of the European Economic Community with its
supranational Commission. Would the EEC be
launched at all on 1 January 1959, requiring as it
did France to begin dismantling its protectionist
industrial tariffs? France was in deep financial
crisis, but de Gaulle did not attempt to abort the
birth of the Common Market. For him it was
not the economic aspects of the Treaty of Rome
that mattered most, but the political. He now
discovered important positive aspects and calcu-
lated that through leadership of the European
Economic Community France could regain influ-
ence in the world and wrest Europe away from
economic and military dependence on the Anglo-
Saxon nations. The recovery of France’s inter-
national position was foremost in de Gaulle’s
mind. An alliance with the US would remain
essential to counter the Soviet threat, but that
need not mean subservience or a European junior
partnership. In a Western Europe still looking to
the US for its defence and advanced technology,
de Gaulle’s was a bold vision of the future.
When de Gaulle returned to power in 1958
one major obstacle to his ambitions was the so-
called ‘special relationship’ between the US and
Great Britain. Britain was not willing to make a
choice ‘for Europe’ if this entailed weakening its
links with the US and the Commonwealth; and
so, although British policy favoured the creation
of an industrial free trade area in Western Europe,
the common external tariff, which would operate
against all non-European members as required by
the Treaty of Rome, was unacceptable. But with-
out Britain in the Common Market, and with
West Germany within it and anxious not to appear
assertive, France would be the unchallenged
leader of Western Europe. As far as the wider
world was concerned, de Gaulle in September
1958 proposed to President Eisenhower and
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that it should
be directed by the US, Great Britain and France.
This policy would have gravely offended
America’s other NATO allies, Italy and the
Federal Republic of Germany, and rejection was a
foregone conclusion. De Gaulle simultaneously
sought a special relationship with the West
German chancellor, Adenauer, who was invited
to de Gaulle’s home at Colombey-les-Deux-
Églises. The terms he offered to Adenauer were
that Germany should abandon any idea of a
nuclear partnership with France, that an agricul-
tural common market should be added to the
industrial Common Market of the EEC, and that
France and the Federal Republic should press
ahead with the Common Market of the Six in
preference to Britain’s larger Free Trade Associa-
tion. Adenauer assented. De Gaulle, who had
come to power with a free hand, had by the close
of 1958 already achieved much for France and
had enhanced its international position. The his-
toric enmity between France and Germany had
been buried and replaced by a new and special
intimacy, which was sealed by the Treaty of
Friendship in January 1963. The French role
would be crucial to the EEC’s further develop-
ment. Britain had been excluded and could con-
tinue to be excluded as long as de Gaulle chose to
make use of France’s veto. But he wished to shape
the Common Market into a close alliance of sov-
ereign states and opposed the transfer of powers
to Brussels, the new headquarters of the European
Commission.
De Gaulle’s priority was to reassert France’s
position in the world. It had been excluded from
the wartime settlements and from the nuclear
club. Without its own nuclear weapons France
would not be given a place at the table of the great
powers. In September 1959 de Gaulle announced
that France would build up its nuclear strike
force. But was there any point? France could never
hope to match the Soviet or American arsenals. De
Gaulle of course realised this but what he feared
and suspected was that the US might not defend
Western Europe with its nuclear weapons if it
meant destruction of the US. France needed its
own strike force to be independent of others. The
new American doctrine of ‘flexible response’ only
increased de Gaulle’s fears that a nuclear war
between the Soviet Union and the US might be
confined between the Elbe and the Atlantic. The
Americans, moreover, were changing their strate-
gic plans fundamentally without first consulting
their European allies. In February 1960 French
scientists exploded France’s first atom bomb.
Then France went thermonuclear with repeated
tests in the Pacific.
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