Margaret Thatcher freed market forces, and Europe is still adjusting

London: As word of Margaret Thatcher's death spread on Monday, it seemed fitting that Prime Minister David Cameron was engaged in what had been billed as a European tour to bring the Continent around to her conservative way of thinking, particularly about Britain's relationship with Europe.

Thatcher, many Britons said, transformed their country, opening the way for sweeping privatization and deregulation, legitimizing wealth and unleashing acquisitive, entrepreneurial passions among her compatriots. But Thatcherism, as it came to be known, never found fertile soil on the Continent, not even after the financial crisis and eurozone woes that have plunged much of Europe into an economic gloom at least as dark as that of 1970s Britain.

Yet her doubts about a "European superstate" and the common currency ring true today, nearly a quarter of a century after she resigned. She correctly predicted in her memoirs that Germany's historical fears about inflation would lead to slow-growth policies that would deepen the problems of the eurozone's weaker, less efficient economies, which could no longer rely on devaluation to solve their problems.

Thatcher's prescription for Britain in the 1980s - faith in market forces, willingness to impose short-term austerity in the service of long-term prosperity, and scepticism or even hostility to the fiscal and social costs of the welfare state - prefigured some of the policies Germany and European regulators are still recommending, wrongly in the view of many economists, for the struggling Southern European countries.

But few of those nations, even in the hard-hit southern tier, have shown the political strength or will to face down the entrenched forces - unions, state-owned enterprises, encrusted political elites - that Thatcher did, and the crisis drags on without resolution.

It is an indelible part of the Thatcher legacy that her success in remaking Britain never drew the Continent closer to its cantankerous, offshore cousins. Nonetheless, she remains the revered icon of British conservatism, a yardstick for true believers in the free market and the ability of capitalism to spread prosperity in a way that socialist redistribution never could.

Within moments of the announcement of Thatcher's death at age 87, Queen Elizabeth II and Cameron offered tributes to what he called "a great leader, a great prime minister, a great Briton." Cameron said Parliament would be recalled on Wednesday for a special session in her honour.

The prime minister's office said that, in line with her family's wishes, Thatcher would not be accorded a full state funeral but would nonetheless be buried with military honours. That ceremony is to take place on a yet-to-be-announced day next week, at St. Paul's Cathedral. Officials gave no other details, beyond saying that the arrangements would be similar to those made after the death in a Paris car crash in 1997 of Diana, Princess of Wales, whose coffin was carried through crowds in London on a horse-drawn caisson.

The last prime minister to be accorded similar honours was Winston Churchill in 1965, a comparison that spoke for Britain's sense of Thatcher as a historical figure, and, as many of her admirers said on Monday, as perhaps the country's greatest peacetime leader.

Thatcher was Britain's first female prime minister, serving for 11 years, beginning in 1979. Many Britons remembered her as a dominant yet divisive figure, whose impact on British life and society was enduring, if deeply contentious at the time, and whose pervasive influence on political thinking about the role of the state in free societies spread far beyond Britain's shores.

Along with President Ronald Reagan, with whom she helped define modern conservatism, Thatcher propagated a faith in the redemptive power of capitalism that became dominant around the world, and hastened the fall of Communism. But she also helped to unleash market forces, and unravel social compacts, in ways that many societies have yet to resolve.

Even on the day of her death, political leaders, commentators and ordinary citizens from Cyprus to Greece and Portugal, and in the United States, were enmeshed in often angry debates over the policies that defined her legacy. Those crosscurrents continue to play out in her own country, a laboratory under Cameron for harsh austerity policies.

In addition to the changes she wrought at home, Thatcher passionately defended her view of Britain as a significant power in the world, with interests and influences of her own that were independent of the 27-nation European Union. Just as she once famously declared "No! No! No!" in Parliament in response to a French-led push for closer European integration, she looked to Britain's "special relationship" with the United States, not to Europe, as a way of leveraging Britain's weight in international affairs, a view also strongly held by Cameron.

Since she retired from politics in 1990, toppled by her own party elite, Britain has hewed to her scepticism about Europe, if anything drifting even further from the Continent. It is not a subscriber to some of main vehicles of integration - the euro currency, and the Schengen accord on free travel across the continent's internal frontiers. Bowing to powerful Thatcherite euroskeptic forces in his party, Cameron has promised a referendum on continued British membership in the European Union by 2017.

He has also balked at a European push for restrictions on bankers' bonuses and opposed the imposition of stiffer Europe-wide taxes on financial trading. Those measures are anathema to Cameron's Conservatives and to the financial industry that is centred in London, which has served as a fount of Britain's now-beleaguered prosperity.

If there was a symbol on Monday of the Thatcher legacy, it was that of a British prime minister abandoning an overture to Europe to return home to mourn at a shrine to euroskepticism whose influence still tugs at many ideological passions.

Cameron spoke for most Conservatives when he said Monday that Thatcher had not simply led Britain, "she saved our country."

But the commemorations were accompanied by more acerbic, even vitriolic, remembrances from those who saw her as a destructive figure who had ruptured the economic and social fabric of post-war Britain and left a country that was more divided, more selfish and, for the have-nots, more resentful than at any time in its recent history.

Across the world, the response to Thatcher's death appeared to oscillate between similar poles. Many foreign leaders and commentators spoke about her as President Barack Obama did, as "one of the great champions of freedom and liberty," and as an example to women that "there is no glass ceiling that can't be shattered."

However, there were others, particularly on the political left, who spoke with bitterness of the vogue that spread across the globe in the name of Thatcherism and, they said, consigned millions without recourse to the rewards of free enterprise to lives of unrelieved poverty.