The Fouchet Plan De Gaulle’s Intergovernmental Design for Europe

The Fouchet Plan
of making progress in time for the second meeting of heads of government, due
to be held in Bonn during the early summer.
During these initial discussions, the German, Italian and Luxembourg
governments proved broadly, if cautiously, supportive of the French
démarche, with Belgium remaining neutral. They could agree that regular
summit meetings of heads of government should act as the focal point of closer
foreign-policy and defence cooperation, so long as the existing, separate role of
the Community institutions was not threatened and the position of NATO was
not jeopardised. From the start, however, the government of the Netherlands
reiterated the strong opposition it had expressed at the Paris summit. The
Dutch representative, with the full backing of foreign minister Joseph Luns,
argued that any moves towards closer foreign-policy cooperation within
Europe should, as a matter of principle, be firmly rooted in existing
Community structures, and would also need to be underpinned by a clear and
unequivocal commitment to the Atlantic Alliance. The best guarantee of the
latter would be for negotiations to await British membership of the
Community, an application for which seemed imminent. For the Dutch,
building ‘political Europe’ in any form was less important than sustaining US
leadership of Europe, which might be threatened by the emergence of a
separate European identity in external affairs. 30
30 See Vanke, op cit, pp97-99. On the institutional front, at least, the Dutch position was somewhat
ironic, given that Britain had traditionally found intergovernmental, rather than supranational,
structures of European cooperation much more appealing, from the Council of Europe through to
EFTA. It was not at all clear that London regarded the Dutch insistence on conventional EC-based
decision-making in the foreign-policy and defence field as at all preferable to the Gaullist notion of
loosely cooperating nation states.
On the defence front, the Dutch argued that a pan-European organisation already existed
in the form of the Western European Union (WEU). This had the advantages of including the United
Kingdom, having a membership congruent with NATO, and holding ministerial meetings which
rendered an important component of the French proposals redundant. However, since most other
member states recognised the WEU to be largely moribund, there were few takers among the
Netherlands’ partners for their arguments on this front.
In European Foreign Policy Cooperation: Interpreting the Institutional Debates from
Fouchet to the Single European Act, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Durham, 1992, Kevin
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