France, Germany, and Nuclear Deterrence
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France, Germany, and Nuclear Deterrence

Quarrels and Convergences during the Cold War and Beyond

Nicolas Badalassi, Frédéric Gloriant, Nicolas Badalassi, Frédéric Gloriant

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eBook - ePub

France, Germany, and Nuclear Deterrence

Quarrels and Convergences during the Cold War and Beyond

Nicolas Badalassi, Frédéric Gloriant, Nicolas Badalassi, Frédéric Gloriant

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About This Book

The legacy of World War II and the division of Eastern and Western Europe produced a radical asymmetry, and a variety of misgivings and misunderstandings, in French and German experiences of the nuclear age. At the same time, however, political actors in both nations continually labored to reconcile their differences and engage in productive strategic dialogue. Grounded in cutting-edge research and freshly discovered archival sources, France, Germany, and Nuclear Deterrence teases out the paradoxical nuclear interactions between France and Germany from 1954 to the present day.

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Year
2022
ISBN
9781800733268
Edition
1

Part I

From the Beginning of the Franco-German Strategic Dialogue to the Nuclear Ambiguities of the ‘Adenauer/de Gaulle’ Era

Chapter 1

Raymond Aron, Germany and the Atomic Bomb

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Joël Mouric

Introduction

In 1950 Raymond Aron was already a prominent French intellectual and an influential columnist, acknowledged for his articles on foreign policy published in Le Figaro, as well as for his criticism of totalitarian ideologies and his anti-communist stance. In his essay The Century of Total War, written at the beginning of the Korean War, Aron told his readers why European unity mattered and why Germany was of paramount importance:
What is essential in the European idea as it was propagated in recent years? To my mind, it is a simple and obvious proposal, which Mr Churchill immediately grasped and which propagandists and intellectuals have since obscured, namely, that Western Europe must build up its military strength, and that strength can only emerge from a reconciliation between France and Germany. … The European idea is useless, sterile, if it does not foster that dialogue.1
In more than one sense, Germany played a pivotal role in Aron’s own life: it was there that he discovered, in the last years of the Weimar Republic, the works of Max Weber and conceived his criticism of the philosophies of history. It was also the place where he witnessed the rise of Nazism and the first months of Hitler’s tyranny. However, after Hitler was gone, and as the atomic bomb and the new balance of power turned Aron’s attention towards the United States, why did Germany remain at the centre of his attention? And how could the fate of a disarmed and occupied territory be related to the atomic bomb? It will be argued in this chapter that Aron immediately grasped the importance of Germany with regard to the stability of Europe. For Aron, Germany should neither remain in a political vacuum nor be absorbed in the Soviet sphere of influence. Simultaneously, he understood that the atomic bomb might prevent the outbreak of a new hyperbolic war. As Aron put it as early as 1947, the situation of the Cold War, which he called the ‘bellicose peace’, could be summed up as ‘peace impossible, war improbable’.2 To understand Aron’s singular position, one has to remember that he was both a scholar, and as such most interested in theoretical debates, and a ‘committed observer’ (spectateur engagé), an indefatigable publicist who intended to defend the existence of a liberal democratic society in Western Europe. The first section of this chapter deals with his understanding of the situation of divided Germany and Europe at the beginning of the nuclear age. The second section is about ‘the Great Debate’ that arose in the mid-1950s: should Europeans access nuclear weapons, and how? Aron doubted the efficacy of small national nuclear forces and envisioned a European deterrent with West German participation. The third section describes Aron’s strong support for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and for its strategic commitment to NATO in the troubled times of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Divided Germany and Europe in the Nuclear Age

While many French leaders and commentators believed that German unity should be undone once and for all, Aron always had the vision of a united Germany.3 What he feared most, indeed, was what he called ‘balkanization’, that is, the civil wars that would engulf European nation-states as a consequence of the ideological conflict between the two great powers. The model was provided by Thucydides in his description of sectarian violence among the Corcyreans during the Peloponnesian War.4 ‘1945’, wrote Aron, ‘is the 1815 of Germany’.5 In his view, Germany’s unmitigated defeat had put an end to the German threat, and a stable Europe without a German state was unthinkable. Aron would make that plea several times, either in front of his students at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (National School of Administration) – the new-born cradle of the French political elite – or within the Gaullist Rassemblement du Peuple Français (Rally of the French People), in which he played an important part from its inception in 1947.6 Therefore, Raymond Aron would do his best to support Franco-German reconciliation, to prevent the Germans from the temptation of neutrality and to foster their integration into the Western alliance.
As for the atomic bomb, Aron was soon convinced that its existence might not be tantamount to the inevitability of a new hyperbolic war. To avoid a new war, the essential prerequisite was the American commitment to the defence of Western Europe. Aron did not see in the Berlin blockade an immediate risk of war, because he was confident that the U.S. atomic monopoly, backed by the impressive power of the American economy, would deter Stalin from using his military in Europe.7 In 1949, he supported the Atlantic pact against those who, like the scholar Étienne Gilson, questioned its usefulness.8 Aron even converted de Gaulle himself to the value of the Atlantic alliance.9 Indeed, de Gaulle originally doubted the value of the American commitment in Europe because he believed that, eventually, isolationism would prevail. Aron’s article on the Atlantic pact convinced him that the mere threat of American intervention embedded in the pact would be enough to deter Stalin and prevent war. Likewise, in April 1950, Aron strongly opposed Leo Szilard’s vision of a neutralized Europe: given the ideological nature of the Soviet regime, nothing would appease Stalin.10 While Aron was not afraid of an atomic war, because none of the contenders was likely to run the risks of what such a war entailed, he also understood that the division of Europe caused by the Cold War would endure. Indeed, the mere existence of nuclear weapons froze the situation that had existed since 1945. This is what he told German students in Frankfurt in June 1952: as German reunification was beyond reach for an unforeseeable future, the best they could do was to go on with European and Atlantic integration. Aron’s speech, later remembered for the vibrant Europeanism in its conclusion, was primarily intended to counter the impact of the notes published by Stalin in April, in which the Soviet leader proposed a reunified but neutralized Germany.11
Even though Aron’s first appraisal of the FRG was disdainful – he called it ‘a rump Germany’ or a ‘caricature’ of Germany – he gradually showed more respect for the Bundesrepublik and Chancellor Adenauer.12 By 1956, Aron would name the democracy of Bonn an ‘appeased democracy’, compared to the regime of Weimar, but also to French politics characterized by everlasting civil strife, in particular under the Fourth Republic in the early years of the Cold War.13 He would then even praise the FRG as a model of liberal democracy. By contrast, as early as 1946, Aron had condemned the Sovietization of the Eastern zone. Far into the 1960s, he would deny the East German state any kind of legitimacy, referring to the ‘so-called GDR’ (German Democratic Republic) in the very words of the Hallstein doctrine.14 In the meantime, the uprising of 17 June 1953, in which the people of East Berlin had rebelled against the communist leadership, had shown that the GDR lacked popular support. Without the intervention of Soviet tanks, the communist regime led by Walter Ulbricht might have been overthrown.
Simultaneously, the European Defence Community (EDC) had not materialized. The EDC, also known as the Pleven Plan, was the French answer to the American insistence on rearming West Germany in the context of the Korean War. To avoid again setting up a German military, less than ten years after the occupation of France by the Wehrmacht, the French government proposed the creation of a European army that would include West German soldiers. From the beginning of this project, Aron presumed the EDC would not work. First, he doubted the efficiency of an army without a government. Moreover, he objected that West Germany and France had diverging interests. While the former was obsessed with the idea of reunification and looked towards the East, the latter was still an imperial power with responsibilities in the Far East and the Mediterranean. In the end, Aron was relieved by the demise of the EDC and the creation of the Bundeswehr within the framework of NATO. Aron went so far as to say that the failure of the EDC could be seen as the death certificate of Jean Monnet’s overall project.15
Nevertheless, with the development of Soviet nuclear capabilities, the question of a European deterrent was now raised: indeed, would the U.S. risk its own cities to defend Western Europe? Aron was well informed about nuclear issues by General Gallois, with whom he had frequent meetings.16 At the same time, he had read Clausewitz thoroughly and concluded that the thought of the Prussian general might still be relevant in the nuclear age. For Aron, Europe was the place where nuclear strategy mattered more than anywhere else: indeed, a war in Europe would necessarily be nuclear, and Europe was the only place in the world in which the problem of ‘graduated’ response existed.17 Indeed, the all-or-nothing alternative apparently implied by the existence of nuclear weapons did not satisfy Aron: it might either lead to annihilation if war were to happen, or to submission and tyranny if the fear of war precluded any defensive action. In his essay On War, Aron outlined his reading of Clausewitz, based on the primacy of the political.18 Contrary to the common interpretation which focuses on escalation, Aron’s vision emphasized restraint and prudence. As an epigraph to On War, Aron had put a quote from Clausewitz, the relevance of which was obvious to the European situation: ‘The art of war will shrivel into prudence, and its main concern will be to make sure that the delicate balance is not suddenly upset in the enemy’s favour and that the half-hearted war does not become a real war after all’.19 However, it remained essential to show a willingness to fight, first of all by developing the capabilities to wage war if need be.

A European Deterrent with West German Participation?

By the end of the 1950s, the UK had built up a national deterrent based on the V-bombers and was working on the Blue Streak, a land-based ballistic missile.20 In 1957, Duncan Sandys had published a White Book based on a strategy of massive retaliation, with significant cuts in conventional forces. Aron objected to this kind of all-or-nothing strategy, because he considered it barely credible. To him, the idea of banning war through the threat of thermonuclear war had become irrelevant. As early as 1956, on the contrary, he claimed that it would be wiser for the Europeans to ‘save war’, and to rely on conventional forces as well as tactical nuclear weapons to show their willingness to defend themselves.21 Moreover, Aron believed that a credible nuclear deterrent was too expensive for a single European nation-state. This led him to emphasize the relevance of a European deterrent. Accordingly, when the treaties of Rome were signed, Aron was more interested in Euratom than in the EEC. While he criticized the ambiguity of the latter (a political project embedded in a common market), he saw Euratom as the means towards European nuclear autonomy and access to atomic weapons. ‘Should the Europeans renounce nuclear energy’, he wrote, ‘they would sentence themselves to complete powerlessness’.22 Even though Aron never mentioned the French-German-Italian agreement on developing nuclear weapons, he de facto shared the concerns of Chancellor Adenauer and his defence minister Franz-Josef Strauß.23 They all resented an unlimited dependence vis-à-vis the U.S. and considered the atomic weapon a necessary attribute of sovereignty which, however, in Aron’s view, could not be attain...

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