Margaret Thatcher has been incautious in her remarks on 'mainland Europe', argues Samuel Brittan, but we ignore her warnings about the dangerous world we live in at our peril

The nasty part of the British leftwing press has gloated over Lady Thatcher's recent frailties; and she has clearly received much aid in compiling this book from a devoted team of helpers, to whom she offers generous thanks. Even so, I feel confident that more of the text is her own than is the case with the many speeches, essays and articles issued under the name of "Tony Blair".

The advance serialisation in the UK of her most incautious remarks on Europe has done Thatcher a disservice. These passages are not representative of the book. The author's demonisation of "mainland Europe" fits ill with her heartfelt paean to individualism in her epilogue. It ignores, for instance, the roots of individualism in the Italian Renaissance and German-led Reformation, not to speak of its remoter origins in the Greek and Roman worlds.

But fewer than a fifth of the book's pages are concerned with the European Union; and even in these sections there are many shrewd criticisms of the way the EU has developed. Similar arguments have been made by fair-minded EU supporters such as Daniel Gros, of the Centre for European Policy Studies.

Thatcher's mention of withdrawal from the EU is only one of several options she lists. Some market economists might be attracted by her obvious preference for free trade areas.

But it should be remembered that Harold Macmillan's application to join the EU was made only after it had rejected his earlier attempt to negotiate a free trade area with it. Thatcher's 1992 suggestion of a multi-track Europe was more realistic.

As so often, the main part of the text is better described by the sub- title than by the publisher's headline. Most of the book is taken up by what foreign secretaries used to call a tour d'horizon. The text is a mixture of observations derived from meetings with world statesman and the morals she draws from recent events. Her strong point has always been her emphasis on the concrete and specific; and with a few exceptions - such as Ronald Reagan, the late F.A. Hayek and the Czech leader Vaclav Klaus - she has preferred to talk to people who could provide such information, while leaving the polemics to herself. Each section is followed by a summary, so that there can be little excuse for misunderstanding. Although few will agree with all her points, it would be a stupid person who would claim to learn nothing from them.

I learned most from the first few foreign policy chapters. Bin Laden's terrorist attack on New York has made me much more receptive to the author's insistence on spending more on defence than I would have been before. As she argues, "since the end of the Cold War, the West has let down its guard." I am willing to offer free copies of my own books to anyone - other than the person himself - who can guess who it was who said: "Once we have cut expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses . . . no hospitals, no schools." It was certainly no Thatcherite rightwinger.

Thatcher has an uncomfortable message on the primacy of power and on states as the unalterable units that wield it. But she also emphasises the importance of principle; and she insists that the balance between the two depends on "gut instinct". There is also a tension, of which she is less aware, between the emphasis on the nation state in these early chapters, and the emphasis on individuals, especially cantankerous and difficult ones, in later chapters more concerned with domestic matters.

Her chapter on the former Yugoslavia is an expression of justified outrage at the behaviour of the Serb leadership together with an attack on the western leaders who gave Milosevic his chance by pretending that all sides were equally at fault. But my ticks in the margin in this chapter were balanced by a series of "No, no, nos" where she defends, on realpolitik grounds, the former Indonesian leader General Suharto, who began his reign with the killing of several hundred thousand "Communists" - or where she writes about General Pinochet, mixing a reasonable condemnation of the process by which he was detained in Britain with a defence of a regime responsible for widespread torture. She rightly castigates Tony Blair for not merely doing business with Vladimir Putin, but for speaking of him as a reforming democrat. But the same could be said of her own own praise for rightwing autocrats.

Nor can I stomach her desire to repudiate the European Convention on Human Rights, which she treats in the same breath as the unnecessary and corporatist rival charter that the EU is seeking to impose. Friedrich Hayek, whom she so much admires, devoted much of his later work to the need for some check on the proclivity of temporary majorities to behave tyrannically. This contrasts with the unfettered espousal of pure democratic sovereignty by British Conservative leaders. They do not seem to realise that nationalism is a relatively modern development in the history of civilisation which - together with democracy - was roundly condemned by many 19th-century Tory leaders from Castlereagh to the great Lord Salisbury and - less well known - was treated with caution by distinguished Liberals such as Mill and Gladstone.

The fundamental problem is the influence of group solidarity and group thinking on the prospects of the human race. It may be that the nation state is still the main focus of such loyalties. But even this is not straightforward, as can be seen from the problem of dual loyalties. For instance, some perfectly loyal British subjects have in the past felt a call to go and fight for Israel, just as some British Muslims have felt a similar call to fight in Afghanistan.

Moreover, the term nation state hides more than it reveals. People of the most diverse nationalities sacrificed their lives for the British, Habsburg and Roman empires, while other inhabitants of these same regions fought to free themselves from the imperial yoke. The instinct to form intense loyalties to sometimes conflicting groups probably goes back to the dawn of the human race when homo sapiens is said to have lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers. These group hostilities, allied with the effect of testosterone on young males, which once found expression in the primordial drive to fertilise as many females as possible, today find their main outlet in crime and terrorism. Thus it is difficult to be optimistic about the long-term prospects of the human race.

Thatcher is probably right that nuclear weapons will be used in the forseeable future. The shift from mutually assured destruction ("MAD") during the cold war to the contemplation of "battlefield" warheads is anything but reassuring. In the meanwhile, the west will prolong its own existence if it takes to heart her warnings and rejects a guilt-ridden policy of apology and appeasement.