Mrs. 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 euro zone 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 euro zone’s weaker, less efficient economies, which could no longer rely on devaluation to solve their problems.

Mrs. 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 skepticism 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 Mrs. 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 Mrs. Thatcher’s death at age 87, Queen Elizabeth II and Mr. Cameron offered tributes to what he called “a great leader, a great prime minister, a great Briton.” Mr. Cameron said Parliament would be recalled on Wednesday for a special session in her honor.

The prime minister’s office said that, in line with her family’s wishes, Mrs. Thatcher would not be accorded a full state funeral but would nonetheless be buried with military honors. 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 honors was Winston Churchill in 1965, a comparison that spoke for Britain’s sense of Mrs. Thatcher as a historical figure, and, as many of her admirers said on Monday, as perhaps the country’s greatest peacetime leader.

Mrs. 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, Mrs. 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.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/world/europe/tributes-pour-in-for-margaret-thatcher.html?partner=rss&emc=rss