journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

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Book reviews – Comptes rendus – Buchbesprechungen
Esther KRAMER – Europäisches oder atlantisches Europa? Kontinuität und Wandel in
den Verhandlungen über eine politische Union 1958-1970, Nomos, Baden-Baden, 2003,
332 S. – ISBN 3-8329-0366-6 – 64,00 €.
European integration has always been a political project. Geopolitical and security
considerations, together with economic motives, have been essential driving forces behind
European unity. And yet, throughout the Cold War, the member states of the European
Community did not succeed in transforming their relations into a political union, despite
several rounds of negotiations. Europe gradually became a key economic actor, but it failed
to establish a coherent power base in the realm of foreign and security policy. Even today,
the European Union in its core has remained an economic entity, its foreign and security
cooperation being organized in a separate, much less integrated pillar.
While political scientists for many years have been engaged in theorizing why European
integration has been much slower and more limited in the political field, historians after the
opening of archives have begun to analyze individual efforts at political unification in their
contextual and temporal particularities. Historical accounts are available today on the
post-war Third Force Europe plans, the negotiations on a European Defence Community
and a European Political Community in the early 1950s, and the Fouchet negotiations in
1961/62. Several of these studies are particularly valuable in that they approach their subject
from a multilateral perspective, which allows for comprehensive interpretations of the
1
respective negotiations. 8
Esther Kramer with her remarkable Ph.D. thesis makes an important contribution to this
field of research in two major ways. By investigating into the debates on political union
between 1958 and 1970, she offers a pioneering analysis of the post-Fouchet period and
covers much new archival ground. And, as she links her research on the later 1960s with a
fresh look at the preceding Fouchet negotiations, she is able to put her findings into a bigger
framework and to point to both continuities and evolutions in the national perceptions of the
need, feasibility, and purpose of European political unity.
Kramer starts off with an evaluation of unification efforts prior to 1958. She rightly
points out the significance of security and defence issues in those early deliberations and
negotiations. Given the importance of nuclear weapons and the uncertainties that the
bipolarity of the Cold War international system implied for European security, there was a
nexus between the notion of a European political entity and the question of NATO reform
and nuclear control from early on. Kramer then proceeds to discuss the international
constellation of the late 1950s and the political design of Charles de Gaulle as new French
president. She convincingly argues that de Gaulle was a far less erratic leader and his
foreign policy conception much more coherent than many analysts have maintained. On the
global level, tripartism promised France a leadership role in Europe. On the European level,
de Gaulle pursued two complementary and consecutive policies: a political confederation of
Western Europe primarily based on security and defence cooperation and autonomous from
the US; and, an all-European scheme “from the Atlantic to the Urals”, with a view to
overcoming the bipolarity and division of Europe. In the mid-1960s, Kramer argues, de
Gaulle after the failure of the Fouchet Plans reversed his priorities and first pursued a policy
of détente with the East, without however losing sight of his blueprint for Western Europe.
As regards the Fouchet negotiations, Kramer notes that talks in a first phase between
February and December 1961 went surprisingly well. This was largely because de Gaulle
initially did not disclose to the Five just how radically different from Jean Monnet’s Europe
18.
See, for instance, J. GIAUQUE, Grand Designs and Visions of Unity: The Atlantic Powers and the
Reorganization of Western Europe, 1955-1963, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel
Hill, 2002; T. CABALO, Politische Union Europas 1956-1963, PapyRossa, Cologne,1999.