FREDERIC BOZO
The importance of France’s role in the Cold War is often overlooked when compared with that of both the two superpowers and the other major West European countries. Germany self-evidently occupied a central position in the East-West conflict from its inception and was a decisive actor at its end, and Britain’s role during the Cold War was much enhanced thanks to the “special" relationship with the United States. By contrast, the French contribution often comes across as less important. This may be partly explained by a comparatively modest French input in the historiography, especially in the Englishspeaking literature. Yet the perception of France as a lesser player in the Cold War is misleading.
To be sure, the country was in a somewhat peripheral position at the very beginning of the East-West conflict. Wartime leader Charles de Gaulle and - following his withdrawal from politics in January 1946 - his immediate successors were indeed reluctant to accept the emerging logic ofthe Cold War and its consequences. By the late 1940s, however, the intensification of the Cold War had led to the country’s active alignment within the West, thus making France a key protagonist in the East-West conflict. Yet France’s position in the Cold War soon provoked a number of frustrations that the country’s painful decolonization process and chronic internal instability only aggravated, and these tensions together played no small part in the demise ofthe Fourth Republic and General de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958. Seeking to reestablish France’s “rank," de Gaulle was determined to challenge the international status quo which corseted the country on the world scene. By the mid-1960s, France’s concept and practice of East-West relations had become premised on the objective of overcoming “Yalta," thus leading France to assume an influential role in the long-term transformation of the East-West conflict. After his departure in 1969, de Gaulle’s successors as presidents of the Fifth Republic by and large continued to shape France’s international policies according to this grand design. Although events subsequently confirmed the durability of the bipolar order and the
Persistence of the European status quo contrary to Gaullist expectations, de Gaulle’s legacy remained the yardstick of French diplomacy during the second half of the Cold War and until its end.
If France’s posture in the Cold War were to be summarized in one word, “Gaullism” should be considered an appropriate one. The term indeed captures the overwhelming influence of Charles de Gaulle and his legacy on France and its international role throughout the period, as well as the specificity of the French input in the conflict. France’s role reflected not only its intrinsic geopolitical importance in the Cold War but, perhaps more significantly, a distinctive approach to East-West relations that resulted from a complex and, at times, paradoxical combination of accommodation and dissatisfaction with the status quo. Because dissatisfaction by and large prevailed, “Gaullism” became a synonym for the Cold War revisionism which - although culminating under de Gaulle’s presidency in the 1960s - characterized France’s policy during most of the period. And because it rested on a forceful and coherent concept of transcending the bloc system, “Gaullism” may be seen historically as having represented one of the most significant alternative conceptions of the evolution of the Cold War beyond the established order of the East-West conflict.
World History
