Reagan's legacy lives on

Americans have been mourning their former President, Ronald Reagan, who died yesterday week aged 93, and who was given a state funeral on Friday.

Mr Reagan's Presidency changed the face of both American and international politics. He laid the ground for a conservative revolution in the United States as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Communism. He was an immensely popular President who was charming and likable.

President Reagan was an extremely good communicator who had an excellent relationship with Congress, even though the House of Representatives was controlled by the Democrats. His sense of humour, wit and confidence brought about a feel- good factor in the United States.

Even his opponents found it hard to criticise him because he was so charismatic. John Kerry, the Democratic Party's presidential candidate said last week: "Even when he was breaking Democrats' hearts, he did so with a smile". And former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev referred to Mr Reagan as a "great President".

Mr Reagan became President in 1981 after having defeated President Carter in the 1980 presidential election. There is no doubt that America at that time was going through a crisis: inflation and unemployment were at an all-time high and American foreign policy was going through a difficult time - both the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the hostage drama at the US embassy in Teheran had made America look very weak. President Reagan certainly restored his nation's confidence and he deserves credit for this.

Mr Reagan's impact on domestic American politics was huge. He shifted the country's political spectrum to the right, made the democrats look like old-fashioned, out-of-touch liberals, laid the foundations for the Republican Party to become the largest party in Congress, destroyed the Democrats' power base in the south, created what was known as the "Reagan Democrats" - mainly blue-collar voters who identified with the President's simple and understandable political message, and forged an alliance with southern conservative democrats known as the "boll weevils", some of whom eventually defected to the Republicans.

Mr Reagan forced the entire American political spectrum to rethink the role of government in the management of the economy. During his 1981 inaugural speech he said: "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem." His economic theory was simple and straightforward: the less government intervention, the less regulation, and the less taxes, the better for the economy. The theory of Reaganomics and the "trickle down theory" which believed that any economic growth would benefit the whole of society was thus born.

There are mixed feelings among economists and political observers about just how successful Mr Reagan's economic policies were. After all, George Bush (senior) who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 and who later accepted to be Mr Reagan's Vice President, had described Reagan's economic policies as "voodoo economics" during the 1980 presidential campaign. What is certain, however, is that low inflation, high economic growth and high job creation were hallmarks of the Reagan administration. That is certainly a good record.

On the other hand, Mr Reagan left office in 1989 with an enormous budget deficit (which is always bad news), caused mainly by massive defence spending and the huge tax cuts which were introduced in his first year in government in 1981. Furthermore, many welfare programmes were cut, some of them unnecessarily, and the gap between rich and poor widened considerably. There is no doubt, however, that Mr Reagan's economic legacy has lived on. How else can one explain President Bill Clinton's famous statement that "the era of big government is over"?

Few people can doubt Mr Reagan's role in ending the Cold War, defeating Communism and causing the break-up of the Soviet Union. He was certainly helped in this role by Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, but the most credit must go to him.

President Reagan had no qualms about calling the Soviet Union "an evil empire" nor did he hesitate to demand that Mr Gorbachev dismantle the Berlin Wall. Mr Reagan's message to the Soviet Union was simple and straightforward: dismantle your empire or we will militarily spend you into the ground. That is exactly what happened - the Soviets could not cope with their massive spending on defence and were no match for the Americans. The Soviet economy began to crumble, and this coupled with a reformist President (Gorbachev) and demands for greater freedom both at home and in eastern Europe led to the entire eastern bloc to fall apart, one year after Mr Reagan left office.

Mr Reagan proved many of his critics wrong in believing that Communism was basically a bad system which was totally inferior to democracy and which would inevitably come to an end. He knew that the Soviets had to be confronted even if this meant placing NATO Pershing and Cruise missiles in Western Europe in order to neutralise the threat posed by Soviet SS-20 nuclear missiles in Eastern Europe.

Although it was fashionable in certain left-wing circles in Europe to demonstrate against the NATO nuclear missiles, President Reagan and his allies were proved right. The Soviet threat was defused and eventually the missiles facing each other were removed from Europe. It was a great victory for President Reagan and all those who stood firm in the face of Soviet bullying.

Of course, there were aspects of Mr Reagan's foreign policy which were certainly questionable, especially his support for certain dictatorial regimes in the Third World, all in the name of anti-Communism. Clearly, some serious mistakes were committed. Genuine democratic political movements in Latin America, Asia and Africa were branded as Communists simply because the governments in those countries were anti-Communist.

This is probably the greatest tragedy of the Cold War: conflicts in the Third World were viewed through the lenses of the Cold War, with disturbing results. The Iran-Contra scandal, when the United States used the money from the illegal sale of weapons to its arch-enemy Iran to fund anti-Sandinista guerillas in Nicaragua, was also a black spot on Mr Reagan's foreign policy.

His simplistic foreign policy towards the major threat posed at that time - the Soviet Union, paid off.

Last week's D-Day anniversary celebrations were moving and must have brought tears to the eyes of may people. The most emotional part was when French President Jacques Chirac told German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder: "The French people embrace you as a brother".

We must not forget that the Allied victory in World War Two was not a victory over Germany but a victory for Germany. Today Germany is a strong and stable democracy and a beacon of tolerance and pluralism precisely because of the allied victory over Nazism.

It was therefore entirely appropriate for Mr Schröder to be invited to the D-Day 60th anniversary commemoration. He represents a Germany that is entirely at ease with itself and which is a leading player in a democratic Europe where common values such as solidarity are shared by all the member states.