Journal of European Integration History – Revue d'histoire de l'

126Book reviews – Comptes rendus – BuchbesprechungenObwohl Megens auch Beispiele der Militärhilfe für Großbritannien und Frankreich vorstellt,die niederländisch-belgische Koproduktion von Turbostrahljägern untersucht undgenerell gern mit der vergleichenden Methode arbeitet, muß sie sich auf der Basis des Dutchcase Verallgemeinerungen zur Wirkung der Militärhilfe versagen. Dies darf als eine Aufforderungverstanden werden, weitere nationale Fallstudien zu wagen, vor allem für die Großempfängervon Militärhilfe, Großbritannien und Frankreich. Der methodologische und multiarchivalischeAnsatz von Megens wird hierfür einen verläßlichen Maßstab bilden. DieAussicht auf die Öffnung der Brüsseler NATO-Akten aus der ersten Dekade des Bündnissesmag ein weiterer Anreiz sein.Norbert WiggershausMilitärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt PotsdamGilbert NOËL. – France, Allemagne et “Europe Verte”. Euroclio, Série “Etudes et Documents”.Berne • Berlin • Francfort-s. Main • New York • Paris • Vienne, Peter Lang, 1995,217 p. – ISBN 3-906751-65-1. 46,00 sFR.The Common Agricultural Policy became the single most important policy of the earlyEuropean Community and agriculture the subject of the longest, most complex and mostacrimonious negotiations in the EEC's formative years. It is therefore surprising how littlehas been written about either the history or the pre-history of European agricultural cooperationin general and the CAP in particular. Gilbert Noël thus deserves much credit for sheddinglight on an understudied corner of European integration history.Noël's first study – Du pool vert à la politique agricole commune (Paris: Economica,1988) – concentrated specifically on multilateral European attempts to institute a degree ofcooperation in the agricultural sector; the new work, by contrast deals only briefly withEuropean discussions and focuses instead on narrower Franco-German collaborative efforts.It is thus as much about the roots of Franco-German rapprochement as about the origins ofthe CAP. Only this is Franco-German reconciliation with the usual cast list of Robert Schuman,Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle replaced by Andreas Hermes and Pierre Martin,heads of the principal German and French farmers' organisations, and Pierre Pflimlinand Wilhelm Niklas, ministers of agriculture in the two countries. High politics gives way toeconomic calculations of precise national interest.As a result, Noël’s book is an important complement to more traditional studies ofFranco-German relations in the post-war decades. It emphasizes the interests of France andGermany in close bilateral economic cooperation and highlights the fact that the idea ofFrance gaining a market for its agricultural exports in return for lowering its barriers towardsGerman industrial produce enjoyed widespread currency as early as 1950. The book alsodemonstrates that farmers' leaders in both countries shared similar views about the necessityof protecting traditional, family-based farms, if necessary by resorting to protectionist policies.This communality of view-point, especially when combined with the actual personalrapport that was to develop between farmers' spokesmen on either side of the Rhine, wouldlater prove its importance as the Community discussions about the CAP got underwaytowards the end of the decade. Also of interest is Noël's portrayal of the continual tensionsbetween intergovernmental and professional cooperation, and between bilateral Franco-Germaninitiatives and wider European projects. The way in which the Benelux countriesexpressed alarm at the emergence of too intimate a rapport between their two largest neighboursacts as a useful reminder that there was little new in the Belgian, Dutch or Italian anxietiesexpressed about Adenauer and de Gaulle's honeymoon in 1962.