The Fouchet Plan De Gaulle’s Intergovernmental Design for Europe

The Fouchet Plan
number of fields, political and economic. In February 1953, de Gaulle drew
upon these ideas in asserting his own vision of future European cooperation.
‘Instead of an intolerable and impractical fusion,’ he told a press conference,
Europe should form an ‘association’ of nations, built in the ‘simplest’ of
institutional forms. This structure would involve ‘a periodic and organic
council of heads of government’, taking ‘decisions in the areas of politics,
economics, culture and defence; a deliberative assembly; [and] a referendum
organised in all the countries, in order to involve the people and base the
confederation on the explicit decision of the vast mass of Europeans.’ 10
De Gaulle and Debré were whistling in the wind when they expressed such
ideas in the early to mid-1950s, even as Gaullist opposition to the EDC
destroyed the immediate prospects for anything other than economic
integration in Europe, relaunched in 1955 by the Messina conference which led
to the 1957 Treaty of Rome. When the General came to power in June 1958,
however, the position was very different. Suddenly he could, if he wished, seek
to define the parameters of institutional debate across Europe and propose
European architecture for the enhancement of French power. This de Gaulle
was to do with striking determination in launching the Fouchet Plan
discussions, even if he was ultimately unable to persuade sufficient of France’s
partners to put his intergovernmental design for a political union into effect. 11
10 Quoted in Susanne Bodenheimer, Political Union: A Microcosm of European Politics 1960-1966
(Council of Europe, European Aspects, series C, number 19; Sijthoff, Leyden, 1967), p54.
11 Once he came to power – from June 1958 to January 1959 as prime minister, and thereafter as
President of the Republic – de Gaulle was obliged to take some early and important decisions about
France’s relationship with the new European Community. Although he had refused to endorse the
Treaty of Rome during its negotiation and ratification – and indeed his new prime minister, Michel
Debré, had violently opposed it – the General chose pragmatic acceptance of the Community. He
quickly concluded that France should respect the timetable for the first stage (due to begin in
January 1959) of the EC’s three-stage transitional period, during which the customs union and
common market would be completed. The need to meet this deadline, and the market
consequences of failure to do so, were used as a justification for the government’s so-called ‘Pinay-
Rueff’ austerity plan of December 1958. As Georges-Henri Soutou has written: ‘For the General, the
common market was to be an essential component in the economic recovery of France. But at the
same time it was understood that the institutional system of the Treaty of Rome should not spill
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