Abstract
Laurent Warlouzet, Le choix de la EEC par la France. L’Europe économique en débat de Mendès France à de Gaulle (1955–1969), Paris, Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 2011; 569 pp.; €40.00; ISBN 978110975171
The Gaullist streak in the French historiography of contemporary France since the Second World War is as strong, if not stronger, than the Gaullism of those French presidents who succeeded Charles de Gaulle, including the socialists François Mitterrand and (perhaps) François Hollande. The central myth of this historiography consists of the idea of a powerful leader who was able to draw upon the resources of the Fifth Republic presidential constitution (introduced by himself) to decide the fate of France. In French European and foreign policy, or so it seems in this historiographical tradition, de Gaulle single-handedly opposed the British free trade area plan in 1958; vetoed Britain’s European Economic Community (EEC) applications in 1963 and 1967; humbled the European Commission in the empty chair crisis of 1965–6; and took France out of NATO’s integrated command structure in 1966.
In his book Laurent Warlouzet dispels this myth. After an introductory chapter on the European policies of the Fourth Republic governments until de Gaulle came back to power in May 1958, he analyses and highlights the extent to which the French president was constrained in his European policy by the government machinery, the new institutional dynamics in the EEC and transnational societal actors who became more and more involved in shaping the legal framework for integration and the substance of the new common policies, such as the Common Agricultural Policy and competition policy. In discussing the origins of Regulation 17/62, which was to form the backbone of EEC competition policy for 40 years to come, Warlouzet shows how sections of the French government and French officials in the EEC were keen to harness the common competition policy for their strategy of regulated liberalization. But he also shows how the institutional dynamics in the Community made it impossible for de Gaulle or the French government to foresee the long-term effects of this regulation, especially as its predominantly do-liberal origins mainly derived (in the EEC context) from German and Dutch traditions and preferences. In particular, it was unclear in 1962 how the Commission would implement the regulatory framework and how the Court of Justice would strengthen its liberalization effects through its later judgements.
Within these constraints, de Gaulle and the French governments sought to mould European integration as a strategy for domestic modernization. In this sense Warlouzet agrees with Alan S. Milward but without assuming that such interests are simply formulated by national governments and ministries; instead, he points out the domestic contestation in policy fields such as competition and agriculture. In fact, French farmers were appalled by de Gaulle’s confrontational empty chair policy in 1965 as they feared that it could risk important gains for them that the Commission’s package from the spring of that year seemed to offer. Extending from his discussion of French (economic) policy in the EEC, Warlouzet also draws some general conclusions for the character of European integration; in particular, he shows how the formation of the EEC and the evolution of its policies in the 1960s did not amount to a simple linkage between French gains in agriculture and German gains in industrial exports. The economic policies and deals and their effects were far more complex than that. Thus, French industrial exports soared, and German farmers also profited from the ridiculously high Community wheat price.
This book revises in important ways how we should think about and research French European policy, and it makes a significant contribution to the study of European integration politics more generally. It also has some weaknesses, however, which chiefly result from its origins as a French PhD thesis. Most importantly, the book does not aim to generalize more rigorously from its findings for the French case on how to conceptualize the study of national European policy, something that could advance this type of research more dramatically beyond Milward’s heavily state-centric comparative framework, which ignores the domestic origins of interests as much as transnational and supranational influences on national policy making. Moreover, the research would have profited from an even more energetic multilateral and transnational contextualization of French European policy. The use of some British sources alongside French and EEC sources provides some useful insights into external perceptions of French policy. However, France’s main partner in the EEC was of course West Germany, not Britain, and Warlouzet has used no German sources and almost no literature in German, even for his study of the origins of Regulation 17/62, despite the very strong German influence on competition policy. In other words, one major weakness of French (and Italian) research on postwar Europe and the EEC in particular remains its very limited understanding of one of the most important member-states and its language – ironically, more limited in some ways than de Gaulle’s.