In Europe

her economic policies. The essence of Thatcher's message went much further than that. Her historical importance, as Mark Mazower has noted, had to do with the ‘reassessment of what the modern state can and cannot do’.
    The British problem, after all, was not limited to Great Britain. Ever since the 1960s, more and more European countries had been confronted with unparalleled price rises, and the sense of economic vulnerability was heightened even further by the 1973 oil crisis. During the October War between Israel and the Egyptian-Syrian alliance in that year, the Arab countries used oil as a weapon for the very first time: they raised their prices across the board and confronted some countries with an embargo. In less than three months, the price of oil had quadrupled. It was an historic turning point: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other vassal states of the West had suddenly begun flexing their muscles. It was a frontal attack on the international status quo which had been firmly in place throughout most of the post-war years, the end of almost a quarter of a century of optimism and confidence. A lengthy recession followed, marked by a combination of rising unemployment and inflation; average unemployment in the EEC rose during this period from 1.5 to more than 10 per cent. Reason enough, therefore, for the British historian Eric Hobsbawm to speak of the period following the oil crisis as ‘the Earthquake’: ‘Thehistory of the twenty years after 1973 was that of a world that had slipped its anchors and drifted away into instability and crisis.’
    Meanwhile, wealthy Europe continued to attract immigrants, both legal and illegal, from all over the world: workers and asylum seekers, pioneers and reunited families, new talents and rose peddlers, rivals and marriage partners.
    In 1968, British ultra-conservative Enoch Powell made a fiery, now almost classic speech against this immigration. ‘Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad,’ he shouted to a stunned crowd in Birmingham. ‘We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.'Thirty years later, his train of thought had become commonplace among large groups of Europeans.
    As early as 1956, during a visit to Rome, Chancellor Adenauer had promised free train tickets to all Italians willing to work in distant Germany. In 1964, the millionth
gastarbeiter
was welcomed to loud applause. The fortunate individual, a Portuguese man, received a Zündapp moped from the employers’ collective. At that time, approximately seven per cent of the country's workforce consisted of foreign workers, a percentage similar to that in England and France. The Netherlands was still actively recruiting abroad: the country signed recruitment contracts with Italy (1960), Spain (1961), Portugal (1963), Turkey (1964), Greece (1966), Morocco (1969) and Yugoslavia and Tunisia (1970). In addition, some four million Algerians had emigrated to France after their country received independence, and Great Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands took in huge numbers of immigrants from their former colonies as well. The percentage of foreigners was rising all over Europe: from 3.7 million (1.3 per cent of the total European population) in 1950, to 10.7 million (3.8 per cent) in 1970, to 16 million (4.5 per cent) in 1990.
    Added to this were many hundreds of thousands of immigrants – estimates from 1998 put their number at around 3 million – who lived and worked in Europe illegally: in restaurants and cleaning firms, in nursing and health care, in agriculture and construction. Their contribution to theEuropean economy should not be underestimated. In 1990, the
Financial Times
claimed that it was to a large extent the work of illegal immigrants that ‘kept the wheels turning’.‘The construction sector depends on it, including the construction of the Channel Tunnel; the clothing industry would collapse without its illegal worker; and all household help would evaporate.’
    Europe, which had been faced in the early 1950s with the phenomenon of emigration – hundreds of thousands of Irish, Portuguese, Spaniards and southern Italians in particular had left each year for the United States and South America – was now suddenly the destination of