428 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
The carousel of talks continued on 8 December when Thatcher
flew to Paris for consultations with Mitterrand. She had come armed
with two continental maps. Pulling them from her handbag, she
accused Kohl of intending to grab East Prussia and even Czechoslova-
kia. She charged him with inflaming a combustible situation.^5
Mitterrand shared her concerns but noted that neither Bush nor
Gorbachëv was willing to stop Kohl by force. He agreed that Eastern
Europe was in a dangerously unpredictable condition, and he shud-
dered at what might happen if the USSR experienced a coup and
mutated into a state ruled by militaristic nationalists. His sole proposal
was that France and the United Kingdom should stick together.^6
This failed to soothe Thatcher, who called for action against Kohl. The
trouble was that she herself refused to commit Britain to preventing
the surge towards German unity. That evening she lost her temper face
to face with Kohl when he declined to sign a joint communiqué con-
firming Europe’s existing frontiers. Mitterrand thought Kohl was
playing a perilous game. But Mitterrand did nothing, and Thatcher felt
let down.^7 On returning to London, she called Ambassador Zamyatin
at the Soviet embassy and urged that Gorbachëv should act on behalf
of the common European good.^8 Zamyatin reported her as panicking
about ‘events in “our” Europe’; he speculated that she was desperate to
demonstrate her remaining ability to influence current events.^9 Britain
counted for less and less in the European situation. On 4 November
Rodric Braithwaite commented in his diary about international poli-
tics: ‘It’s clear how little the UK counts, apart from the personal
relationship with Mrs T.’^10
Decommunized Eastern Europe had become a reality everywhere
except for Romania and Albania, and Gorbachëv and Bush at their
Malta summit had agreed on efforts to seek a peaceful resolution of
problems of European security. Soviet leaders were aware that the
Poles, Czechoslovaks and others were nervous about the territorial
claims that Kohl might present. They saw the chance, in the debris
of communism across the region, to step forward as the guarantors of
East European borders. When Shevardnadze visited NATO head-
quarters in Brussels on 17 December, he put the Soviet official case to
Secretary-General Manfred Wörner. The seed fell on stony ground.
Wörner contended that NATO and the Warsaw Pact should focus on
bringing the Vienna disarmament talks to completion.^11
The USSR’s leaders had long thought that Romania was on the
brink of a political eruption. General Nicolae Militaru, an opponent of