As Mark Twain reputedly observed, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot.” In many respects, the years from 1969 to 1974 do not appear to be so distant a mirror of our own times, as there are so many of the same issues, developments, and challenges. Indeed, the late 1960s and early 1970s era of US foreign relations with Western Europe offers us many rhymes for today, and this book aims to bring the Nixon administration’s policy on European integration to new light. From the recent past of the US policy towards European integration, 1969–1974, it is even possible to outline future scenarios of US-EU relations and implications for nations in their relations with Washington and Brussels.
When the Marshall Plan for Europe was first publicized in 1947, Congressman Richard M. Nixon was chosen by Speaker Joe Martin as a junior member of a special bipartisan House committee headed by Congressman Christian Herter which spent some weeks investigating the European situation. The committee soon approved the Marshall Plan, and Nixon succeeded in persuading his sceptical California constituents of the necessity of the Plan. This experience left its mark and did much to establish him as an experienced practitioner of foreign policy.
On January 20, 1969, Richard M. Nixon assumed the presidency and inherited the US Cold War policy, which was almost unchanged since the mid-nineteenth century.1 Containment had been the keystone of successive US administrations ’ foreign policies, although, it was expressed in various languages and styles. President Nixon acknowledged that a new international system was emerging and held clear views on the broad objectives of his administration in foreign relations with Western Europe:
With that belief in world leadership, President Nixon envisaged the role Western Europe had in the new global environment and assumed European integration was a necessity to produce a united Europe, a Europe which would be more able to fulfil its responsibility in the Atlantic alliance and throughout the world. Likewise, Henry A. Kissinger, who entered the Nixon administration as National Security Adviser on January 20, 1969, shared Nixon’s beliefs about the end of a period of international order which naturally led to a new design for US foreign policy: “When I came into office, we were really at the end of a period of American foreign policy in which a redesign would have been necessary to do no matter who took over.”3 In the context of the Cold War, then, building a strong and prosperous Europe was inevitable in the redesign of US foreign policy. Both Nixon and Kissinger expected that the integration process in Western Europe would help to strengthen the Atlantic alliance and that a united Europe would be the United States’ reliable partner on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. However, the Nixon administration also recognized that in this new kind of world order, a united Europe would present a challenge to US hegemony. Kissinger acknowledged, “During the Cold War, European integration was urged as a method of strengthening the Atlantic partnership; today many of its advocates view it as a means of creating counterweight to the United States.”4It’s time for America to look after its own interests … they [Western Europe] have got to know that I supported the Marshall Plan, I was on the Herter Committee, I supported reciprocal trade, I’ve been supporting the damn foreign aid. I believe in world responsibility. … My point is, that right now, we are in a period, where the United States, the people of this country, could very well turn isolationist unless their President was looking after their interests. And we must not let this happen.2
During his presidency from 1969 to 1974, Nixon and his team worked to solve this dilemma while the European Economic Community (EEC) of the Six worked to end the political and institutional stalemate which existed because of General de Gaulle ’s radical positions on a number of European issues.5 The leaders of the Six saw the need to revive European integration. The new President of the French Republic, Georges Pompidou, summarized the EEC ’s new priorities in three words, “Completion, deepening, enlargement.” European integration was widely accepted as “the process of EEC/EC/EU construction and policy formulation by a wide range of actors—representative of governmental as well as nongovernmental entities, of member states as well as of the EU—engaged in decision making at the EU level.”6
The modern history of European integration began with the end of the Second World War in Europe in May 1945, when serious efforts to encourage regional integration were made in order to rebuild Western Europe economically, defend it in the context of Cold War tensions, and prevent extreme forms of nationalism.7 The creation of a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1950, which placed the French and German coal and steel industries under a supranational High Authority, reflects some significant aspects of Europe in the post-war period: it was important to bring Germany into Europe to constrain its dependence of action; Great Britain was hostile to surrender its sovereignty; France had lost much of its glory; and the United States wanted to support a united Europe, strong enough to push back the feared Communist expansionism, but not so strong as to challenge US economic and political hegemony.
The US policy on European integration during the Cold War was consistently supportive. According to Armin Rappaport, it was a “first” in international history: It was the first time a major power promoted integration rather than disintegration among nations on a continent in which it had strategic interests. “Divide and conquer” seemed to be outmoded. “Unify and federate” emerged as a modern pattern in the practice of international relations.8 The formulation of US policy towards European integration in the Nixon presidential years was conditioned by the perceived relative decline of the United States, Western European emergence and competition, the feared Communist expansionism, and US national interests. Against that backdrop, the Nixon administration saw the need to re-evaluate its policy on Western Europe and the integration process on this continent. President Nixon and Kissinger wanted to ensure that the United States was well able to shape and adapt to European integration. Their efforts to sustain the role of the United States in European integration and to adapt to the development of the European integration process were a colourful thread in the fabric of the US-EC relations. The Nixon administration ’s foreign policy in the changing international environment had an impact on its policy towards European integration and created new interactions and difficulties in US-EC relations. The question of whether the Nixon administration strengthened or...