Diplomatie et grands contrats: L’état français et les marchés extérieurs au XXe siècle by Laurence Badel (review)

In Diplomatie et grands contrats: L’état français et les marchés extérieurs au XXe siècle, French scholar Laurence Badel pays close attention to the significant diplomatic support that France provided to its businesses throughout the twentieth century in order to facilitate expansion in foreign markets. Focusing in particular on the period from 1918 to 1978, Badel highlights how the French state organized its commercial representation abroad and how the various actors involved—the relevant ministries, quasi-state organizations, and private actors—shared responsibilities. In so doing, she sheds light on “the public structures of France’s commercial diplomacy, which has not really been studied to date” (p. 9). Well-written and engaging, this book will prove particularly helpful for scholars interested in France and the intersection of politics and trade, but it also offers some illuminating insights on how France’s commercial diplomacy served its larger Cold War ambitions, especially by helping to foster ties with the Communist bloc in the 1960s and 1970s.

The impetus for a new commercial diplomacy and for an increased state involvement emerged in the late nineteenth century, at a time when France faced a period of relative commercial decline vis-à-vis Germany, Great Britain, and the United States and appeared unprepared for the growing international economic competition. For the most part, French businesses could not obtain reliable and useful information about foreign markets, nor were they well served by French consuls. The latter were often too busy, or unwilling, to provide support to French businesses. Moreover, French banks could not guarantee long-term commercial transactions, which hindered the ability of businesses to develop their operations abroad. In that context the French state, as well as many of its neighbors, began to take a more active role in the commercial realm in the early part of the twentieth century. This often led to the emergence of new administrations—such as the Board of Trade in Britain, the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry in France—because the normal diplomatic corps balked at the idea of focusing on economic matters.

In the early part of her book, Badel explains in detail the incremental creation of the public structures of France’s commercial diplomacy and the important debates regarding the relationship between diplomacy and economic matters that defined the new administrative organization. Despite pleas from the Quai d’Orsay (French Foreign Ministry) to maintain full control over foreign policy, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry successfully extended its authority over the nascent network of commercial attachés in late 1918.

After World War Two the new administrative structure and division of labor truly took shape. The Direction des Relations Économiques Extérieures (DREE), created in 1944 and first under the purview of the State Secretariat for economic affairs, became the main interlocutor for businesses trying to expand in foreign markets. The Quai D’Orsay’s Direction des Affaires économiques et financiėres (DAEF) exercised control over representation and negotiation in international organizations. The postes d’expansion économique (economic missions abroad) were in charge of collecting economic information about the regions in which they were based and sending it back to both the DREE and the DAEF. Although the heads of the economic missions were nominally dependent on the Ministry of Finance and the Economy, the head of each mission also had to submit to the authority of the ambassador who represented France in the country.

Badel’s book shows how, after 1945, France’s expansion into foreign markets came to rely on a number of key factors, including “the direct or indirect control of the economic information that the state gathered and redistributed, the creation of a system to finance external commerce that the state guaranteed, and a close collaboration between the two key operational centers in this domain...