The post-war history of France is full of contradictions.
To outward appearances the Fourth
Republic was plagued by a degree of political
instability that promised to repeat the weaknesses
and follies of the Third, which had ended with
Vichy’s disgrace. The individualistic French,
divided on so many issues and by so many parties
and groupings, seemed ill-suited to a parliamentary
democracy. De Gaulle certainly believed this
when he withdrew from government in January
1946 and then, a little less than a year later in
1947, launched his movement grandly called the
Rassemblement du Peuple Français, offering his
leadership above party in place of the squabbling,
weak politicians who by their jostling for power
were reducing the National Assembly to ridicule.
But the constitution of the Fourth Republic had
vested power in the National Assembly rather
than in the president and the executive. De Gaulle
had to wait in the wings for eleven years.
The spectacle of twenty-two governments
from December 1946 to May 1958, the shortest
lasting four days and the longest a little over a
year, seemed to justify the behaviour of those
groups who treated parliamentary democracy
with scorn. The French Communist Party, which
still looked to Stalin’s Russia for guidance and was
excluded from any share in responsible government
after May 1947, attacked each government
successively, and felt no sense of commitment to
the institutions of the Republic. Its domination
of the trade unions through the communist-led
Confédération Général du Travail (CGT), whose
membership was larger than that of the MRP–
Catholic Union and the Socialist Union (Force
Ouvrière 1947) combined, enabled it to harass
the governments of the Fourth Republic. During
the years of acute inflation and shortages
(1945–8), when wholesale prices tripled but
wages lagged behind, there was plenty to fuel discontent.
Split ideologically and frequently calling
strikes that were politically motivated, organised
labour was limited in the constructive role it
could play to help reform and modernise the
economy. French working people did not feel
that their standard of living had significantly
improved during the twelve years of the Fourth
Republic or that disparities of wealth had decreased.
Apart from a short period of comparative
price stability from 1952 to 1955, inflation had
become endemic.
The difficult conditions of working people’s
lives help to explain why, despite the Cold War, the
French Communist Party was able to retain the
electoral support of one in every four voters,
polling the largest percentage of the votes in every
election from November 1946 to January 1956.
But its split with the fiercely anti-communist
socialists deprived the left of a commanding parliamentary
role. Support for the socialists was not as
strong as that for the communists and fell away
from the end-of-war peak of 23 per cent to 15 per
cent in 1956. The Fourth Republic was also threatened
by the re-emergence and recovery of the right
and by the tactics of de Gaulle, who had re-entered
active politics in 1947. Those on the right, discontented
with the workings of the Fourth Republic,
from de Gaulle’s Rassemblement to various conservative
groupings, polled 26 per cent in 1951,
and later with the popular Poujadists in the 1956
elections gained 32 per cent. Thus coalition governments
were threatened by the prospect of disagreement
among the partners.
If we add to this political instability the conservative
structure of the greater part of French
industry, dominated by small enterprises and
widely dispersed – in 1956 there were still
499,000 industrial plants, each employing an
average of eleven workers – a backward agriculture,
much of it split into uneconomic small
farms, as well as a much higher rate of inflation
than that of its industrial rivals, the total picture
is bleak.
Armed resistance to the threatened loss of
empire after 1945 greatly increased France’s
burdens in the first difficult post-war decade. De
Gaulle was not the first French leader to attempt
to compensate for the humiliation of defeat by
reasserting France’s grandeur overseas. Even the
French communist leader Maurice Thorez supported
the French army against the communist
Vietnamese independence movement, declaring
that he ‘did not intend to liquidate the French
position in Indo-China’. Their unsuccessful war
in Indo-China, from its start in December 1946
until the armistice agreed in Geneva in July 1954,
debilitated the French, costing them more than
they had received in Marshall Aid; 10 per cent of
the national budget had been swallowed up by it
and 75,000 officers and men had lost their lives.
Meanwhile, in North Africa, the French were
facing serious conflict in their protectorates of
Tunisia and Morocco. Here, too, they had
refused to bow to nationalist demands until terrorism
and resistance wore down their will to
maintain their rule. Independence was granted to
Morocco and Tunisia in 1956. The withdrawals
from these two North African countries had
another cause. A French presence there was
regarded as secondary to continued French rule
in Algeria: for Algeria was not a protectorate, it
was ‘France’. The savage conflict, which began in
1954 and was to last for eight years, finally broke
the Fourth Republic and brought back de Gaulle.
In the summer of 1958 France came close to civil
strife and the politicians, in despair, gave way to
de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic.
This catalogue of disasters and burdens is,
however, only one side of the history of the
Fourth Republic. Behind the unstable political
façade, the Fourth Republic inaugurated an
industrial revolution by a remarkable combination
of state encouragement, central planning and
private enterprise. From 1944 to 1947 the state
had acquired considerable economic power,
having brought into public ownership and
control the Renault motor works, Air France, the
Bank of France and the larger private banks,
insurance, gas, electricity and the coal-mining
industry. Although the departure of the communists
from government and the decline of the
socialists halted the expansion of state ownership,
there was no denationalisation, and what had
been nationalised was vigorously developed. The
results of the modernisation of agriculture were
patchy and less spectacular; nevertheless over a
decade and a half some real progress was
achieved. The new concept of modernisation was
typified by Jean Monnet, one of France’s most
distinguished public servants.
Monnet had persuaded de Gaulle after the war
to allow him to organise a group of experts to
prepare a plan for the recovery and modernisation
of France. The first Five-Year Plan was approved
in January 1947. It placed Monnet at the head of
a small secretariat in the modest offices of the
Commissariat du Plan de Modernisation et
d’Équipment, charged with promoting the realisation
of its objectives. The Plan indicated growth
targets for specific sectors of the economy; modernisation
commissions were set up for each
sector at which the details of how this growth
could be achieved were worked out with industrialists,
civil servants and the unions, with the
assistance of members of Monnet’s secretariat.
Monnet’s Plan bears little resemblance to Soviet
five-year plans, with their detailed targets and
directives. In place of the stifling bureaucracy and
rigid, inefficient central planning of the USSR,
cajolery, incentives and more subtle means of persuasion
were employed. This method of proceeding
was greatly aided by a closely knit French
establishment.
A peculiarity of the French establishment was
the interrelationship of government, regional
administration, senior civil servants, politicians,
industrial management and higher education.
The French leadership was recruited from
elitist educational establishments. Young men
would be selected on academic merit for entry to
the École Polytechnique or the École Nationale
d’Administration, and then recruited into one of
the Grands Corps, where the career ladder
reaches to the top posts in the ministries or the
prefectoral administration. This elitist group of
graduates also runs the state industries and is to
be found in the private sector too. The close oldboy
network gets things done and counterbalances
the rigid administrative divisions of the
state. The expertise developed by groups of brilliant
technocrats in engineering, in administration
and in business skills, together with their dedication
to the state, which rewarded them handsomely
with high salaries, created a powerful elite
that, in the unstable political conditions of the
Fourth Republic, spearheaded the drive for
modernisation in industry and agriculture.
Such a high degree of institutionalised elitism
has its weaknesses and its dangers too. It is fundamentally
undemocratic. It is possible for those
of poor background through sheer talent to enter
one of the Écoles, but it is very much easier for
the children of the better-off Parisian families
who can afford the best education in preparation
for the competitive entrance examinations. Of
course, France is not unique in this respect. The
system tends to stifle talent and initiative lower
down; it also encourages patronage and allows
excessive influence to a small number. On the
other hand, it has provided France with an able
corps of innovators and administrators in key
positions, and so counteracted the disruptive
political and industrial conflicts that plagued the
Fourth Republic.
Monnet’s First Plan (1947–1952/4) concentrated
on key sectors fundamental to a general
modernisation programme: coal, electricity, steel,
cement, the mechanisation of agriculture, fertilisers
and transportation. But the most immediate
needs of the workers for better housing and consumer
goods were largely sacrificed, with the
exception of food, to provide for a better future.
Nor were financial controls exerted, so the currency
rapidly lost value which, in turn, created
industrial instability for most of the years of the
Fourth Republic. All efforts were directed to
improving the productivity of industry and agriculture.
The result was not an overall advance
across the board, but the creation of some
modern, efficient and technologically progressive
industries and farms alongside the small, backward
nineteenth-century enterprises and peasant
holdings. It was too much to expect the First and
Second Plans (1947–57) to transform the whole
French economy; much of agriculture remained
backward and traditional attitudes prevailed
throughout France. Indeed, the difficulties facing
modernisers in France were great. There was no
large increase in the labour force, as there was in
West Germany. The waging of colonial wars, an
inefficient system of indirect taxation and high
inflation were all serious handicaps. But during
these hard times, which largely contributed to the
return of de Gaulle in 1958, the foundations were
laid for the expansion of the 1960s and later. The
modernising of key sectors enabled France to
compete successfully with West Germany. They
also provided 2 million more jobs, compared with
before the war, and productivity significantly
increased. From 1947 until the early 1960s, successive
plans had an important influence. As they
became more sophisticated after 1966 so French
administrations also became less interventionist.
Plans had to be ‘adapted’ in any case to reflect
economic realities such as the unexpected oil
shocks of the 1970s.
But for the majority of French workers and
small farmers the gradual transformation of
France, with islands of highly advanced technology,
did not mean rising standards of living in
accordance with their expectations. France continued
to be a divided society of great inequalities
between the rich and the poor, between the
privileged technocrats of the École Polytechnique
and small businessmen and traditional peasant
farmers who vented their frustrations in supporting
populist movements.
It was a curious paradox of the Fourth Republic
that so much solid progress in changing the fundamental
economic and industrial structure of
France could be taking place in parallel with the
political and social strife reminiscent of the 1930s
and the Third Republic. Proportional representation
and the French electoral system permitted a
multiplicity of parties. The so-called ‘Third
Force’, standing between Gaullism and communism,
played musical chairs in successive government
coalitions, the exclusion of communists and
Gaullists from government being the one point of
agreement among the other parties from left to
right. From 1947 to 1951 coalitions were built
around three parties; the Mouvement Républicain
Populaire (MRP), the Socialists and the Radicals.
At the election of 1951, the Conservatives and
Gaullists increased their strength and the MRP
was weakened, but the Socialists decided to leave
the government and return to opposition in a bid
to rebuild their support. From 1951 to 1954 governments
were based on centre–right coalitions.
From 1954 to 1958 the Socialists once more
returned to government in coalitions with the
centre. On specific policy issues the coalition
parties held strongly opposing views, and there
were endless rounds of compromise, accommodation,
rupture, and back to compromise.
The MRP, that is to say the French Christian
Democrats, managed to remain partners in all
these coalition governments. It was not a narrowly
Catholic party, though it reconciled its majority of
Catholic supporters to the Republic. It inclined to
the Conservatives in believing in a market economy
and private property, but was progressive in
seeking to overcome traditional industrial conflict
by collaboration between employer and employee.
On issues of social and welfare policies it sided
with the Socialists, but differed from them and the
Radicals in seeking to retain independent Catholic
education with state aid. But on policies relating
to Western European cooperation, generally favoured
by the MRP and the Socialists, they were
aligned against the conservative right. The parties
in the National Assembly were prepared to make
compromises only on a short-term basis. The
instability that so discredited the Fourth Republic
was an inevitable outcome. Nonetheless, there was
greater continuity than might at first be supposed,
since a number of able ministers, for instance the
Socialist Jules Moch, was appointed to several of
the governments. The Foreign Ministry remained
from 1944 to 1954 in the hands of the MRP,
alternately in the charge of Georges Bidault and
Robert Schuman.
Against the disasters of the colonial wars have
to be set the success of the Fourth Republic’s
West European policies, and the conciliation and
practical cooperation of France and the Benelux
countries with their former enemies, the Federal
Republic of Germany and Italy. During the years
of the Fourth Republic, the Christian Social
Democratic leaders of West Germany, Italy and
France, Adenauer, de Gasperi and Schuman, laid
the foundations for the new economic and political
relations of the principal Western Europe
nations, which proved so powerful a force in promoting
their mutual economic growth and prosperity,
and settled their historic and territorial
enmities.
The French recognised that the imbalance in
Europe had only been temporarily solved by
Germany’s defeat. German vitality would lead, so
the French feared, to a resurgence of power and a
renewed threat of aggression. De Gaulle at first
followed past traditions in maintaining the
‘French thesis’ that even after the East–West division
of Germany, West Germany would need to
be curbed further and permanently. In the wider
European context he saw the continued need for
an Eastern link with Russia. In the treatment of
occupied Germany the French stubbornly resisted
the Anglo-American efforts to bring the Western
occupation zones together and to centralise
their administration. What is more, the French
demanded the economic detachment of the Ruhr
and the Saar from West Germany, and some form
of internationalisation of the industrial Ruhr. The
Cold War, and the resulting American and British
military presence on the continent of Europe,
shattered de Gaulle’s vision, shared for a time by
many French ministers after his withdrawal in
1946, that France could be the dominant continental
West European state, acting as arbiter
between East and West. Instead, the French risked
total isolation. They therefore went along with
Anglo-American plans put forward at the London
Conference in 1948 on the future of Germany. A
West German state would be created with a federal
constitution; safeguards would remain, especially
Allied supervision of heavy industry, coal,
iron and steel in the industrial Ruhr complex. But
the US and Britain, for whom the occupation was
proving a costly strain, were determined to help
West Germany to recover economically and to stabilise
it politically and socially. With the continued
threat from the Soviet Union, a chaotic and dissatisfied
West Germany could be dangerous. The
French accepted the need for change.
In September 1949 the federal West German
state came into being, its government, however,
still subject to some Allied supervision and controls.
The occupation of the French zone came to
an end. France would have to find a new way of
living with its powerful neighbour.
France’s foreign policy adjusted to the
changed international conditions of the Cold War
and the revival of West Germany with difficulty
and only after fierce debates in the National
Assembly, which had to ratify the treaties
embodying the shift in France’s position. In 1949
France agreed to become a founding member of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, but the
spectre of Germany was what most concerned
the French. Would Germany be built up militarily
by the Americans and also become a member
of NATO, eventually overshadowing France?
Despite Schuman’s robust rejection of such a possibility
‘even in the future’, and his insistence that
Germany would remain disarmed, others saw the
writing on the wall. The debates in the National
Assembly show how far France was from reconciliation
with Germany.
There was also another current at work, the
call for a federation of Europe – a cause strongly
espoused by Winston Churchill. The ideal of a
united Europe was appealing, especially to a
younger generation seeking an escape from the
recent past. The high point of the European
movement was reached at The Hague Congress
in May 1948, but practical results were few.
In May 1949 ten West European governments
agreed to set up the Council of Europe, the
purpose of which was to achieve a greater unity
between its members. There was to be no pooling
of sovereignty, however. The Council’s work was
largely confined in the 1950s to cultural spheres.
The signature of a Convention of Human Rights
in 1950 was nevertheless a notable and lasting
achievement. The European movement had come
to a dead end by then, as far as the political integration
of Western Europe was concerned.
Neither France nor Britain, nor any of the other
members, was ready for a real United States of
Europe. But the public support generated for the
idea of Europe played a part in preparing the way
for the more hard-headed approach of piecemeal
economic integration followed in the 1950s.
For France the fundamental problem of the
overwhelming strength of Germany, even a
divided Germany, remained to be faced. The outbreak
of the Korean War and the likely continuation
of the Cold War made it obvious that the
Americans and the British would insist on West
German recovery. Wartime policies pursuing the
demilitarisation and industrial dismantling of West
Germany were ended, and the French came under
great pressure from Washington to permit West
German rearmament and a German contribution
to defence. France had to make the best of it: it
could not be defended without the alliance of
Britain and the US. The French prime minister,
René Pleven, therefore took the initiative in
October 1950 to call for a European army subject
to a European Defence Community (EDC), which
would avoid the danger of creating a separate West
German army. Under the Pleven Plan, German
combat units would be kept small and thus incapable
of independent action. In May 1952 the
Occupation Statute was repealed and the Federal
Republic of Germany took a further step towards
the restoration of full sovereignty; simultaneously
the European Defence Community Treaty was
concluded between France, the Federal Republic
of Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries
(Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg).
Britain was not a member. The Anglo-Saxon
separation from continental Europe had, from the
first, worried the French as they faced a resurgent
Germany, for memories of Britain’s lack of support
in the inter-war years were still fresh. To reassure
the French, the British Conservative government
concluded a mutual defence treaty with the EDC.
The French had, however, to concede that the
national army units would be 12,000–13,000 men
strong, rather than the 1,000–2,000 they had
envisaged, and that West Germany would contribute
half a million men.
The signature of the treaty was not enough to
secure its adoption. It had to be ratified by the
signatories’ national parliaments as well, including
the French National Assembly. No issue since
the Dreyfus case divided France more deeply than
the EDC and its consequential endorsement of
German rearmament. Successive French governments,
uncertain of ratification, procrastinated
until in August 1954 the National Assembly,
when the treaty was finally submitted, rejected it.
The opponents of EDC initially refused to see
that France could not veto the creation of a new
German army in the long run since the other
West European nations and the US were insisting
that the Federal Republic be accepted as a full
ally. By December of the same year, enough
members of the National Assembly had shifted
their views for the restoration of sovereignty to
the Federal Republic and its membership of
NATO to be accepted. Policy had thus run full
circle, from Pleven’s attempt to create a European
army that would have avoided a new German
national force, to an acceptance of German rearmament
and the creation of the Bundeswehr.
Pleven’s plan to counterbalance German strength
by playing the card of ‘European integration’ had
been aborted at the military level.
German industrial power had been closely
linked with German aggression – for example, the
alliance of the Krupps with the Hohenzollerns
before 1914 and with Hitler after 1933. European
integration could break these links. Accordingly
the French developed dynamic European policies
that were to change the economic and political
face of Western Europe. But what form should
European integration take? By 1950 it was clear
that the hopes for a ‘federalist’ solution to create a
United States of Europe, by which a member
state’s interests would be subordinated to a federal
European government, were not going to be
realised. The Council of Europe could not be
developed further along integrationist lines, but
there was another way. Prussia’s Zollverein in the
nineteenth century had shown how common
economic interests could bind states together; the
way to proceed was not at the top, at national
level, but rather ‘functionally’, where collaboration
could be shown to benefit all concerned.
Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg had
shown the way. During the war they had agreed to
form a customs union, which came into operation
in 1948. The Belgian statesman, Paul Henri
Spaak, was an ardent Europeanist; he had been
elected to the presidency of the Council of Europe
and was later to play an important role in the creation
of the Common Market.
The Americans also sought to further West
European integration. Marshall Aid had been
offered on condition that the Europeans themselves
should cooperate and work out a coordinated
plan for reconstruction. This led to the
setting up of the Organisation for European
Economic Co-operation (OEEC) in April 1948.
The carrot of US aid spurred sixteen Western
European nations (in October 1949 the Federal
Republic of Germany joined and, also in 1949,
Spain) to agree on how to share the aid. The
Council of the OEEC was composed of representatives
of the member states, but it could not
impose its decisions on individual nations. It was
not a supranational body, but its expert committees
developed the practice of discussing economic
cooperation. Their most important and
difficult task was to agree on the division of
dollars, which the US was making available.
European integration policies became, as far as
their leading proponents were concerned, a question
not just of idealism but also of hard-headed
realism. For the French a comprehensive arrangement
with the German iron, coal and steel complexes
made good economic sense in safe-guarding
French heavy industry; at the same time supranational
control would remove any possibility of
undetected or uncontrolled German rearmament.
French determination to secure access to the coal
mines of the Saar, without the bad blood a separation
of the Saar from West Germany would cause,
was an additional incentive. The outcome of all
these considerations was the famous plan proposed
in May 1950 by the foreign minister, Robert
Schuman.
The Schuman Plan, largely Jean Monnet’s
brain-child, put forward the bold scheme of
pooling French and German production of coal,
iron and steel – it would be open to other West
European countries to join if they wished. A
crucial aspect of the Plan was the setting up of a
supranational ‘high authority’ that would make
decisions not on a national level, but in the overall
interests of the integrated industries. Adenauer
saw the advantages of the Plan and promptly
accepted it. West Germany would be treated as
an equal, and the European solution allowed relationships
of trust to be re-established that would
facilitate the recovery of full sovereignty for the
Federal Republic. This was finally attained only
five years later in May 1955.
The European Coal and Steel Community
played the key role in taking its six West European
member states (France, West Germany, Italy
and the Benelux countries) forward at last along
the road of economic and political coordination.
By this means the ‘German problem’ became
manageable, and, more than that, West European
economic cooperation made all of the participating
states rapidly more prosperous. The success of
the original ECSC was due, in the first place, to
the fact that its aims were strictly limited.
As with the Monnet Plan for French modernisation,
a practical start had been made in just
one crucial sector of industry; the creation from
the start of a comprehensive European political
and economic union was recognised as impossible.
Second, institutions were created which
down-graded national sovereignty – an important
reason why Britain would not join – and transferred
decision-making to the supranational High
Authority. Working with it were a Council of
Ministers, a Common Assembly and a Court of
Justice. Thus an embryonic European executive,
Parliament and Court were set up, which worked
with government representatives in the Council
of Ministers – but most decisions did not require
the separate consent of national governments.
Jean Monnet was the choice for the first president
of the ECSC.
The ECSC overcame an early period of difficulty
and haggling between rival national interests
to prove in the mid-1950s the benefit to all the
participants of having established a common market
in coal and steel. Business interests in France
and Germany, and the other four countries, now
advocated extending the common market in coal
and steel to the rest of their economies.
Thus pressure was building up in a realistic way
for more ambitious integration. This is not to
underrate the continued enthusiasm for the idea
of ‘Europe’. The European Movement, founded
at The Hague in 1948, was still active and had
won important adherents in the political world of
the six nations. ‘Europe’ offered a road forward
and away from the guilt-ridden past, especially
for a new generation of young Germans; it also
offered the best means of reconciliation after
two destructive world wars. The foundation of
such reconciliation rested on the new relationship
developing between France and West
Germany, carried forward by many political and
social groups in both countries. Meetings organised
between politicians, journalists, educators,
Chambers of Commerce, town partnerships, cultural
exchanges, school exchanges and textbook
revisions to remove national bias are just some
examples of this multifaceted effort to bring
about a fundamental change of attitudes. It
worked because it reflected a massive desire for
change by millions of ordinary people.
The ideas – inculcated through propaganda
and schooling – that national patriotism automatically
involves hostility to a neighbour, that
national frontiers should be fought over so that
one country may expand its territory at the
expense of another, and that enmities between
nations were a law of nature, have all vanished in
Western Europe. A perceived common threat,
from the Soviet Union, also led to alliances and
military cooperation. But the collaboration of
Western Europe encompasses more than the kind
of alliances that have been formed for common
purposes throughout modern history. That such
a fundamental change in national relations can be
brought about in a region of the world that was
torn with strife is a momentous achievement in
the history of the twentieth century.
The three Benelux foreign ministers – the
Dutchman Johan Beyen, the Belgian Paul Henri
Spaak and Joseph Bech of Luxembourg – took
the initiative in the spring of 1955 at governmental
level to provide new momentum for
European integration: an example of statesmen of
small nations who have exerted a disproportionate
influence. Their proposal for a large extension
of economic collaboration received the backing of
the European Coal and Steel Community. The
failure of military integration after the French
rejection of the European Defence Community
the previous year had been seen as a setback but
not as an end to integration in other spheres. In
May and June 1955 the foreign ministers of the
Six met in Messina, Sicily. Their agreements
paved the way for further intergovernmental conferences
and negotiations which took place
during the following two years. Britain was not
excluded, but its cooperation was half-hearted
and it withdrew without making a serious effort
to overcome the problems of its association. The
Six had difficult problems to iron out and did not
wish to be impeded by Britain, though they were
able to resolve their differences far more speedily
than the British had expected. They signed
the treaty setting up the European Economic
Community (and Euratom) in Rome in March
1957; these treaties were ratified in the succeeding
months of that year. The majority of the
French Assembly in July voted for European
collaboration and thus dispelled the fears that
the spectre of defeat aroused by the EDC failure
would be repeated. That same month, the
Bundesrat in West Germany completed the process
of German ratification. The treaties entered
into force on 1 January 1958.
All the members of the European Economic
Community had had to make concessions and
compromises. Obstacles to trade between the Six
were to be removed eventually. Those of most
immediate importance were the duties levied on
industrial goods in order to protect the importing
country’s home industry. The French and Italians
especially feared competition from the more efficient
West Germans. A transitional period of
twelve to fifteen years was therefore agreed,
though in the event the abolition of duties was
speeded up and completed by July 1968. Free
trade required many other aspects of economic
management to be harmonised as well, and complex
arrangements were agreed over the years:
for example, common rules of competition, free
movement of workers, of capital and of services,
harmonisation of taxation and of quality standards,
and a system of managing currency
exchange rates. An essential feature of the EEC,
beyond the removal of internal barriers of trade
between the Six, was the erection of a common
tariff, which non-member states had to pay when
exporting industrial and agricultural goods to the
Common Market. This provided protection where
it was most needed by the Six. Together with payments
from its members it provided the funds of
the common budget of the EEC that could be
used to support economic and educational activities
within the Six and to pay for the administration
of the Common Market. But it also led to
much tension with the US, whose agricultural
exports particularly were discriminated against.
The most controversial aspect of the Community
has proved to be the support given to
farmers by the Common Agricultural Policy
(CAP). Intervention prices are fixed annually by
the Council of Ministers for each kind of agricultural
produce and the farmers are guaranteed
these prices. What they cannot sell in the
Common Market, that is the surpluses, are
bought by the Community; exports to non-
Community members are subsidised so that the
farmer secures the intervention price. The farm
costs are met by the EEC budget, which has had
to devote to them the greater part of its funds.
The CAP benefits the countries with most farmers
– France, Eire and Denmark – and is unfavourable
to countries such as Britain, a member since
1973, which import food, because world prices
frequently are below those fixed by the Common
Market to support its farmers. If not corrected by
other mechanisms, this would result in Britain
and Germany paying disproportionate contributions
to the common budget. A second undesirable
feature is the high prices that have to be paid
by the consumers of the member countries, and
the stimulus to agricultural production that was
to lead to costly cereal, meat and butter mountains
maintained by the EEC as it bought up what
could not be sold at the set prices. The funds
required by the CAP became larger as each year
passed, but member governments found it difficult
to deny their farmers, who form an important
political constituency. Not until the later
1980s was any serious reform attempted. The
subsidies were devastatingly harmful to Third
World farmers denied cheaper exports.
As France braced itself for the full impact of
German industrial competition in its markets, its
politicians could boast that they had secured benefits
for the large agricultural sector. But the
Common Market proved an immediate success,
greatly surpassing the hopes of those who had
negotiated its establishment. French industry was
stimulated by competition and by the new export
opportunities. Industrial production between
1958 and 1962, far from declining, grew by
almost a quarter; the West Germans did even
better, increasing industrial production by more
than a third. West Germany’s and France’s trade
with the rest of the Six doubled and trade
between France and West Germany tripled in the
same period. The continued economic success of
the Common Market won it the support of the
peoples of the Six as they gained in prosperity
from economic collaboration, but hopes that it
would lead to closer political union were frustrated,
especially after the return of General de
Gaulle in 1958.
The Commission is the body that runs the
EEC, two commissioners being appointed by
each of the member states. In practice, on important
issues it can only put forward plans and proposals.
Decisions are reached by the Council of
Ministers, which represents the viewpoints of
national governments. Here again, escape clauses
allow individual countries to opt out of joint decisions
if they believe their vital interests to be
affected; what is more, it later turned out that
individual countries could exercise a veto. Even
so, the degree of integration actually achieved
went much further than Britain and its European
Free Trade Area partners were at that time willing
to accept. The European Parliament of the Six
was also given only limited supervisory powers.
The most important controlling body to emerge
was, therefore, the Council of Ministers. That has
remained the case to the present day.
Two of the most important achievements of the
Fourth Republic were the French contribution to
the creation of the European Common Market
and Franco-German reconciliation. Yet, little
more than a year after the signature of the Treaty
of Rome, the Fourth Republic came to an ignominious
end as General de Gaulle returned to
power on his own terms. The general had no time
for Monnet’s visions of supranationalism. The
European institutions were not to be permitted
to override national decision-making; they were,
in de Gaulle’s view, to act as no more than forums
where national differences could be discussed and
negotiated.
By 1958 the majority of French people perceived
that the rivalries of the political parties in
the National Assembly had made active government
on many of the crucial problems facing
France virtually impossible. The achievements –
the Common Market, reconciliation with West
Germany, security through NATO – were easily
overlooked as their benefits became apparent only
later. It was de Gaulle who was to be credited
with the rising prosperity and modernisation of
France. High inflation from 1947 to 1951, when
retail prices more than doubled, followed by three
years of greater stability (1953 to 1955) and a
resumption of inflation proved very unsettling,
even though wages and salaries kept abreast. The
harsh economic measures introduced in the
autumn of 1957, higher taxes and devaluation to
reduce inflation, once again hit the pockets of
French families. Constant strikes, some for the
most trivial reasons, were one symptom of the discontent
and general malaise. But the final blow
was the government’s inability to deal with the
crisis in Algeria, where a military takeover raised
a near panic in Paris at the prospect that
the whole country might fall victim to a military
dictatorship.
World History
