedom and liberty for its people. In 1982, Thatcher re-opened negotiations with Chinese Communist leader Deng Xiaoping on the future of Hong Kong.
Hong Kong, a colonial territory like the Falklands, was not a usual situation for the British. Thatcher could not grant the people of Hong Kong independence because they were already free, and mostly pro-British. The risk of Hong Kong, for the British, was that a free people would be forced into a totalitarian and oppressive state and the government they had relied on would be unequipped to protect them. The Chinese saw the issue as the rectification of history: the Ching dynasty had made a mistake over 150 years ago, and a territory that should have always belonged to China was signed away to a foreign imperialist power. The British government recognized that in a changing world, there was no way for Britain to maintain sovereignty of Hong Kong, and the best course of action would be to negotiate for the continuation of Hong Kong’s capitalist economy and social structure. But Thatcher saw none of this. She believed that Britain had a right to the sovereignty of Hong Kong because of the 1842 treaty and, particularly after the Falklands, she and Britain could not afford to simply cede sovereignty. In a meeting with Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang, she maintained that “confidence in Hong Kong, and thus it’s continued prosperity, depend upon British administration.” Thatcher also knew that a transfer of the administration to the Chinese would trigger a wave of mass migration to Britain, because the people of Hong Kong did not want to be subjected to Communist rule. Meetings between Deng Xiaoping and Thatcher were tense and uncomfortable because both leaders were stubborn and often unwilling to compromise on their positions. Both governments had to maintain their legitimacy in the face of changing power dynamics across the globe. The Hong Kong stock market dropped by 25% as a result of the uncertainty of the future, and the people demanded a response from either government. Her government urged her to concede sovereignty without a fight, but Thatcher refused to until the Chinese gave her a compromise she felt satisfied the needs of the people of Hong Kong. The biographer Charles Moore described her “path toward eventual agreement” as one “strewn with concessions she did not want to make and had to despite herself.” In 1984, Thatcher and Zhao Ziyang signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which transferred sovereignty to the Chinese, but set up the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) so that the capitalist system and Hong Kong currency would continue past 1997. The city continues to be an economic center of the world that rivals New York and London. Thatcher’s unique dedication to the preservation of the Hong Kong way of life made certain that socialism would never govern the former colony. Although, unlike the Falklands, Britain was unable to maintain sovereignty, Thatcher’s prevailing success was the preservation of British clout in Hong Kong. This would not have been possible had she thought of Hong Kong as anything other than a necessary piece in the British sphere of influence.
SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP
An Anglo-American “Special Relationship” has existed, in some form, since the British colonization of America. The relationship was at times one of friendship or alliance against foreign powers, but at others relied on the shared language and complementary political structures between the two nations which have always made them predisposed to similarity. An official alliance began with President Wilson’s entrance into WWI on the side of Britain, ending the US’s isolationist foreign policy. British PM Winston Churchill coined the term “special relationship” in 1944, while the Allies fought the Axis Powers. During the Cold War, the US was the largest force against Communism because of its massively successful capitalist economy and political and social democracy: The UK was its most vocal ally. No era in the Special Relationship has been tighter than the political and ideological marriage between Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan. Both were radical leaders of their respective Conservative parties, who believed in economic deregulation, neoliberal foreign policy, and destroying the Soviet Union. Thatcherism and Reaganomics are almost identical in their principles. Beyond the political relationship, Thatcher and Reagan were extremely close friends who enjoyed each other’s company.
Since WWII, Britain’s role in global politics had been significantly diminished by the independence movement and the debt of the War. The UK’s economy would never rival the US’s, and its population was vocal but relatively insignificant in terms of numbers. In the Cold War, Margaret Thatcher recognized a position through which she could transform the role of the UK in international politics. She knew that President Ronald Reagan would need a strong ally against the “Evil Empire”- someone who could execute while he charmed. By framing the front against Communism as “the West,” not just “America,” Thatcher guaranteed that Britain would have a spot on the global stage in the future. Thatcher relied on her close political alliance and friendship with Ronald Reagan and the long established “Special Relationship” to assert Britain’s leading role in the fight against Communism.
Thatcher’s reasoning, obvious as it may seem, was extremely important to the future of Britain and the world. Her joining of forces with Reagan turned his vision of the fall of the USSR into a reality. The author Nicholas Wapshott went as far as to say that “Reagan’s pointless tirades against Communism may have remained just that, had Mrs. Thatcher not explored a way to engage with a new generation of Soviet leaders.” Thatcher’s dedication to the issue at times surpassed even Reagan’s. She traveled to the USSR to attend the funerals of both Andropov and Chernenko, earning respect in the Soviet Government. She predicted that Gorbachev would rise in power, and was the first Western leader to invite him to visit her. After their meeting, Thatcher famously told Reagan that he was “a man they could do business with,” which prompted the important Reagan-Gorbachev summit meetings. She not only allowed but welcomed American missiles, a physical embodiment of the alliance, to be stationed in the UK. Thatcher’s name will forever be immediately associated with Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s in the ending of the Cold War. Thatcher used her position to ensure that the Special Relationship would be relevant in the future, and that Britain would maintain an important role in global politics.
Indira Gandhi
Indira Gandhi was born in 1917 in Allahabad. In a letter to her grandfather on the day of her birth, her father wrote that “this child will be the new soul of India.” Gandhi (of no relation to Mahatma Gandhi) was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian nationalist reformer who would go on to lead the Indian National Congress. Indira Gandhi’s childhood was one of privilege and sacrifice. Her father, with her mother’s encouragement, joined Mahatma Gandhi and gave up the colonial privileges that wealthy Indian families enjoyed. The Nehru family burned their clothes and any personal objects that were reminiscent of British influence. Gandhi’s house became a watering hole for both European and Indian intellectuals and politicians. The massacre at Jallianwala Bagh was a turning point in both Indian history and Gandhi’s life. She was old enough to be aware of the injustices her people had suffered at the hands of British imperialists. Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru became even more absorbed with cause, and Gandhi’s childhood was dominated by resistance. Before Gandhi turned thirteen, her father had been arrested five times. In her teenage years, Gandhi attended many different schools across India and Europe. She attended Oxford University, but had to leave before graduation to care for her ailing mother. In England she met and married Feroze Gandhi, and they had two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay. In 1947, India gained independence, and Nehru was tasked with creating the Indian government: a secular, socialist, democratic republic, with a constitution. In the fifties, Gandhi returned to work for her father as he was the first Prime Minister of India. She served as President of the Congress, and was particularly instrumental in removing the Communist Party from any role of influence in India. After Nehru’s death in 1964, Gandhi served as Minister of Information and Broadcasting, proving to the government that she had inherited politics as a career and not just as an assistant to her father. In 1966, the Congress appointed Gandhi Prime Minister, mostly because the older members of the party believed she would be easily manipulated as a young woman. However, they could not have been more wrong. Gandhi held her position as Prime Minister from 1966 until 1977, and then again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984. In her twenty years of public service, Gandhi focused on eradicating all evidence of India’s past as a colony, and consolidated her power in order to turn India into a modern nation. Indira Gandhi viewed her nation, India, as a collection of regions who had suffered greatly under imperialist foreign power and needed to be unified in order to compete internationally.
ECONOMIC REFORM
When Indira Gandhi won election in 1966, India’s poverty rate was extremely high, and she knew she would be faced with the task of economic reform. Gandhi is often criticized for not holding a single ideology, and tending towards a kind of Machiavellian populism. She considered herself a socialist, but only circumstantially so, saying “I suppose you could call me a socialist, but you have understand what we mean by that term…we used the word [socialism] because it came closest to what we wanted to do here – which is to eradicate poverty. You can call it socialism; but if by using that word we arouse controversy; I don’t see why we should use it. I don’t believe in words at all.” To Gandhi, “socialism” really meant “fighting off the legacy of imperialism.” She had run on a platform of “garibi hatao” (“remove poverty”) and positioned herself as an advocate of the poor. This tactic was smart because most of India’s population was poor. After a drought-induced famine in the sixties, India was suffering its worst recession since independence. 50% of Indians were subsistence farmers who relied on good weather to survive. India was surviving off of American aid, which Gandhi saw as untrustworthy and humiliating. Eradicating traces of liberalism left in the country’s failing economy, Gandhi instituted the Fourth Five Year Plan in 1969 with the goal of “growth with stability and progressive achievement of self-reliance,” and a 5.7% growth rate. She nationalized the banks, and put higher regulations on the private sector. Gandhi also implemented “The Green Revolution,” which focused on improving agriculture, especially in the Punjab region, which had suffered huge economic blows. The result of the project was making India self-sufficient in grains, particularly wheat, which would help resist famine. Gandhi also abolished privy purses, which had been a convention in India since imperialism. The sums of money had been granted to princes of different regions by the British government (and then the Indian government continued the custom) as a gift for surrendering sovereignty and joining a united India. Gandhi believed that they were outdated because they represented the British imperialist influence in India, and the money could be delegated to benefit the poor in those regions. Gandhi used economic reform to consolidate India under a strong centralized government and eradicate lasting traces of imperialism.
NON-ALIGNMENT
When the Cold War began around 1947, India had just gained its independence, and because of this status was by default a part of the “Third World.” Prime Minister Nehru intended to secure a position of non-alignment as he observed the two world powers entering into a dangerous conflict. Gandhi inherited this position, and truly believed that it would be more strategic and beneficial in the long term to not associate India with either side of the conflict. Instead, she attempted to make India, with its huge population and geographic size, the leader in the Third World non-alignment movement. Still, Gandhi and other Indian government officials tended to get along better with the Soviet leaders than the American ones. When Gandhi waged war on Pakistan to free Bangladesh, she did so with Soviet support. However, she only exercised this support because she believed so strongly in the Bangladesh liberation, that to her the issue transcended the need to appease both world powers. In her second tenure as PM, Gandhi focused on reasserting India as the leader of the non-aligned movement. She appealed to many because she emphasized the role of economic subjugation and modern colonization. As a self-proclaimed populist leader herself, she also understood the importance of not tying oneself to a particular ideology that could end up damaging in the future. Gandhi saw power and influence in neutrality: as such a large country, she intimidated both the USSR and the US because they could not rely on or anticipate her course of action. At the same time, she saw safety: preserving the newly formed Indian economic and political system, and united Indian culture. Gandhi adhered to a policy of non-alignment in the midst of the Cold War in order to preserve India’s independence and self-sufficiency.
Project by: Bay (10th Grade)
Faculty Advisor: Peter Heinz
Please write a description of the project you are proposing. Why do you want to take this on, and what do you hope to learn?
This project will be a continuation of my honors project last trimester. I will research the lives of a few female leaders of the 20th century such as Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher, and read biographies and archived newspaper articles. I hope to come to some sort of conclusion about the patterns between female rulers regardless of time or geography.
What is your proposed outcome? How will you be able to demonstrate successful completion of this Project?
A comparative essay with citations that combines my research from this trimester and my research from last trimester to compare the stories, perceptions and legacies of female leaders from ancient history and the 20th century.
