Rapport Védrine_ENG_GERMAN - Ministère de la Défense

I. EVALUATION
1. HISTORY OF RELATIONS BETWEEN FRANCE AND NATO
A. The Atlantic Alliance was created in Washington on 4 April 1949, with the signature of the “North
Atlantic Treaty”. The signature came after the Truman administration managed to persuade the
American Senate, which was reluctant to make a binding commitment unlike any other in the history of
the United States. This commitment was the one contained in Article 5 of the Treaty:
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall
be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack
occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article
51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith,
individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use
of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”
In the post-war period, France had worked to bind the United States to Western Europe in a permanent
alliance, so as to avoid a repeat of the experience in the nineteen-twenties, to protect Western Europe
from the Soviet threat and, without actually saying so, deal with the German question. Naturally, France
was one of the twelve founding members of the Alliance, as well as one of the most active.
The Treaty Organisation per se, which is the “O” in NATO, was not set up until two years later, in April
1951, in response to the traumatic surprise Chinese and Soviet attack on Korea in June 1950. The
purpose was to organise the Allies’ military forces in Western Europe in peacetime so that they could
respond promptly to any Soviet attack, as if they were already in wartime. This gave rise to integration
and Pentagon control of planning and the chain of command. The United States imposed these
changes without encountering any protest and the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) has
always been an American. General Eisenhower served briefly as the first SACEUR, before being
elected President of the United States in 1952. The Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Powers in
Europe (SHAPE) was set up at Rocquencourt. After the French Parliament’s vote on 30 August 1954
rejected the European Defence Community (EDC), which was an unsuccessful European and American
ploy to get French politicians to accept German rearmament, West Germany was admitted to NATO in
May 1955. The members at the time, in addition to the United States, were Belgium, Canada, Denmark,
France, Italy, Iceland, Luxembourg, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Greece
and Turkey (since 1952), and now Germany.
B. General de Gaulle’s decision to leave the integrated military command.
On 17 September 1958, General de Gaulle, who was France’s President of the Council (Prime Minister)
at the time, sent a Memorandum to President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Macmillan calling for a
tripartite directorate of the Alliance, made up of the United States, the United Kingdom and France, and
a global, rather than an Atlantic, vision of their security. Despite three-party discussions lasting for three
years after this move, neither J. F. Kennedy, who had actually spoken of a “European pillar” of the
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