Search Results

This chapter covers Franco-German political developments around the Tiger combat helicopter from 1988 to 2009. Focusing on these years' historical processes illustrates—notably through the evolving Franco-German pride regarding the high-end armament product and their joint salesmanship of the Tiger—that institutionalized relations may bring about events that in turn reflect back on the meaning of an institutionalized relationship itself. Three particular sets of outcomes need explanation during these years leading up to the Tiger's becoming a physical reality: French and German export interests in Dutch, British, Australian, and Spanish export episodes; the quite different French and German interest formation in the Turkish export episode; and the outcomes of the difficult year 1996, when the program's existence was questioned once again.

This chapter picks up where Chapter 3 left off, reconstructing and analyzing the continuation of Franco-German combat helicopter dealings from October 1982 to May 1984. At the end of this critical period, Germany and France, via an intergovernmental agreement in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), jointly embarked on the common development of a second-generation combat helicopter. The chapter first discusses the history of Franco-German defense affairs, beginning with the bilateral re-launch of the program at the fortieth Franco-German summit consultation in Bonn in October 1982 and continuing through subsequent Franco-German interaction. It culminates in the initiation of the enormous joint armament project in May 1984, with the signing of the Franco-German MoU during the forty-third Franco-German summit in Rambouillet. It then investigates the contents of the MoU contract, as the definition or nondefinition of common interests, positions, and goals regarding all aspects pertaining to the helicopter program—including the machine's technical specifications, its delivery schedules, and its financing. After focusing on the institutionalized meanings and purposes underlying the political processes of the period under review, the chapter presents as cases the three main outcomes that need explanation during this period: the revival of the program in the fall of 1982; the French and German interests and positions that were modified during the interaction processes between 1982 and 1984; and the interests and positions that have remained unaffected by the interaction in the same time period.

This chapter summarizes the preceding discussions and presents some concluding thoughts. Frequently highly charged with meaning and value, the historical and political processes of Franco-German security relations investigated in the preceding chapters helped bring about an extremely expensive piece of material reality in policy areas in which we should expect it the least. However, these processes were also prominently driven by rather dissimilar, historically-shaped French and German domestic constructions and their respective impacts on the two states' interests and policies. The book's institutionalist-constructivist model sheds much light on the processes and outcomes of French and German national interest formation and policy formulation in the historical investigations of Chapters 3–6. However, the model does not explain equally well the outcomes in all of the twelve case studies that these chapters present, and it fails altogether to explain the outcome in one of these cases.

This chapter investigates the early years of French, German, and Franco-German second-generation combat helicopter politics. It begins with French and German defense planners' demands for new anti-tank combat helicopters in the first half of the 1970s. It then proceeds to analyze the two main outcomes of these years: France and Germany's initial “coming together” in combat helicopter matters between 1974 and 1979—even though their interests were fundamentally different—and their subsequent inability truly to collaborate in launching the program from 1979 on, faltering with the failed joint helicopter definition phase by 1982. As a case or observation, the first of these outcomes shows how the Franco-German institutionalized relations and the two states' historically rooted domestic constructions of self-understanding and roles in the world additively affected French and German interests and policies. The analysis of the second main outcome of these years shows that in the subsequent Franco-German interaction, diverging French and German interests, informed in important ways by their respective domestic constructions of French and German roles and purposes in the world, led to the stalling of cooperation during the first joint helicopter definition phase at the lower governmental and administrative levels. Both the logic of their institutionalized relations and their respective domestic constructions decisively drove the processes of French and German interest formation and policy formulation processes over the eight years covered in the chapter.

This chapter covers the turbulent years from 1984 to 1987. It examines why and how the Franco-German combat helicopter program—due to mushrooming costs, massive delays, and multiple other obstacles—slid into a financial and technical impasse between late 1984 and mid-1986. It also scrutinizes why and how the program, barely escaping cancellation, survived deadlock and paralysis, and finally escaped the impasse in a yet further modified and revised form ultimately codified by the French and German governments in November 1987.

‘Rivals and scavengers' introduces Herman Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, and their respective bureaucratic satrapies. All four Nazi paladins tried to carve out positions in occupied France with mixed results. Although vested with formidable economic and diplomatic responsibilities, Hermann Göring preferred to augment his own art collection with works confiscated from French Jews and exercised an erratic influence on French affairs. Without little enthusiasm for diplomacy after the start of World War II, Hitler refused to countenance serious negotiations with the Vichy regime and forced the German foreign office to play a secondary role in the Occupation. By highlighting the danger of an alleged Jewish menace, first Rosenberg and later Himmler accrued considerable authority and established independent positions in occupied France.

The opening chapter introduces this book’s two main questions, placing them in historical, political, and theoretical context: Why have France and Germany hung together in a particularly tight bilateral relationship for half a century amidst fundamental domestic change and international transformation, and in spite of enduring basic differences between the two? And why has the joint Franco-German impact on shaping Europe’s polity and European policies, while fundamental, proved so uneven across different types of political decision making, political domains, and time? In order to address both questions at once, the introduction then develops “embedded bilateralism” as a general perspective on regional integration and European politics since the late 1950s. It then contrasts embedded bilateralism from the main macro-perspectives on European integration and regional politics from the early post-war era until today. The introduction concludes with a brief overview of the plan of this book.

Assassinations in Nantes and Bordeaux on 20 and 21 October 1941 placed General von Stülpnagel and the military administration in the center of a political firestorm. Using assassinations as a pretext for genocide, Hitler ordered the execution of hundreds of hostages, sanctioned mass deportations through the Night and Fog Decree, and ordered subordinates to carry out severe reprisals that focused on Jews and communists after every resistance attack. General Otto von Stülpnagel condemned ‘Polish Methods' that neither made political sense nor sat well with his conscience, but this stance poisoned his relationship with Hitler, Armed Forces High Command (OKW), Army High Command (OKH), and Nazi leaders like Joseph Goebbels. Assassinations and brutal German reprisals divided communist resistance groups like Main‐d’œvre immigrée from Charles de Gaulle's movement, upset Germany's relationship with Marshal Pétain and the French government, and exposed sharp disagreements between various German institutions in Paris.

This chapter summarises and evaluates the pattern of Franco–German relations from the Armistice talks of late 1918 to the reparations crisis of autumn 1922. It explains how and why inter-Allied disagreements compromised the peace and reparations settlement, and investigates German responses to the reparations regime in particular. Specific events discussed include the 1918 Armistice, the Paris Peace Conference and Versailles Treaty of 1919, the London Reparations Agreement of 1921, the abortive attempts at rapprochement — Wiesbaden (1921) and Locarno (1922) — and the ensuing crises that persuaded the French army and government to launch an occupation of Germany's Ruhr District.

This introductory chapter describes the traumatic consequences of the Ruhr Crisis for the region's people. It argues that these events, in which Germany and the Germans appear as victims, have been largely neglected by historians since they fit uncomfortably within an essentially negative and pessimistic understanding of 19th- and earlier 20th-century German history. However, the Ruhr Crisis is best understood as a popular struggle rooted in the republican values of Weimar Germany, conducted at an ultimately devastating price to the ordinary people of the Ruhr and to the wider post-1918 revolutionary settlement. All in all the character of post-1918 Franco–German relations and of early Weimar Germany assume a form contrary to received wisdom.

The trajectory of interwar European diplomacy was ambivalent and the character of Franco-German relations was similarly complex. Historians are divided over whether confrontation or reconciliation lay at the heart of dealings between Paris and Berlin, variously regarding the period as a mere suspension of hostilities, or as the era when the foundations of contemporary European and Franco-German collaboration were laid down. This chapter summarizes developments during the period 1900 to 1925, identifying and assessing repeated efforts to reconcile French and German interests, with economic considerations proving particularly influential. It concludes that the commitment to rapprochement was significantly stronger than is conventionally believed.

Franco-German relations developed across a set of frameworks, which ranged from diplomacy to the economy and cultural linkages. This chapter notes the development of influential economic pressure groups and a range of other initiatives, before examining a sustained, publicly funded effort to strengthen rapprochement on the cultural plane (the Grautoff initiative). The chapter then focuses on the international diplomacy surrounding the successful renegotiation during 1929 and 1930 of the reparations schedule at The Hague (the Young Plan), and agreement on an early Allied military evacuation of the Rhineland. The Hague conferences saw a marked deterioration in Franco-British relations as against improved Franco-German relations. The shock of Gustav Stresemann’s untimely death in October 1929 was mitigated as French leaders warmed to his successor as Foreign Minister, Julius Curtius, and the pursuit of Franco-German rapprochement appeared a credible option.

This chapter examines the formalization of creditor-debtor state relations in post-1945 Europe within the early framework of the Bretton Woods system. It looks in depth at the European Payments Union; the first decade of the EEC; the process and the substance of EMU, particularly from the Werner Group to the Delors Committee and the Maastricht Treaty. The chapter considers the post-2007 economic and financial crisis; its strategic management within a shrinking ‘hard core’ of creditor states; the rise and eclipse of the ‘stand-alone’ model of European monetary union and the process of beginning to build banking and fiscal union in Europe. It examines the Franco-German relationship, the European Council, the European Commission, and the ECB. The chapter concludes by considering the boundaries of creditor-state power and the unresolved tension between endogenous preference formation, in particular learning by doing, and conditional cooperation, in which ‘red lines’ continue to be drawn.

French diplomacy sought in 1930 to consolidate the 1919 peace settlement through a collaborative if vaguely defined proposal for European union: the Briand Plan. France’s traditional ally, Britain, was unenthusiastic and Germany also had reservations. Berlin feared that Foreign Minister Briand’s prioritization of political union would set the Versailles territorial settlement in stone. However, Germany was open to European integration in principle and quickly reached agreement with Paris to collaborate on economic union, rather than political. That said many French politicians remained unsettled by Germany’s territorial ambitions along its eastern frontier. After the June 1930 Allied evacuation of the Rhineland the mood in Paris darkened, for it was greeted in Germany by strident nationalistic outbursts, followed by spectacular Nazi gains in the September 1930 Reichstag elections. However, the formation of a moderate German coalition government under Heinrich Brüning and a range of cultural and grassroots initiatives retrieved the situation.

This chapter examines Franco-German and U.S.-Japanese relations in the early interwar period (1919-30). The chapter begins by drawing on the primary and secondary historical record to evaluate how key French and German decision makers thought about each other’s intentions, focusing on these episodes: the negotiation, signature, and aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles; the onset, development, and resolution of the Ruhr Crisis; and the Locarno era. Were they confident that their counterparts had benign intentions—that is, did they trust each other—as asserted by intentions optimists? Or were they uncertain about each other’s intentions, which is to say that they mistrusted each other, as suggested by intentions pessimism? Having shown that Paris and Berlin were far from confident that the other side had benign intentions throughout the early interwar period, the chapter then describes the shape of the resulting Franco-German security competition. The second half of the chapter repeats the analysis performed in the first half, this time with respect to the United States and Japan, focusing on the following episodes: the aftermath of World War I; the creation and operation of the Washington Treaty system; and the three years between the Geneva and London Naval conferences.

The Versailles peace settlement initially failed to reconcile French and German interests. However from 1924 both countries sought to circumvent this impasse through a process of rapprochement based on powerful synergies between their economies. This process has been associated with the German Foreign Minister, Gustav Stresemann, and his French counterpart, Aristide Briand. The latter in particular envisaged wider European integration developing around this emerging Franco-German axis, but despite Stresemann’s death in 1929 and British scepticism in particular towards the ‘Briand Plan’, efforts continued to secure Franco-German detente. This process, which also drew on a common Catholic heritage, culminated in the 1931 Berlin Accord, only to be derailed by deepening economic crisis and domestic political hostility either side of the Rhine. Nonetheless, underlying logic, institutional memory, and a limited degree of personal continuity ensured that a durable Franco-German partnership would emerge after 1945 as the bedrock of European integration.

Relations between states have seldom been approached in terms of peacebuilding; this book also includes inter-state relations in the discussion of the recurrence of war. This chapter searches systematically for such policies in postwar conditions since 1945, particularly the relationship between France and Germany post–World War II. Based on this example, looking at future potential inter-state wars, we must ask whether the basic incompatibility has been removed, and whether security measures, such as disarmament or other such confidence-building measures, have been undertaken. We must also ask if the outcome has dealt with justice and dignity, notably in the form of compensation or war crime trials. Potential long-term peacebuilding, very challenging in inter-state wars, would have to include the development of democratic structures on both sides, shared memberships in a regional organization, and a degree of military integration into a larger framework.