Charles de Gaulle, the International System, and the Existential Difference

Graham O'Dwyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317168300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This innovative account of Charles de Gaulle as a thinker and writer on nationalism and international relations offers a view of him far beyond that of a traditional nationalist. Centring on the way de Gaulle regarded nations as individuals the author frames his argument by rationalising de Gaulle's nationalism within the existential movement that flowed as an intellectual undercurrent throughout early and mid-twentieth-century France. Graham O'Dwyer asserts that this existentialism of the nation and 'the presence of the past' allowed de Gaulle to separate the 'nation' from the 'state' when looking at China, Russia, Vietnam, and East European countries, enabling him to understand the idiosyncrasies of specific national characters better than most of his contemporaries. This was especially the case for Russia and China and meant that he read the Cold War world in a way that Washington and London could not, allowing him a unique insight into how they would act as individuals and in relation to other nations.

1 Introduction to the work

French philosopher Régis Debray once claimed that history’s giants are history’s great ‘political myths’. They appear, that is, as fleeting intrusions in our lives that ‘decimate or exhaust us’ and leave a lasting mark on the world. In using the term ‘myth’, Debray does not mean to imply that history’s giants are some form of ‘imagined beings’ that lack a tangible existence, rather that certain personalities exert an omnipresent ‘force that leaves a wake behind it’ and which, at least for a time, ‘turns the world upside down’.¹ It is true to say that most of us will never meet such an individual and instead we tend to create subjective narratives that, while containing certain kernels of truth, are largely fictionalised accounts. It is in this sense that man becomes myth and, while we may have no formal acquaintance with such ‘giants’, we nonetheless sense the aftershocks of their actions. As inheritors of the historical, that is, we live with the legacies of their actions and are condemned to swim in the ‘wakes’ that transcend the era in which they lived. This is true of figures such as Bonaparte and the two decades that he dominated European affairs, of Vladimir Lenin and his sense of the ‘natural laws of history’ in relation to Czarist Russia, of Franklin Roosevelt and his radical expansion of the American state in the 1930s and 1940s, of Margret Thatcher and her injection of a dose of Hayekian economic thought into the heart of British political life, and of Deng Xiaoping’s reorientation of the Chinese economy in the latter years of the twentieth century. As ‘conductors’ of their time such giants seem to condition and orchestrate the world around them in a way that few others do.

While the consequences of Vladimir Putin’s vision of politics both within Russia (and the ‘democratic recession’ that he possibly represents) and on the international stage may see him join such illustrious company it is surely the case that this book’s central focus, Charles de Gaulle, sits among the cast of historical leviathans and ‘myths’ as a consequence of his potent sense of France, his actions in ‘saving’ France in the 1940s, his creation of the French Fifth Republic in the 1950s, and his actions on the world stage which he sought to influence and bend to his cast-iron will during the 1960s. Indeed, de Gaulle understood that for most Frenchmen and Frenchwomen he was a ‘mythical’ figure and spoke of how his subsequent political career was conditioned by the public image that had formed around him. There was, in other words, a self-conscious understanding that ‘de Gaulle’ was largely a public ‘invention’ over which ‘Charles’ had little control. This had been formed during the Second World War when he became aware that he had entered the national consciousness of France. ‘I realised that “General de Gaulle” had become a living legend’, he once claimed. ‘The French had formed a certain image of him…they expected many things of him…they thought of him as behaving in a certain way. From that day on I knew I would have to reckon with this man, this General de Gaulle’. ‘There were many things’, he recalled, ‘I would have liked to do but could not, for they would not have been fitting for General de Gaulle’.² This is why he stressed to André Malraux that ‘I too am a myth’.³ It is also why, after giving his inflammatory ‘Vive le Québec libre!’ speech in 1967 (where he was seen to stir certain secessionist sentiments in Canada), he told his aides that, in the context of the occasion, diplomatic niceties were not available to him; ‘When one is General de Gaulle one does not get away with those kind of expedients. What I did, I had to do.’⁴ It is interesting to ponder how true this is for other world leaders who, due to their stature and importance, take on a similar status within their respective nations.

It is because figures such as de Gaulle have a profound impact on their political environment, in both a domestic and international sense, that they transform souls and have a propensity to divide people into supporters and adversaries during their lifetimes but also long after they have passed on. While we spill endless ink debating their respective influences and the merits of their ideas, visions, and actions it is certainly the case that to be great is to be controversial (although it is clear that the relationship does not always work the other way around). Of course, as the quintessential contrarian of his day, controversy was de Gaulle’s life-long companion. Whether as a young student at Saint-Cyr, as writer and critic on the antiquated nature of French military strategy in the 1930s (de Gaulle saw this as being too defensive, theoretical, and rigid, and thus lacking in mobility; a quality that he treasured in political life), as self-proclaimed leader of France in the 1940s, or as premier of the Fifth Republic in the 1950s and 1960s, de Gaulle habitually courted the controversial. This is why, in the twilight of his political career, Alexander Werth once described the General as ‘the most controversial figure on the international scene’. ‘Perhaps’, as Werth was to write, ‘his Stendhalian qualité suprême has been his tendency to always rebel against something’ and is why de Gaulle liked to say that ‘in politics one must always vote against something’.⁵ This he most certainly did.

The study of individuals in the context of international relations

Irrespective of the reasons we are drawn to the world’s historical giants I begin this study by assuming that figures such as de Gaulle do matter and should be studied in some capacity. This may, it is true, appear as an odd caveat to offer in the opening chapter of this volume but in all honesty it probably (read certainly!) exposes my background in international relations (IR) where individuals are seldom studied. Indeed, as a scholar of the relatively minor sub-discipline of IR that is ‘Foreign Policy Analysis’ (FPA), where individuals are one of the central points of focus or ‘levels of analysis’ (what is usually referred to as ‘actor-specific theory’), I often find myself at odds with academic colleagues regarding the importance of ‘the individual’ to international affairs and events and am constantly assured that the individual is of peripheral importance. Needless to say I do not believe this to be the case and hope that this study goes someway to supporting this way of thinking about the world, but given the countless discussions that I have (genuinely) enjoyed on the issue over the years I find it somewhat difficult to proceed without touching on this rather elementary point. That said, and in relation to this question, it must be noted and indeed conceded that the intellectual foundations of my opponents’ position sit upon solid ground as theirs is largely representative of the ‘default’ position in contemporary IR scholarship regarding certain ontological assumptions.

By this I mean the claim that individuals are of peripheral importance to global affairs stems, in large part, from the dominance of systemic theories in IR such as neorealism (perhaps better understood as ‘structural realism’) and neoliberalism that have shaped the ontological ground of the discipline whereby ‘the state’ is seen as the central, and often solitary unit of analysis (although supranational bodies have increasingly figured into theories of IR in recent decades). States in other words, and the structural forces that condition their actions matter, people and human-agency generally do not. Alexander Wendt captures IR’s consensus on this question when he writes that scholars ‘have mostly ignored individuals on the assumption that their effects mostly washout in a world of Leviathans like States, Multinational Corporations, and International Organizations’.⁶ This is certainly the case.

In a sense I raise the essence (if not the full extent) of this debate right away as I wish to cut off any significant discussion on the matter and focus solely on framing de Gaulle’s interpretation of the Cold War international system, and the foreign policy that was produced by this, through the logic of Bergsonian ‘duration’, ethno-symbolic nationalism and, ultimately, Sartrean existentialism in order to offer a fresh perspective on the broad themes of French foreign policy under his stewardship. Indeed, my central claim in the work is that de Gaulle’s views, actions, and pronouncements in relation to international politics were inherently Bergsonian, ethno-symbolic, and existential in nature and led him to see the world, what we may call the ‘content of the international system’, differently than that of his Anglo-American counterparts. This, as I go on to argue, bears much responsibility for the deterioration in trans-Atlantic relations during his presidential tenure. In short, and in seeking to pinpoint de Gaulle’s ‘operational code’ (a term that is often employed in FPA that seeks to explore an individual’s ‘belief system’) I set out to explore Debray’s remarkably astute comment that ‘de Gaulle was an existentialist of the nation’.⁷ While this may be a somewhat cryptic remark and hence one that is not easily ‘unpacked’, I argue that it is worth pursuing, given its explanatory power in relation to de Gaulle’s foreign policy. I seek to make no broader claims in the work and offer no substantial discussion or analysis on French domestic politics during the 1960s. That said, it is perhaps wise to offer a few words on the ontological questions that I have alluded to before progressing. To whom this debate is of little importance I offer my apologies as this may seem to be a redundant monologue that highlights nothing other than that which is patently self-evident. In many ways I share such views and hence to the ranks of ‘de Gaulle’ scholars and my FPA colleagues this may be nothing more than an unnecessary digression. But in another sense I feel that it helps to frame the work in a broader intellectual context which, in turn, offers a clear justification for a focus on de Gaulle as a decision-maker, but also individual decision-makers in a wider context, thereby contributing to the growing sense that we cannot understand the world’s major events through structural forces alone.

Here is not the place to delve into a substantial genealogy of the importance of the individual to IR as this would be a project of ambitious scale in itself. Indeed, Quintin Skinner’s seminal lecture at the British Academy (in May, 2008) on the genealogy of the modern state tells us something of the immense scope of tracing the lineage of a multifarious and similar concept back through time.⁸ But it is worth noting that this way of thinking (the peripheral importance of the individual that is) is largely a reflection of the dominance of the neorealist school of thought within IR that since the publication of Kenneth Waltz’s 1979 seminal work, Theory of International Politics, has sought to develop, and what is in essence a laudable endeavour, a scientific approach to IR whereby states are seen to be ‘like units’ that all share the same assumptions and goals and whereby the structural forces of the international system are more important than individual states per se and certainly the individual decision-makers that govern these. This is an act or method that is often called ‘black boxing the state’ whereby these entities are stripped of any significant idiosyncratic content and differences, thusly becoming ‘metaphysical abstractions’.

The centrality of Waltzian logic, it must be noted, is not that states are identical in any meaningful sense, rather ‘states perform or try to perform tasks, most of which are common to all of them’.⁹ In other words, and although significant cultural, historical, and geographical differences exist between China, Russia, India, France, and the United States (for example), all are driven by the same logic and pursue similar goals in relation to security, the accumulation of hard and soft power, and acts of war. This ontological principle, in turn, provides the basis from which universal claims and theories may be postulated to explain generic state action through the ‘billiard ball’ model of IR and which sits at the heart of most neorealist works that explore how state behaviour (often in a negative sense) is a product of external pressures and assumptions. The essence of this is captured by the title of John Mearsheimer’s seminal work, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), where he explores how the inherent logic of the international system forces states to act in a certain way. ‘This situation’, he writes,

which no one consciously designed or intended, is genuinely tragic. Great powers that have no reason to fight each other – that are merely concerned with their own survival – nevertheless have little choice but to pursue power and to seek to dominate the other states in the system. This dilemma is captured in brutally frank comments that Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck made during the early 1860s, when it appeared that Poland, which was not an independent state at the time, might regain its sovereignty. ‘Restoring the Kingdom of Poland in any shape or form is tantamount to creating an ally for any enemy that chooses to attack us’, he believed, and therefore he advocated that Prussia should ‘smash those Poles till, losing all hope, they lie down and die; I have every sympathy for their situation, but if we wish to survive we have no choice but to wipe them out’.¹⁰

Of course, focusing on states rather than individual decision-makers is essential to the development of grand IR theory (at least in systemic terms) as this removes the thoroughly unpredictable ‘human element’ from any universal model and allows us to focus on scientific units that (nominally) conform to rational choice theory (RCT) and hence behave in a certain and predictable way.

Indeed, states, to most IR theorists, are rational actors and their behaviour is marked by this. They are, as Mearsheimer notes, rational actors in the sense that

they are aware of their external environment and they think strategically about how to survive in it. In particular, they consider the preferences of other states and how their own behavior is likely to affect the behavior of those other states, and how the behavior of those other states is likely to affect their own strategy for survival. Moreover, states pay attention to the long term as well as the immediate consequences of their actions.¹¹

Of course, focusing on decision-making in foreign policy that is the product of the human mind rather than the structural forces of the international system may allow us to explore global events through RCT but this also implies varying degrees of emotion, cognitive bias, and ideological underpinnings that grand theory is unable to account for. The subjectivity of human existence, in other words, produces endless variables and views of the world that grand theory cannot work with and hence working with the state rather than the individual decision-maker allows the discipline’s scholars to develop complex theoretical models of state action. In many ways this ‘sidesteps’ the significant challenges to IR’s reliance on RCT that cloud an individual’s ability to act in a rational way such as confirmation bias (seeing what one wants to see or seeking out information that confirms pre-existing views), the availability heuristic (believing that solitary, local, and immediate examples are representative of wider trends or processes), the Texas sharpshooter effect (seeing patterns, coincidences, and relationships where none exist), or the Dunning–Kruger Effect (the belief that one’s own abilities and skills are better than they actually are; this is sometimes called the American Idol Effect for obvious reasons).¹²

It is the removal of the individual that differentiates neorealism from classical realist works such as E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939) and Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations (1948) which largely saw state action as a reflection of the personalities, egos, and emotions of world leaders and which causes a problem for scholars of FPA who look to individuals and leaders to explain world politics. To be sure, although contemporary figures such as Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin are certainly products of their respective political environments, national histories, and security concerns, and are also constrained by limited resources and the geographical positioning of their respective states, I find it difficult to believe that individual personalities, and the decisions they produce, can be so easily discounted. One good example of this is Steven Yetiv’s 2013 work, National Security Through a Cockeyed Lens: How Cognitive Bias Impacts U.S. Foreign Policy, on the ways in which human irrationality and personality have driven key elements of US foreign policy since 1945 (such as US energy policy, the Iran-Contra episode, and Jimmy Carter’s response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979), suggesting that the human element in IR cannot be ignored and may in fact undermine any attempt to formulate a grand theory of IR that is able to withstand new attempts to falsify it. As Yetiv writes, ‘people don’t usually make decisions like programmed computers. Instead, they som...