journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

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economic potential of the aging population. The third structural element of the West-German
State taken into consideration is its Constitution (Grundgesetz). From a juridical point
of view, Christoph Gusy has put into relation the Constitution's two main features, its provisional
nature and “the aspiration for the revision of the status quo”, with the questions of
German unity and European unification. In fact, he concludes, the Cold War altered and
reduced to empty rhetoric what was written down in the 1949 document.
Also in Andreas Wilkens’s analysis of Jean Monnet’s activity in Germany during the 1955
‘relaunching’ – which gives a detailed review of the German élite’s attitude after the failure of the
European Defence Community and during the ambiguous “early détente” – a major point is the
cautious, un-ideological attitude of the political and bureaucratic elite of the FRG toward the
supranational and institutional path to integration. So, it was a combination of ideals and
cool-headed appreciation that inspired the CDU/CSU attitude toward the European construction.
In Ulrich Lappenküper’s essay, Adenauer appears to be driven by the determination to combine
the shortest path toward the recovering of Germany sovereignty and independence, with security,
democratisation and westernisation. Lappenküper follows the ups and downs of the Bonn-Paris
and the Bonn-Washington dialogues, putting the Christian-democrat “European choice” into dialectical
relation to its “Western choice”. Also in the third section, Anne Saint Sauveur-Henn and
Jean-Paul Cahn examine the attitudes respectively of the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP) and
Sozialdemokratische Partei(SPD). Of course, reunification and security influenced the German
parties in a peculiar way. But domestic aspects, electoral calculations, need for openness in the
governmental coalition, pressure groups, made the “European choice” a splitting issue inside all
parties. So, by the FDP's change in attitude, that shifted around 1955 from support of the European
integration process to its denunciation, its leaders aimed at setting the party apart from its
coalition partner (Saint Sauveur-Henn). Jean-Paul Cahn seeks the origins of the SPD’s
Euro-enthusiasm back in the 1920s and analyses its post-war position that moved from rejecting
the Schuman Plan to adhering to Monnet’s Committee for the United States of Europe and supporting
the Common Market and Euratom.
The same author deepens his analysis of the SPD’s attitude in the fourth section concerning
security. He reappraises the party’s opposition to the EDC, that left the party with an almost
nationalistic, anti-European stain. Kurt Schumacher’s loud opposition to German rearmament, to
NATO, to the EDC are explained in the light of a ‘national’ position, based on the FRG’s right to
equality and preoccupation with all-European aims. Also Klaus-Jürgen Müller analyses the EDC
affair, this time from the point of view of early German security concerns. Renata Fritsch-Bournazel
looks East, seeks the germs of Adenauer’s Ostpolitik and finds the “Hallstein Doctrine”
guilty of producing a West German passivity in East-Central Europe until the early Sixties. Last
of this section, Bernard Poloni discusses how the year 1957 achieved the postwar recovery, and
opened a further phase of West German history under four keys points, domestic policy (the
CDU/CSU success in the elections of the Bundestag), European and Western policy (not only the
Rome Treaties, but the coming into force of the Saar agreement and general Hans Speidel’s
appointment as C-in-C of NATO’s ground forces in Central Europe), German-German and
East-European policy (a hardening of positions), the international framework (Suez crisis and
Sputnik).
In the last section, Georges-Henri Soutou, Stefan Fröhlich, and Henri Ménudier consider Adenauer’s
high-policies. This three dimension statesmanlike portrait stresses the Chancellor's eagerness
in pursuing a set of vital aims – his country’s position and status vis-à-vis its allies, its security,
the solidity of the American defence guarantee, Franco-German reconciliation and the advancement
of West-European integration – not considered to be alternatives, but complementary and
mutually reinforcing. Soutou presentes his thesis about Adenauer’s genuine commitment to the
Paris-Bonn entente. His loss of confidence in the American nuclear guarantee, highlighted by the
Berlin and Cuba crisis, explains why he pursued a strategic and military as well as political entente
with France. Eager to reap for Germany the benefits of the rivalry between Paris and Washington,