Le choix de la CEE par la France: L’Europe économique en débat de Mendès France à de Gaulle (1955–1969), by Laurent Warlouzet

Extract

High stakes and hyperbole have often obscured the fact that what we know today as the European Union was born out of a messy compromise. It was the product of competing interests and overlapping visions, all of which jostled for space among Europe’s technocratic elite of the 1950s. In these early years, France played a vital role. Its national pride may have been badly wounded by the experience of the Second World War, the coming of the Cold War and protracted colonial conflict, but if there was one area where the French could still wield their influence, it was over their European neighbours. There was initial hostility in many circles but French negotiators, politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders soon saw the opportunity for a European project that would further their own ends.

What exactly these ends were—and how they mattered—is the subject of Laurent Warlouzet’s meticulous analysis of France’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC). With the help of painstaking and comprehensive archival research, he makes clear just how little the French were able to control the slow process of European unification in the late 1950s and ’60s—and how contingent the grand ideals of the European project actually were. The approach is predominantly chronological, moving from the debates surrounding projects for economic union in the mid-1950s to the end of Charles de Gaulle’s presidency in 1969. The originality of the book’s thesis undoubtedly lies in its emphasis on how far behind the French were in adapting to emerging European priorities. While some administrators—such as the influential Robert Marjolin—saw potential, many others feared economic competition and a relative decline in French geopolitical power. In large part, this was because the Algerian War and the collapse of the Fourth Republic severely compromised institutional and ideological consensus. Indeed, the author does not stress enough that a whole-hearted commitment to Europe was only possible once the Algerian question was settled. Quite apart from the financial and political toll of the war, Algeria raised too many intractable questions with respect to France’s identity in Europe—a subject that scholars such as Todd Shepard have begun to address.