The Fouchet Plan De Gaulle’s Intergovernmental Design for Europe

The Fouchet Plan
too – to express unequivocal hostility to the international implications of de
Gaulle’s initiative, echoing their deep concerns about its likely institutional
effects.
Initial discussions
In retrospect, at least, it is clear that, as the intergovernmental committee set up
by the Paris summit began its work, there was little common understanding of
what closer foreign-policy and defence cooperation in Europe might mean, and
little consensus on the best practical route to attain it. Was a common foreign
and defence policy meant simply to be an additional, optional mechanism, to
be employed as and when governments saw it as useful? Or was it intended
from the start to replace national policies on a binding basis, with the
systematic elaboration of common positions on all the principal issues? The
answer to neither question was clear, compounding with confusion the
already-evident ideological differences between states about whether,
institutionally, such cooperation should be founded on a supranational or
intergovernmental design, and whether, substantively, it was intended to (or
would in practice) undermine the Atlantic Alliance.
As a result, heads of government sanctioned and set in train a negotiation
which lacked any prior agreement, even in outline form, on what sort of
political union Europe actually needed. Perhaps crucially, the common ground
between de Gaulle and Adenauer was insufficiently firm for a joint Franco-
German position to be asserted, of the kind which in turn would carry the other
four EC states before it. Equally, little serious effort was made to discuss the
plans in advance and in detail with Italy and the Benelux states, and to try
realistically to accommodate such reservations, institutional or political, as they
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