French Foreign Policy since 1945

An Introduction

Frédéric Bozo

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785332777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia francesa

When Charles de Gaulle declared that "it is because we are no longer a great power that we need a grand policy, " he neatly summarized France's predicament on the world scene. In this compact and engaging history, author Frédéric Bozo deftly recounts France's efforts to reconcile its proud history and global ambitions with a realistic appraisal of its capabilities, from the aftermath of World War II to the present. He provides insightful analysis of the nation's triumphs and setbacks through the years of decolonization, Cold War maneuvering, and European unification, as well as the more contemporary challenges posed by an increasingly multipolar and interconnected world.

PART I

THE ERA OF FRUSTRATION (1945–1958)

Chapter 1

FRANCE’S DIFFICULT ENTRY INTO THE COLD WAR (1945–1950)

According to the classical definition of ‘power’, France at the end of the Second World War could no longer really be called one. Its economy had shrunk by half compared to prewar levels; its infrastructure was devastated; its population had been sapped by the human cost of the conflict; the country was cut off from the resources of its colonies; its armed forces were only just beginning to rebuild. What was France compared to the formidable economic and military power of the United States, the demographic mass and powerful war machine of the Soviet Union or the (admittedly declining) grandeur of the British Empire?

Above all, France’s power in 1944–1945 was overshadowed by the events of May–June 1940 when it had been dramatically defeated by Germany. At the end of the war, France’s early collapse remained the major determining factor with respect to the country’s role in the world, as shown by the reluctance of the Big Three (the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom) to grant France the place on the world stage to which it aspired. Reversing this situation, placing France among the victors and restoring its right to stand alongside the other great powers, had been what de Gaulle had sought to achieve from his Appeal of 18 June 1940 onwards. For the next four years, he had seen politics as the continuation of war by other means.

Was de Gaulle’s vision of a restored France one of vain pretension – or one of vital ambition, necessary both for the country and for the world? Be that as it may, the task General de Gaulle had set himself four years earlier did not end with the liberation of France’s national territory from spring–summer 1944 onwards (with the Allied landings in Normandy in June, and in Provence in August) or even with Germany’s surrender in May 1945. It was quite clear that the restoration of France’s ‘rank’ was going to be a long-term project. Postwar French foreign policy was thus in many ways a continuation of the country’s wartime diplomacy.

De Gaulle’s Policy

In order to be a power once more, France would have to conduct a policy of power: this was the line taken by de Gaulle when he came back to Paris at the end of August 1944 following the liberation of the capital as head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic (Gouvernement Provisoire de la République française, GPRF). De Gaulle held the main levers of foreign policy, namely the diplomatic service, which had been progressively rebuilt from London and later Algiers and was led by the Christian-Democrat Georges Bidault (whom de Gaulle had made foreign minister for the reason that, in the eyes of the wartime Allies, he represented the internal French Resistance) and the armed forces, now rising from the ashes to help seal France’s status as a victorious power alongside the Big Three.

Indeed, the first great battle fought by the provisional government was a diplomatic one: the GPRF needed to gain international recognition from the Allies. On 23 October 1944 this was achieved, the United States, the United Kingdom and the USSR having finally overcome their reticence regarding a power whose legitimacy they only grudgingly accepted, as shown by de Gaulle’s difficult relations with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill over the previous years: ‘The government’, de Gaulle famously (and ironically) commented, ‘is most satisfied to be called by its rightful name.’ The struggle for ‘rank’ did not stop there, however: recognized at last as an international player by the Big Three, de Gaulle’s France wanted above all to be considered as their fourth member. This was what was at stake in the big international conferences of 1945, which would finally see this status conferred upon France even though, paradoxically, the country was not represented at these same meetings. At Yalta (4–11 February 1945), the Big Three assigned France a zone of occupation (ZO) in Germany and a permanent seat on the Security Council of the future United Nations (to a large extent the result of Churchill’s keenness to see France standing alongside the United Kingdom as a counterweight to the growing power of the USSR); and, at Potsdam (17 July–1 August 1945), France was given a seat on the Allied Control Council (ACC), which had authority over German affairs, and on the Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM), which oversaw the drafting of peace treaties with the former Reich and its ex-allies.

In 1945, then, Germany constituted the highest priority in French foreign policy, the ‘central problem of the universe’, as de Gaulle put it. The goal was clear: Germany must be left incapable of launching a new act of aggression, and its resources must contribute to repairing the damage done to the victims of the Reich, starting with France. As well as demilitarization, France sought – at least to some extent – Germany’s economic dismemberment and political fragmentation. There could be no question of a return to any form of centralized Reich: Germany could only be reborn as a highly decentralized federation, and three of its territories would be detached, namely the Saar (which would be economically attached to France), the Ruhr (to be internationalized) and the Rhineland (to be occupied for the foreseeable future). With regard to Germany, de Gaulle’s France, in other words, sought to pursue a classic policy of coercion, or at least of ‘reinsurance’, which carried clear echoes of the aftermath of the First World War. And yet, as early as 1945, French policy-makers, under the cover of this policy of intransigence, were privately quite conscious of the limits of the hard-line approach that they adopted in public when it came to the German question, regarding which they would reveal themselves over the months and years that followed to be quite capable of compromise when needed.¹

Acting alone, France would obviously be unable to impose its views regarding the fate of the former Reich. Faced with the prevailing uncertainty around this question, the possibility – in the long term, at any rate – of a resurgent German threat therefore remained a central preoccupation of French foreign and defence policy in the immediate aftermath of the war. Sceptical with regard to a possible long-term involvement of the United States on the old continent following the end of hostilities, yet ruling out a formal alliance with the United Kingdom because of the serious Franco-British disagreements that persisted in the Near East (in particular over Syria and Lebanon), de Gaulle opted for a classic alliance de revers with Moscow, which was concluded on 10 December 1944 during his trip to the USSR. Parallel to this alliance, he believed that France, at the head of a sort of ‘grouping’ of western European states (Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg and the German territories west of the Rhine) and acting in concert with the USSR, would be able to control a defeated Germany. Such a west European consortium would also allow France to act as a counterweight to the Soviet presence in the east of the continent, while maintaining the balance between the USSR and the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. This, in broad terms, was the geopolitical vision that lay behind French diplomacy in 1944–1945.

When de Gaulle stepped down from government in January 1946, the results of his foreign policy were mixed. It was true that, as an occupying power of the now-defeated Germany alongside the United States, the United Kingdom and the USSR, and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, France had managed to establish its status as the fourth ‘Big’ power, a scarcely believable result given the country’s real situation at the end of the conflict. For the moment, however, this status existed only on paper, a fact made clear by France’s exclusion from all the major diplomatic conferences of 1945, from Yalta to Potsdam. Above all, while de Gaulle may have managed to reaffirm his country’s ‘rank’ and independence, he was largely unable to impose his foreign-policy vision, in particular with regard to the German question, on which France’s demands left the country isolated. Meanwhile, the background of the nascent Cold War meant that international relations were now increasingly governed by the Soviet-American standoff, from which even the United Kingdom, despite its unquestioned status as a victor, in effect found itself sidelined. De Gaulle’s intransigence, which was in stark contrast to how little power his country actually possessed, could only increase France’s isolation in the context of the progressive disintegration of the ‘grand alliance’ between the Western powers and the Soviets – an alliance that it was naturally in France’s interest to maintain. De Gaulle’s January 1946 decision to step down from power was certainly not unconnected to this: as well as denouncing the return to the discredited party ‘system’ in French domestic politics, de Gaulle was also beginning to feel the limits placed on his freedom of action on the international stage, at a time when the country, after the trials it had just come through, wanted more than anything to concentrate on its own reconstruction.

After de Gaulle

With de Gaulle’s departure, Bidault gained full control over foreign policy, which he would run for the next two and a half years almost without interruption. A complex character, always in awe of, and sometimes humiliated by, the General, a strident defender of national independence, Bidault wanted above all to continue de Gaulle’s policy of maintaining a balance between East and West and to pursue his declared objectives with respect to the fate of Germany. Yet the domestic and international context was increasingly unfavourable. While the succession of ‘tripartite’ governments that followed de Gaulle’s departure (composed of the MRP, the SFIO and the PCF, i.e. the Christian Democrats, the socialists and the communists) stated in public that they sought to prioritize continuity in France’s foreign policy, in reality the various coalition parties differed increasingly with regard to its principal aspects, namely the question of Germany and relations with the USSR and the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ respectively. Even more portentously, while the intensification of the Soviet-American confrontation strengthened the desire of the French to maintain an equidistant position between the two emerging superpowers, it also made this objective all the more difficult to achieve. Despite this stated emphasis on continuity, then, French foreign policy was bound to change once de Gaulle had left power. Even if the major shifts would not occur immediately, by 1946 it had become obvious to France’s leaders that these were inevitable in the longer term.

This was especially true of the policy towards Germany. In the face of the steadily deepening rivalry between the Western powers and the Soviets over Germany from 1946 onwards, France’s policy seemed less and less sustainable. By this time the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, were moving towards a policy of rapid reconstruction of the western half of Germany, as heralded by the speech given in Stuttgart on 6 September 1946 by US Secretary of State James Byrnes and the creation of an Anglo-American economic ‘Bizone’ on 2 December of the same year. While the French still maintained their hard-line approach in public, they were aware by now that the sort of dismemberment of Germany that they had been calling for since the end of the war was no longer realistic: in the climate of the gathering Cold War, a form of partitioning of the country between East and West seemed to be a far more likely outcome. Among France’s demands with regard to Germany, only the economic attachment of the Saar to France seemed acceptable to Washington and London in 1946, provided that Paris abandon its projects regarding the Rhineland and, even more importantly, the Ruhr – the internationalization of which would have given the USSR a say in the running of Germany’s industrial heartland. Although for the time being France’s domestic political situation prevented Bidault from making a clean break with past German policy (not least because the communists were in favour of maintaining the alliance with Moscow at any price), a move towards the position of the United States and the United Kingdom, called for increasingly openly by many French politicians, was now on the cards.

In any case, such a shift seemed inevitable from an economic point of view. The exhausted country was dependent on a stream of US aid that was still by no means guaranteed. Admittedly, the Blum-Byrnes accords, signed on 28 May 1946 in Washington between the former leader of the Front populaire, Léon Blum, and US Secretary of State James Byrnes, providing new credits to France and writing off a part of its debt, did promise some breathing space. Yet the result of these long and difficult negotiations in Washington (carried out by a French team headed by the ageing socialist leader and by the commissioner-general of the National Planning Board, Jean Monnet) fell well short of what was needed. Nor, or not yet at any rate, did the Blum-Byrnes accords result in a realignment with US policy, a move Bidault continued to oppose. (The communists nevertheless loudly denounced the accords as a capitulation in the face of US imperialism, not least because they ended the quotas placed on US films shown in France.)

It was with the UK Labour government, then, that it was possible in 1946 to see the beginnings of a rapprochement. This was to a large extent the result of the eagerness of the French socialists (who were also showing themselves ready to be more accommodating over the German question) to balance the power of the USSR with a Franco-British counterweight. The rapprochement was confirmed by Blum during his short-lived government (December 1946–January 1947); had it not been for the subsequent divergences between the two countries on European integration, it could have led to the construction of a Franco-British Europe, desired by many at the time. For the time being, the improved relations between London and Paris resulted in the signing on 4 March 1947 of the Franco-British Treaty of Dunkirk, which was ostensibly designed to prevent any resurgence of the German threat; this bilateral military alliance indeed completed a diplomatic triangle between Paris, London and Moscow, which appeared to fulfil the Gaullist policy of ‘reinsurance’ with regard to Germany and of equidistance between the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and the Soviets. Yet the time for such schemas, premised on maintaining a ‘grand alliance’ between the powers that had defeated the Reich, had passed; 1946 had seen the confirmation of the growing confrontation between East and West, and thus by the beginning of 1947, France’s policy of independence from either camp had clearly become a dead end.

France Moves Over to the West

It would be something of a caricature to define spring 1947 as the moment at which France ‘chose’ its camp in the East-West conflict. France was, by nature, a Western power: in this sense, there was no French ‘choice’ in favour of the West. Moreover, France’s entry into the Cold War was not the result of a sudden decision. As early as 1945–1946, there had been a realization among de Gaulle’s entourage and certain key military figures, such as General Pierre Billotte (the Army’s deputy chief of staff and then the head of France’s military mission to the UN), that the looming Soviet threat was a more pressing danger than any hypothetical German resurgence. Yet it was only in the spring of 1947 that French foreign policy really began to take this fact on board – and the path it took was anything but straightforward. The institutional system of the Fourth Republic (whose constitution was approved by a referendum in October 1946) indeed established a very diffuse decision-making process: while the main responsibility for foreign policy resided with the foreign minister at the Quai d’Orsay and with the president of the Council of Ministers (i.e. the prime minister), the president of the Republic could exercise a degree of influence over it, and parliamentary wrangling defined its general orientation. The very nature of this system, in other words, left little scope for abrupt changes of direction.²

The events of spring 1947 would nevertheless precipitate tendencies that had been gathering momentum for months, finally leading to a decisive shift in France’s posture in the East-West confrontation. The announcement by President Harry S. Truman on 12 March of the doctrine (that would henceforth bear his name) of US assistance to countries menaced by communism confirmed that the logic of the Cold War was now firmly established. In this context, the French delegation at the Conference of Foreign Ministers in Moscow (10 March–24 April 1947) could be under no misapprehension as to the deterioration of East-West relations and its consequences for France. Bidault was particularly shaken by the failure of the Moscow conference and now realized the impossibility of reaching any agreement with the USSR over the German question and the lack of any Soviet support for French demands, especially with regard to the Saar. It was now clear that any agreement over the future of Germany would have to be made with the United States and the United Kingdom – in exchange, of course, for French concessions. The German question had...