PERSPECTIVE ON BRITAIN : A Deep Well of Wounded Pride : Nicholas Ridley has awakened a demon and betrayed the supposed British genius for understatement.

We have no quarrel with the German nation,

One would not quarrel with a flock of sheep.

But, generation after generation,

They throw up leaders who disturb our sleep.

--Sir Alan Herbert, 1941

There is probably not a single member of Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet who would not give a discreet nod of sympathy if this piece of doggerel were recited after a confidential dinner. But by phrasing it even more toughly, and giving utterance to the dread name Adolf Hitler, Nicholas Ridley has awakened a demon while simultaneously betraying the supposed British genius for understatement.

We now know that, three months before her trade minister gave way to an attack of paranoia, Thatcher convened a meeting of British scholars and historians to debate the German national character. (Among the chosen experts was Lord Dacre, better known as Hugh Trevor-Roper, who only a few years ago gave his imprimatur as historian to the pathetic forgery of the Hitler diaries.) These experts appear to have told the prime minister that although the postwar Germans had been remarkably well-behaved, they still exhibited tendencies toward “anxiety, aggression, arrogance, lack of consideration, smugness, an inferiority complex and sentimentality.”

I happened to be in London on the night that West Germany knocked England out of the World Cup soccer contest and could see all these emotional deformities richly displayed on the streets of London. “Krauts” was the expression employed to describe the courteous winners on the front page of the following day’s Sun newspaper. German-made cars were vandalized in a self-pitying parody of Kristallnacht reflecting economic inferiority.

Ridley, an upper-class fiscal conservative and former supporter of the arch-chauvinist Enoch Powell, told the editor of the Spectator, a magazine with Tory sympathies, that the German mark would always be sovereign because of German “habits,” by which he can only have meant the strict anti-inflationary continence of the Bundesbank. But surely the last time the Germans began to give cause for alarm was when they surrendered to inflation. Here is the difficulty with analyzing nations by character--they appear to be in character whatever they do.

Throughout World War II, British commentators and intellectuals divided between the Vansittart faction and the anti-Vansittart faction. Sir Robert Vansittart was director of the British Foreign Office and authored a paper saying that, indeed, the war was a quarrel with the German nation rather than with fascism. He elaborated a grand theory of the underdevelopment of the German national character and its proneness to barbarism and hysteria. Anti-fascists denounced this as a form of racism, but the theory became official dogma and gave British war planners the necessary sense of righteousness for the fire-bombings of Dresden and Hamburg. After the war, the theory became something of an embarrassment with Germany in NATO, and Sir Robert went on to transfer the same analysis to the Russians. But traces of its influence remain ingrained in the British official makeup.

It is this institutional memory, coupled with her own almost cultish admiration for Winston Churchill, that has led Thatcher to encourage the very line of thought that a minister resigns over for expressing too crudely. There is also a contemporary aspect to the problem. Ever since 1945, all British foreign and defense policy has been predicated on a “special relationship” with the United States, on the view that London was America’s particular friend and ally in Europe. Now, to the inexpressible dismay of the British Establishment, it seems that Washington is starting to prefer Bonn. A Bush-Kohl axis represents the very antithesis of what Thatcher thought she had achieved by her romance with Ronald Reagan. Her current misgivings about European unity show some of the wretchedness of the rejected lover.

It was as a counterweight to Germany that the British solicited American help in two world conflicts. The Anglo-American alliance was what placed American missiles and men and Marshall Plan aid on the European Continent in the first place. For this influence to be thrown onto the German side of the scale, as it has been on the related questions of missile deployment and currency standardization, is a tremendous blow to British esteem. Ridley’s bitterness and resentment may seem atavistic from this side of the Atlantic, but it is drawn from a deep well of wounded pride, historic defiance and political arrogance. Of such elements are national characters made.