Journal of European Integration History – Revue d'histoire de l'

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134Notices – Informations – MitteilungenNATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Germans down, and the Americans in”, or, in otherwords, to contain the Soviet Union and to prevent German hegemony in Europe. A commoninterest in the development of markets and the expansion of transatlantic trade, a commondemocratic tradition and ideology and the americanized mass culture only were additionalfactors.Klaus Schwabe (Aachen) also emphasized the importance of the German factor forAmerican European policy and for the evolution of the transatlantic relationship after 1945.However, according to Schwabe, the Radford Plan of 1956 marked a clear turning point. Byeffectively calling into question the American nuclear guarantee for Western Europe, theRadford Plan undermined “the credibility of the United States as leader of the Atlantic Community”.It led to the evolution of a “community of interest” between France and the FederalRepublic and it encouraged French demands – made especially by the French PresidentCharles de Gaulle in 1958 and thereafter – for a reform of NATO and for a new transatlanticpartnership based on real equality between Western Europe and the United States. After deGaulle’s veto against British membership of the European Economic Community (EEC) ofJanuary 1963 destroyed the American “Grand Design” concept, European integration andAlliance politics “developed more or less independent of each other”.The Nobel Symposium saw a controversy about the degree of autonomy the West Europeanswere likely to develop in their relationship with the United States after the end of theCold War. Pierre Melandri (Paris) drew attention to recent changes in French policy. Heargued that the possible reintegration of French forces into the integrated NATO commandindicated that the Gaullist Jacques Chirac, the French President, was prepared to give up thetraditional confrontational policy towards the United States established by de Gaulle. Such adecision would reflect a more wide-spread recognition in France that the previous emphasison the symbolic politics of independence had merely led to a reduction in actual Frenchinfluence within the West and that a more independent European foreign and security policycould only develop out of a sub-system of NATO.These changes in French policy in turn have encouraged a reorientation of German foreignand European policy in favour of closer Franco-German collaboration in foreign policyand defence. In his analysis of the changing nature of the transatlantic relationship since1989 Werner Link (Cologne) pointed to the concept of a more integrated core Europe, orKerneuropa, first put forward by the German Christian Democrat politicians Karl Lamersand Wolfgang Schäuble in 1994, and to the recent German support for French positions inimportant questions of NATO reform, for example with respect to the possible transfer ofthe NATO command in the Mediterranean to a French general.Finally, David Calleo (John Hopkins) expected a qualitative change in the nature of thetransatlantic relationship to result from European Monetary Union (EMU). EMU wouldgreatly enhance the European Union's international bargaining power in economic and tradepolicy. It was also likely to lead to further political integration which could lead to the creationof a significantly more independent decision-making centre in Western Europe. A possiblewithdrawal of the remaining American troops from Europe could further encouragesuch a development. This withdrawal was boldly predicted by John Mearsheimer (Chicago)with the curious argument, which was not intended as an April fool hoax, that the Russianpossession of nuclear weapons excluded a possible German attempt to conquer Russia andEurope which in turn made the continued American military presence in Europe superfluous.Other conference participants doubted, however, whether the next decades would infact see a substantial reduction in American influence on European politics. Their case wasmostly based on the argument that Britain and several smaller EU states would continue tolook to the United States, in the words of Lundestad, as the “ultimate arbiter” to preventGerman or Franco-German hegemony in Western Europe. In addition, it proved highly controversialwhether a more equal relationship between Western Europe and the United States
Notices – Informations – Mitteilungen 135would actually facilitate transatlantic cooperation, or whether it would only lead to moreconflicts.While full of interesting insights into the changing patterns of the transatlantic relationshipsince 1945, the Nobel Symposium also reflected some of the deficiencies of the studyof the history of international relations in general and of Alliance politics and European integrationin particular. An economic historian himself, Milward criticized in his concludingcomment that there was still little understanding of the underlying economic patterns of therelationship between Western Europe and the United States, as these were mostly ignored bythe more traditional diplomatic historians. Related to this issue was the highly problematiccontinued treatment of transatlantic relations as little more than the sum of the bilateral relationshipsbetween the United States and individual West European countries, especiallyBritain, France and Germany. Such a view, however, fails to provide an adequate explicatoryframework for the transatlantic relationship because it does not take account of the increasingsignificance and influence of the European Union which is obvious in trade matters, butmore subtle in other important policy areas. It also tends to ignore the important role of thesmaller West European states which have tried to use European institutions to enhance theirinfluence.The conference proceedings will be published by Scandinavian University Press in 1998.Wolfram Kaiser
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Journal of European Integration History – Revue d'histoire de l'

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