French History Advance Access originally published online on January 20, 2009
French History 2009 23(1):69-87; doi:10.1093/fh/crn065
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Power through Europe? The case of the European Defence Community in France (1950–1954)
* The author is a Lecturer in the Department of Contemporary History, Faculty of Geography and History, at the University of Barcelona. He may be contacted at vgavin{at}ub.edu
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Abstract |
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This paper analyses how the European Defence Community (EDC) project sparked off an internal debate inside the French government, foreign ministry and military concerning the country's position in the world. The conclusion that the outcome of the EDC would signify a reduction, rather than an increase, in French power, led Paris to reject a project that it had itself launched four years previously. Though the EDC created great tensions in public, the private debates in the corridors of power can, today, shed more light on the connection that Paris established between European integration and the exercise of the country's power abroad. According to classic historiographical analyses, the French were genuinely committed to creating an integrated Europe in the early 1950s. This article aligns itself with the opposite thesis defended by the British historian Alan Milward, according to which the aim of France's European integration project was, from its very start, to strengthen the nation state, not to substitute it with a federal European structure.1