The Fouchet Plan De Gaulle’s Intergovernmental Design for Europe

The Fouchet Plan
However, following the relaunch of the European Community in the mid-
1980s, pioneered by Jacques Delors as President of the European Commission
and culminating in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the competing merits of
‘supranationalism versus intergovernmentalism’ in the construction of Europe
came strongly back into focus among both politicians and commentators.
Interest began to revive in a whole series of institutional questions that had
been prominent in the 1950s and early 1960s, but which often lay dormant
during the decades of stasis from 1966 to 1986. The story of the Fouchet Plan -
which until then was largely seen as an inconsequential cul-de-sac of post-war
history, of greater interest to students of Gaullism than to thinkers about
European integration - gradually acquired renewed relevance. The failure of
de Gaulle’s initiative could now be seen as an early, acute example of the
recurrent institutional and political problems involved in designing structures
to share sovereignty in the foreign policy and defence fields - areas of power
central to the claim of larger nations to remain independent states. It also
pointed to the limits of integration likely to be confronted by simple replication
of the classic ‘Community method’ in increasingly sensitive areas of policy. The
acceptance of intergovernmental pillars for Common Foreign and Security
Policy (CFSP) and cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) in the
Maastricht Treaty, signed three decades after the collapse of the Fouchet
negotiations, led to the latter re-entering European political consciousness,
with a renewed tolerance in certain quarters for the logic of de Gaulle’s
institutional design.
Writing in Le Figaro in January 1995, for example, de Gaulle’s former finance
minister, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, declared that:
With the passage of time, one can see how the rejection of the Fouchet Plan was a serious
political error. It is true that the Community would have been endowed with two
institutional structures: one federal, to manage external trade and the economy; the
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