The Fouchet Plan De Gaulle’s Intergovernmental Design for Europe

The Fouchet Plan
intergovernmental cooperation – and, more substantively, it might sanction
actual negotiations to draft a new treaty text. The President had mentioned the
idea of holding a summit to Adenauer at Rambouillet, but nothing much had
followed. Now in October, Debré reiterated this suggestion, in the hope of
agreeing a date. After brief hesitation and even though de Gaulle’s public
initiatives had irritated him, the Chancellor accepted the French proposal,
again in defiance of orthodox opinion in Bonn, with the meeting initially
scheduled for 5-6 December in Paris. 18
As the date approached, the Adenauer entourage expressed growing reticence
about the proposed meeting, not least because it would coincide with the
interregnum between the election and inauguration of Eisenhower’s successor
as US President, so offering the prospect of discomfiture in Washington about
the future direction of European policy. Their influence, however, was partly
offset by intense lobbying for the summit by Jean Monnet, who wrote to
Adenauer on 21 November, strongly supporting de Gaulle’s initiative. As it
happened, Adenauer fell ill in December, and the summit had to be deferred
until January, and then February, the following year. This delay gave the
General a useful breathing space. In the interim he was to secure massive public
endorsement for Algerian independence in a high-risk referendum which
greatly increased his political authority, both in France and abroad.
The first summit of heads of state and government of the European
Communities was duly hosted by de Gaulle – the only executive head of state
among the Six – in Paris, at the Quai d’Orsay, on 10-11 February 1961. The day
before the meeting, de Gaulle and Adenauer met bilaterally and decided to
18 Adenauer’s ambivalence was reflected in his emphasis to Debré that any future discussions on
political union should be pursued through both ‘institutions and governments’- implying a twintrack
negotiation involving existing Community structures and a new intergovernmental forum
working in tandem – on the basis that ‘existing possibilities must also be exhausted.’ Cited in Jeffrey
W. Vanke, ‘An Impossible Union: Dutch Objections to the Fouchet Plan: 1959-62’, Cold War History,
Volume 2, Number 1, October 2001, p100.
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