De Gaulle’s complicated legacy

Charles de Gaulle’s European vision continues to shape both French and European Union policymaking.

Seventy years ago this week in London, on 18 June 1940, Charles de Gaulle defied the course of history. In a short broadcast on the BBC and with France on the brink of armistice, he appealed for resistance to “the mechanised force” of Germany. France’s war was about to change and in France’s future there now gaped a de Gaulle-shaped hole.

For more than a quarter of a century after the end of the Second World War, and from in and out of office, de Gaulle rewrote French political culture. Strong leadership, audacious friendships and the art of saying ‘No’ became firmly entrenched in the French republican toolkit and, amongst other things, set the tone for France’s relations with the European Union.

Here, de Gaulle’s 11-year presidency of France (1958-69) left a tricky legacy for each of his successors, Nicolas Sarkozy included. The current French president’s visit to London on 18 June 2010 will commemorate not only a wartime hero, but a figure who scoped out the possible and the say-able in France’s European policy for the foreseeable future.

De Gaulle’s own inheritance was complicated. By the time he came to power, France had taken the momentous decision to pool sovereignty with Germany, in the form of the new European Communities. That decision was itself an accident of history that went against the grain of French history and France’s federalists have never since been so influential.

When he returned to power in 1958, de Gaulle was faced with a substantial problem: how to tally French membership of European Community institutions run by men whom he derided and according to principles that he ridiculed, with his vision of an independent France leading the way in Europe. For de Gaulle, the essence of European ‘construction’ was that it should be political: a power to be reckoned with in the world; a forum for politicians (not stateless, unelected bureaucrats), and driven by a shared sense of Europe’s distinct identity in the world. Its watchwords were to be co-operation, never integration, sovereignty, not supra-nationalism, a ‘Union of States’.

There was no place in this vision for what de Gaulle depicted as UK’s “deep-seated hostility” to and “lack of interest” in European construction, and he accordingly rejected the UK’s belated application to join the Communities not once, but twice (in 1963 and 1967). The smooth journey towards a federal Community, as foreseen by the European Commission, the treaties and Germany, was abruptly halted by de Gaulle’s ‘empty chair’ protests of 1965 and the Luxembourg ‘compromise’ that followed. Ultimately, de Gaulle failed to scupper the Jean Monnet method, of European integration through small steps, or to impose an alternative; the support simply did not materialise, either in Paris or in Europe.

Where does this leave Sarkozy, who conducts himself as a man in de Gaulle’s image, prepared to go against the flow? He certainly treats the EU as a forum where governments do politics, a case in point being this week’s European Council in Brussels (17 June), where national heads will meet to pool ideas and power in the face of weighty issues of common concern (economic governance, climate, jobs, immigration). And in such circumstances, Sarkozy has to squeeze every ounce of goodwill from his relationship with German Chancellor Angela Merkel – no small task, yet one facilitated by a comfort zone forged between the two countries by de Gaulle in his time as French president. And Sarkozy certainly believes in making Europe’s voice distinct and audible on an inter-national level, in good Gaullist fashion.

Yet Sarkozy is no more immune than his predecessor from the forces that undermined de Gaulle’s own European vision in his own day, amongst which are the discordant voices at home in France and the difficulty of reaching agreement with both Germany and the UK. On that day in June in 1940, nothing was certain, but a myth was in the making. Contemporary France is profoundly European and de Gaulle will forever be associated with the many bold and troubled decisions that made it so.

Helen Drake, a senior lecturer in French and European studies at Loughborough University, United Kingdom, edited “French relations with the European Union”, published in 2005

Click Here: cheap nrl jerseys