The Fouchet Plan De Gaulle’s Intergovernmental Design for Europe

The Fouchet Plan
Table of Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................. 1
Early Gaullist thinking ........................................................................... 6
De Gaulle’s 1960 initiative ..................................................................... 9
Paris summit: February 1961 ............................................................... 13
Institutional concerns ........................................................................... 16
Foreign policy concerns ....................................................................... 19
Initial discussions .................................................................................. 22
Bad Godesberg summit: July 1961 ..................................................... 26
First Fouchet Plan: November 1961 ................................................... 28
Hardening opposition .......................................................................... 30
Emerging stalemate .............................................................................. 33
Second Fouchet Plan: January 1962 .................................................... 36
Counter-Treaty of the Five: February 1962 ....................................... 40
Tactical French retreat .......................................................................... 42
Negotiations collapse: April 1962 ....................................................... 45
Deepening rifts ...................................................................................... 48
Legacy of stalemate............................................................................... 52
Acknowledgements
This essay is a substantially extended version of the entry on the Fouchet Plan which appears
in Anthony Teasdale and Timothy Bainbridge, The Penguin Companion to European Union
(fourth edition, Penguin Books, London, 2012). It also draws on elements contained in the
book’s entry on Charles de Gaulle. The author would like to thank Vernon Bogdanor, Ian
Davidson, David Levy and Martin Westlake for their valuable comments on a preliminary draft
of this essay. He is also grateful the library staff of the FNSP and Institut Charles de Gaulle in
Paris, and of the EU institutions in Brussels, for their assistance in locating and retrieving
various texts.