Accommodation, however, did not mean satisfaction. Beginning in the early 1950s, the policies of the Fourth Republic were characterized by a growing sense of frustration. This reflected, first of all, a widening gap between the country’s ambitions and its limited economic, political, and military means. As a result, France faced growing dilemmas when confronted with major international choices or crises. Yet Paris’s frustration was also, to a significant extent, fostered by the rules of the Cold War, which France never wholeheartedly accepted. Nonetheless, the fundamentals of the country’s posture in the East-West conflict and, most of all, its Atlantic and European orientations were at no point called into question after 1947. Although some of the factors that explained France’s reluctance to enter the conflict in the early years were now less salient, they still continued to operate. On the domestic scene, the influence of neutralist tendencies remained important in political and intellectual circles, especially in the early 1950s, and, in strategic terms, the fear of a confrontation with Moscow, in particular over the German rearmament question, continued to loom large.
The foregoing helps explain French thinking about East-West relations during the 1950s, which in some ways foreshadowed de Gaulle’s policies in the next decade. Most important was the notion - at least in the early years of the decade - that the Cold War was a transitory state of affairs and that alternative schemes were conceivable; the belief that a more independent Europe could alleviate the East-West divide in the long run, for example, played a significant role in the thinking of Jean Monnet. Also important was the thought that France had to temper what were now and then seen as exceedingly confrontational US policies (again, the German rearmament debate revolved largely around this issue as viewed from Paris). And last, but not least, was the belief that it was important to preserve contacts with the Soviet Union for the sake of European security. Pierre Mendes France was thinking this way when he broached the theme of disarmament and detente at the United Nations in November 1954 and when his successor, Edgar Faure, pushed for the convening of the meeting of the Big Four in Geneva in July 1955. Although the international policies of the Fourth Republic can hardly be viewed as "revisionist" in the sense of de Gaulle’s in the 1960s, they did reflect the country’s growing sense of unease with the constraints and dilemmas imposed by the East-West situation.
Yet it was within the US-dominated Western alliance that the strictures of the Cold War were felt most bitterly by the French during the Fourth Republic. To be sure, the country had a fundamental choice in the late 1940s and the early 1950s: along with the UK, France had been the most important European supporter of the Atlantic political alliance and its military organization. Yet if "Atlanticism" prevailed under the Fourth Republic, the consequences of that choice were felt with increasing dismay. The country quickly found itself in the position of a junior partner of the "Anglo-Saxons” within the Western bloc, especially with regard to nuclear weapons, of which it was deprived. As a result, France’s NATO policy, starting in the early 1950s, amounted to an uphill battle for recognition as the alliance’s third big power, along with the United States and the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, the establishment of the Atlantic system inevitably led to the blurring of the European project which, by then, had become a central element of France’s foreign policy and the principal justification of its claim to international leadership.
The 1956 Suez crisis, however, even more decisively affected France’s disgruntlement with US domination of the Atlantic alliance. Its humiliating outcome, which Washington had forced upon London and Paris, dramatically illustrated France’s and Europe’s diminished margin of maneuver vis-a-vis the United States. This feeling of humiliation was aggravated by the fact that the crisis had taken place, as seen from Paris, against the backdrop of de facto Soviet-American collusion, illuminating a new phase of the Cold War, characterized by the emergence of bipolarity at the global level. But whereas the Suez crisis had led Britain to seek a reaffirmation of its "special relationship" with the United States, France, in the last years of the Fourth Republic, chose a different course and relaunched its search for strategic autonomy. Suez was the real starting point of a process that would culminate under de Gaulle in 1966.
By the end of the 1950s, the principal source of French frustration was the agonizing decolonization process that the country was experiencing in the aftermath of World War II and that was now circumscribing its ability to act freely in international affairs. France’s colonial wars were without doubt only partially the consequence of the East-West conflict. The perception nevertheless prevailed that the former were exacerbated by the latter; this was in fact the case in Indochina, which had become a theater of the Cold War after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, but not in Algeria, where the motivations of the "rebels" had little to do with international Communism. Moreover, the French felt that, although the country was fighting these wars in the interest of the "West," their task was made more difficult, if not jeopardized, by their allies, especially the United States. In Indochina, Paris had quickly come to resent Washington’s growing influence in the conflict, which was seen as being at odds with French objectives. This led to French-American friction culminating in the Dien Bien Phu crisis in the spring of 1954. In Algeria, the perception arose - especially after Suez - that not only did the United States call into question the legitimacy of France’s fight, but that Washington acted against France’s interests by encouraging Algerian nationalists. This pattern eventually led to the final crisis of the Fourth Republic in the spring of 1958. Washington and London imposed their good offices in the French-Tunisian crisis that had developed alongside the war in Algeria, thus paving the way for the return of General de Gaulle. By then, France’s international impotence had become glaring, and it reflected the country’s dissatisfaction with its place in a world increasingly dominated by the realities of the Cold War.
World History
