number 1 - Centre d'études et de recherches européennes Robert ...

The Bomb and Europe 67
I
Only after de Gaulle's rejection of the British plan for a Free Trade Area in December
1958 did the government in London begin to appreciate the full significance of
the evolving bilateral alliance between Paris and Bonn for any future attempt to
secure British economic and political interests in Western Europe. When Macmillan
first started to think about a possible solution to the problem of the economic
split of Western Europe into Sixes (EEC) and Sevens (European Free Trade
Association – EFTA) at the end of 1959 he wrote to his Foreign Secretary Lloyd
that it was the governments of these two countries that had to be influenced in order
to reach an economic settlement between the two groups, which at that stage was
still British policy. 7 Of the two, because of the Federal Republic's generally weak
strategic position in connection with the latent Berlin crisis, the Bonn government
was considered to be in a weak position politically. Macmillan thus believed that
Adenauer could probably be forced to support British policy over Europe by
applying pressure which would range from hinting at the possibility of further
sharp cuts in the strength of the British Army on the Rhine (BAOR) to threatening
that Britain might even decide to leave NATO if the continental Europeans "declared
economic war upon her". 8
However ill-conceived this policy may have been, de Gaulle's veto against the
creation of a Free Trade Area the year before had illustrated that the key to a
satisfactory settlement in Europe lay in Paris. 9 Macmillan and the Foreign Office
rightly thought that contrary to Adenauer, de Gaulle would be able to negotiate
from a position of strength, and that essentially for three reasons. Firstly, his domestic
political position was considered to be increasingly secure. In 1958 France had
appeared to be on the brink of civil war. Despite the explosive Algerian question,
which was only resolved in 1962 with the Evian agreement, the Fifth Republic now
already enjoyed a comparatively high degree of internal stability following the
introduction of the new constitution in October 1958. This in turn allowed the ever
more self-assertive de Gaulle to shift his attention to foreign policy issues, particularly
to the idea of a reorganisation of the Atlantic Alliance, which he began to
develop with his 1958 memorandum on tripartism, and to the establishment of political
cooperation among the Six, whose foreign ministers began to meet regularly
at the end of 1959. On both issues, the British government was in a very awkward
position, as it expected to lose much of its own influence both in Europe as well as
vis-à-vis the United States as a result of any change in the status quo.
Secondly, by 1959 France had experienced several years of comparatively
strong economic expansion. The introduction of full convertibility of the Franc at
the end of 1958 signalled that the internal economic modernization was progres-
7. Macmillan to Lloyd: PRO PREM 11/2679 (22 October 1959).
8. PRO PREM 11/2328 (8 October 1958). For the evolution of British policy towards the Federal
Republic see W. KAISER, "Wie nach Austerlitz? London-Bonn-Paris und die britische EWG-Politik
bis 1961", in: Integration 16/1 (1993), pp. 19-32 (26-27).
9. Macmillan to Lloyd: PRO PREM 11/2679 (22 October 1959); Macmillan to Queen Elisabeth (23
December 1959), quoted in Horne, Macmillan II,p. 222.