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Authors: William I. Hitchcock

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France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 (37 page)

BOOK: France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954
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Page 173
called, after the French acronym for EDC. The Socialist Party leader Guy Mollet remained an adherent and could keep most of his rank and file in line. The Radical René Mayer, a strong "European" who would soon become prime minister, voiced reasoned appeals within his party in favor of the plan. Defense Minister René Pleven's small centrist party (the Union Démocratique et Socialiste de la Résistance) also backed it, and the MRP, with only a few dissenters, kept the faith. In the press,
Le Figaro
and its noted columnist Raymond Aron made steady and sober arguments in favor of the EDC. But in the face of some very sound criticisms, these forces had difficulty making the case that the EDC actually advanced French national interests. The Schuman Plan had been able to draw on a host of strong economic and political arguments to attract considerable support in the nation. The best the
cédistes
could do was cling to the negative argument that a plan that no one liked should be accepted because it was better than the alternative.
8
The prospects of the treaty were not improved by developments on the diplomatic front. The United States had become the most ardent advocate of the integrated army plan. For Dean Acheson and even more for his successor, John Foster Dulles, the EDC promised to create a strong western defense, contain German nationalism, integrate Germany into western Europe, improve Franco-German relations, and finally contribute to European unity. The EDC had come to incorporate all of America's hopes for postwar Europe. Yet the more the Americans pushed for ratification, the greater the resistance they met from French officials who feared giving any impression of doing Washington's bidding in rearming Germany. Worse, as the prospects for the EDC dimmed in the Assembly, French governments demanded ever more concessions from Washington in related areas such as the financing of French rearmament and aid for the Indochina war. Throughout the fall of 1952, Defense Minister Pleven engaged in tough negotiations with Washington over the sums the United States would channel into the French defense industry through offshore procurement. When the State Department told Pleven that the American outlay would be less than the $ 650 million figure Paris had counted on, Pleven claimed that the United States was undermining the French defense industry just at a time when the Germans were being encouraged to rearm. Pleven argued that this development would play right into the hands of the EDC's opponents. France tried to parlay Washington's commitment to the EDC into improved French leverage on these issues, leading outraged American officials to label French tactics as blackmail. In November
 
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1952, the American ambassador cabled his view to the State Department that "Franco-American relations are cooler than at any time since Gen[eral] de Gaulle resigned in 1946." The EDC, rather than promoting western unity, threatened to break the alliance to pieces.
9
Nor did the British offer much hope to the
cédistes
. Anthony Eden had given the EDC signatories some limited guarantees concerning British alignment with the integrated army, but steadfastly refused continental requests for British membership. The Foreign Office registered a certain pique at the French request for further British commitments to the EDC. France had laid claim to the leadership of a European bloc through the ECSC, and now seemed hoisted on its own petard. Foreign Office officials cynically suggested that France had taken Turkey's place as the sick man of Europe, and believed that the French leadership exploited the country's weaknesses to "secure palliatives from abroad."
10
This position grew from Britain's long mistrust of European unification schemes that might downgrade Britain's relationship with the United States. The continentals, in the British view, could have the EDC if they wanted; Britain would remain out of it. If the project failed, then Germany must be brought into NATO. Indeed, as early as November 1952, Eden was already suggesting to Acheson that "we should begin to think about what alternative plan we could fall back on" if the EDC were not ratified.
11
Events across the Rhine only deepened the despair of the EDC's advocates. Immediately after the signing of the accords, Adenauer's coalition partners began to question whether the EDC sufficiently assured German equality of rights and chafed at French demands for amendments to the treaty that might strengthen the French position in the community. The SPD took Adenauer to the Constitutional Court in hopes of seeking to halt any rearmament without a constitutional amendment. Worse, the Saar issue reared its ugly head once again. Ever since the Saar Conventions of 1950, France and Germany had engaged in a war of words over the future of this long-disputed border territory. France insisted that the Saar be granted political autonomy but remain economically linked to France; Germany sought the return of the province. France had inflamed German opinion by appointing an ambassador to the Saar government and by restricting the political activities of pro-German parties in the region. With a new round of Saar elections slated for November 30, tensions mounted. On November 18, the Bundestag called on the Saarlanders to boycott the elections, after hearing SPD leader Erich Ollenhauer refer to Saar president Johannes Hoffman as the
 
Page 175
"Grotewohl" of the Saar  as loyal to Paris as the East German leader was to Moscow. Vice-Chancellor Franz Blüucher of the Free Democratic Party and the minister of all-German affairs Jakob Kaiser denounced the suppression of the pro-German parties and generated considerable fervor against French policy. On the eve of the elections, two unarmed French soldiers of the Eighth Artillery regiment stationed in Saarburg were attacked by German civilians as they left a café in nearby Trier in the French zone of occupation. One was killed, the other seriously wounded. The Saar elections, however, reinforced French policy: 75 percent of the electorate voted for autonomy within a "European framework," while only 25 percent favored a return to Germany. The highly charged issue continued to do great harm to the notion of intimate military cooperation between France and Germany as envisioned in the EDC.
12
Perhaps most threatening to the future of the EDC was the gradual erosion of support for the idea within the Quai d'Orsay itself. Of course there remained powerful advocates: Schuman himself, as well as France's representative to NATO Hervé Alphand, Deputy Foreign Minister Maurice Schumann, and leading diplomatic officers such as Ambassador Henri Bonnet, High Commissioner André François-Poncet, and the secretary general of the CIQCEE Thierry de Clermont-Tonnèrre. But the current of opinion among key civil servants was running against the treaty. One long paper on the subject from the Direction d'Europe enumerated the weaknesses of the plan. In trying to maintain some sovereignty over France's own army, the paper argued, French negotiators had watered down the supranational and coercive features of the EDC so that its value as a control mechanism over Germany  so important to the success of the ECSC  had been compromised. The Council was not an integrated body like the High Authority of the ECSC but simply a roundtable of national ministers, hopelessly ineffective from a military point of view. The common budget did little to equalize Franco-German relations because voting weight in the Council was linked to the size of each member state's financial contribution. Above all, the absence of truly integrative structures in areas such as recruitment, training, arms production, and general staffs meant that the EDC invited the resurrection of a German national army, rather than employing German manpower and financial resources for the creation of a European force as initially envisaged by the Pleven Plan.
13
These doubts were encouraged by signs within Germany of what sensitive French minds considered to be a growing German arrogance with regard to the nation's newfound influence on the world stage. In the
 
Page 176
middle of June, French officials reported on the public boasting by Theodor Blank, the German minister charged with negotiating rearmament, that by the end of 1954 Germany would possess an army of half a million troops. These figures, not meant for public consumption, were in any case inflated, but Blank's tone unsettled French observers. In October, Armand Bérard, the French deputy high commissioner, informed Paris that in private, Germans presented their country as America's most reliable ally and had begun to shed their earlier hesitations toward rearming. François-Poncet noted that mounting French criticism of the EDC "carried water to the German mill." It would allow Adenauer and Blank the opening they sought to approach the Americans about a direct and unfettered entry into NATO. Such thoughts were inflamed by rumors that the American secret services were already engaged in arming paramilitary groups in Germany, and that former
Wehrmacht
troops were coming out of the woodwork across the country in the hope of returning to their careers in a future German army.
14
Fueled by suspicions that the EDC was far more advantageous to Germany than to France, Quai officials quickly soured on the scheme. In the course of the debate, key figures who had supported the Schuman Plan and encouraged a policy of cooperation with Germany in the late 1940s  men such as François Seydoux, Alexandre Parodi, René Massigli, Pierre de Leusse, Jean Chauvel, and Guy le Roy de la Tournelle  turned against the EDC. Without the institutional support of these policymakers, the treaty had little chance of success.
15
Revising the Treaty
On December 22, the government of Antoine Pinay fell, toppled by the MRP, which had grown increasingly uncomfortable supporting Pinay's financial austerity plans and his cuts of the social welfare budget. Pinay had been very popular in the country. He managed to halt inflation, slowed government borrowing, and cut spending, and his fall was decried within France and without. His departure set off a scramble for a successor, and the EDC played an important role in determining the outcome. President Auriol, after calling on the Socialist leader Guy Mollet, the RPF leader Jacques Soustelle, and the MRP leader Georges Bidault, could find no candidate able to secure the needed 314 votes in the Assembly. On January 2, 1953, the Radical René Mayer began to canvass the parties. He could get MRP, Radical, and Independent support, but the Socialists remained in opposition to any right-wing coali-
 
Page 177
tion, and so Mayer's only hope lay with the Gaullists. The RPF, long hostile to the EDC, required Mayer  sympathetic to the plan  to state that he would seek additional protocols to the EDC treaty to enhance French military sovereignty and to bring Britain more closely into the pact. Following this commitment, Mayer received the RPF vote and the premiership on January 7, 1953. The most notable victim in the cabinet reshuffle was Robert Schuman, who was succeeded by his predecessor, Georges Bidault. Few expected major changes in foreign policy, but Bidault was considered a less ardent supporter of the EDC and had closer ties to the Gaullist delegation in parliament. Bidault and Mayer thus both owed their new posts to the RPF, and the price for this was a revision of the EDC treaty.
16
Upon his return to the Quai, Bidault received a good deal of advice about how to approach the EDC problem. The most extended arguments came from opponents of the treaty. Bidault no doubt expected the kind of missive shot off by Michel Debré, the staunch Gaullist and fiery opponent of the EDC. In his mind, the EDC was militarily, morally, and financially an abomination that could lead in only one direction: toward "Germanic hegemony" in Europe.
17
But Bidault received more sober and therefore more effective criticism from the director general of the Quai d'Orsay, Guy le Roy de la Tournelle. He rehearsed the by now standard line that the EDC treaty did little to prohibit the reestablishment of a German army. But his most powerful arguments went to the subject of French influence in Europe, the Atlantic Alliance, and the world. Within Europe, la Tournelle believed that the EDC would inhibit the ability of France to develop a strong arms industry and would make national economic strategies harder to pursue. Within the Alliance, France's status would be compromised by the military constraints of the EDC. "Despite certain obstacles which have resulted from American power and the necessity of calling upon the United States for military and economic aid, we have managed to maintain the autonomy of our foreign policy," he wrote. But the EDC would ruin this. "It is likely that, once France has been eliminated as an independent world military power, the leadership of the [western] coalition  directed now by the Permanent Standing Group [of NATO] in which we are represented  will become the exclusive privilege of the United States and Great Britain.'' Emphasizing a point that British officials understood all too well, he stated that "we cannot at the same time join the Six [the EDC] and remain alongside the two Great Powers." Finally, the EDC would impair France's ability to pursue a vigorous colonial policy. Not only did
 
Page 178
the treaty require permission of the EDC states for France to deploy troops overseas, but the constant need to keep troops in Europe so as to counter German weight in the EDC structure would inhibit a strong defense posture abroad. In a final flourish, la Tournelle threw out a pointed rhetorical question to the foreign minister: "is it right for France to practice a policy which will not block the restoration of German military power, but which will at the same time be for us a source of weakness and confusion? Is it wise, in the false hope of binding our neighbor in chains, to chain ourselves up as well?"
18
La Tournelle's memorandum reflected one of the major concerns of French foreign policy. Since 1945, France had been engaged in a search for influence in Europe: influence over Germany, influence within the emerging Western Alliance, influence in East-West relations. This search required France to be vigilant, as Bidault had been before 1948, but also flexible and at times daring: the London accords, the Petersberg Protocol, the Schuman Plan, all reflected the belief that French influence in Europe would be enhanced both by the creation of a web of guarantees and controls over Germany and by a stable, integrated, and unified Europe based on a Franco-German entente. Those who opposed the EDC were not necessarily questioning this strategy. Rather, la Tournelle sought to measure the EDC by the standard used for previous experiments in Franco-German rapprochement: would it augment the French position in European and Alliance relations? He thought not, and an increasing number of his colleagues shared his view.
La Tournelle may have been too late, however. For on January 23, Bidault sent a telegram to the embassies in all the EDC capitals stating that he intended to press ahead with the ratification of the treaty.
19
What were his reasons for pursuing a pact against which so many sound arguments could be raised? Of course, Bidault was the leader of the party, the MRP, most strongly identified with European integration. Indeed, the party stood for little else. To renounce the EDC would shatter the political movement that he had founded in 1944 and embitter his own supporters. Further, strong arguments were made against la Tournelle's positions. Hervé Alphand, who bore primary responsibility for negotiating the EDC treaty, countered each of la Tournelle's points. The EDC, he thought, would effectively deprive Germany of a national military establishment and would not harm France's ability to defend its colonies. As for France's status in the alliance, Alphand argued, "it is evident that France cannot maintain her rank unless she transforms her archaic military structure and the cartels which characterize her economy. Such is
BOOK: France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954
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