The Fouchet Plan De Gaulle’s Intergovernmental Design for Europe

The Fouchet Plan
the discussions taking place ‘about the future political framework of Europe’.
The latter proposition, music to the ears of the Dutch and Belgians, remained
out of the question so far as France was concerned. 55
When Community foreign ministers gathered in Paris a week later, at what was
to prove the final meeting in the Fouchet negotiations, the potential basis for
agreement sketched in Turin proved inadequate to meet Dutch and Belgian
concerns. Joseph Luns and Paul-Henri Spaak had both been irritated by de
Gaulle’s bilateral approaches to Adenauer and Fanfani – which they saw as
presaging their own exclusion from the power politics of the future Union –
whilst the whole discussion over references to the Atlantic Alliance and the
revision clause had confirmed their deep fears about the French President’s
desire for an independent, intergovernmental Europe, in which NATO and the
EC were both systematically downgraded. In communicating on 15 April
France’s formal (but well-known) refusal of President Kennedy’s proposal for
a NATO multilateral nuclear force under US command, Couve de Murville’s
sense of timing had perhaps been less than adroit.
In Paris, on 17 April, despite pressure to compromise by Adenauer, 56 the Dutch
and Belgian foreign ministers simply rejected the Turin amendments and
declared that, especially in the light of Heath’s speech, it would now be best if
55 Heath subsequently claimed that his proposal was an ‘offer ... made in good faith’ and certainly
was not intended to slow up political union, by playing into the hands of de Gaulle’s opponents
(Edward Heath, Old World, New Horizons (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1970), p55). Heath’s
exact words to the WEU Council in London were: ‘... in view of the progress which we hope to make
in the negotiations in Brussels in the next few weeks, I wonder whether it might now be helpful if
we, as impending members of the European Economic Community, were to join with you now in
your discussions about the future political framework of Europe. Might this not be a great stimulus
to our whole work together? The two processes of discussion between us, both the economic and
the political, might then go forward together, and we might find that they interacted favourably
upon one another. This is a thought that I would like to leave with you, and on which no doubt you
will want to consult together.’
56 Vanke cites an internal Dutch foreign ministry memorandum (Luns to MBZ, GS-55-54,1898 of
18 April 1962), reporting that, on the eve of the 17 April meeting, the German Chancellor wired
the Belgian prime minister, seemingly in a last-ditch attempt to disrupt the Belgo-Dutch common
front, predicting ‘worse treatment’ for the UK membership application if the two countries
frustrated a final deal on political union. (Vanke, op cit, p108).
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