The Fouchet Plan De Gaulle’s Intergovernmental Design for Europe

The Fouchet Plan
Institutional concerns
France’s five EC partners were naturally cautious about de Gaulle’s motives in
proposing regular heads of government meetings and political union
negotiations, for both institutional and foreign-policy reasons.
Since acceding to power in June 1958, only five months after the Treaty of Rome
(for which he had no sympathy) came into effect, the General had consistently
stressed his essentially intergovernmental, rather than supranational, concept
of Europe. In his May 1960 speech, for example, he had talked of the
Community following the path of ‘an organised cooperation between states,
which might one day evolve into an impressive confederation’. Such a
confederation, in which the central authority would have no binding power
over its constituent parts, was in striking contrast to the explicitly federal vision
of Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, René Pleven and so many of de Gaulle’s
Fourth Republic predecessors. Unlike them, the General believed that an
ambitious, ostensibly economic Europe, administered by technocrats, and
enjoying supranational powers, would represent an unacceptable challenge to
the sovereign authority of nation states endowed with direct democratic
legitimacy.
Instead, as he told his September 1960 press conference, Europe’s nation states
were ‘the only realities upon which one can build’, unlike ‘vaguely extranational
bodies’ – such as the European Commission, the European Parliament,
or indeed a Council of Ministers acting by qualified majority vote – ‘which do
not and cannot have ... any political authority’. He went on: ‘It is an illusion to
believe that one could build something capable of effective action, which
would be approved by the people, above and beyond the nation state’. Any
other approach would be ‘to indulge in fantasy’.
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