European Integration and the Cold War: Ostpolitik-Westpolitik, 1965–1973 ed. by Piers Ludlow (review)

The last years of Western Europe’s postwar golden decades were, as Piers Ludlow and the contributors to European Integration and the Cold War remind us, transformative. Much changed between 1965, when Charles de Gaulle launched his insurgency against U.S. leadership of the West, and late 1973, when the oil crisis signaled the dusk of Europe’s twenty-year postwar boom. During this 1965–1973 period the members of the European Economic Community opted for expansion and integration over de Gaulle’s concept of a security order based on the primacy of national interests. In these years, too, the Atlantic alliance coalesced around a common strategy for East-West détente, a choice that inaugurated a lengthy thaw in Cold War tensions and led to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975.

Historians have not yet satisfactorily explained the complex politics of European international relations in these decisive years. This omission, Ludlow and his collaborators suggest, may well be attributable to their engrained disciplinary insistence on telling the stories of Cold War détente and European integration as entirely separate narratives. This separation, Ludlow and his colleagues propose, constitutes an artificial distinction that obscures the very real ways in which the two historical processes—European integration and the pursuit of Cold War détente—interacted and shaped each other in reciprocal complexity.

The habitual exclusion of the Cold War from the story of European integration and vice versa has, as Ludlow concedes, reflected certain historical realities, notably the bureaucratic cleavage between the high politics of foreign policy, the domain of national foreign ministries, and the low politics of tariffs, regulations, and agricultural subsidies that preoccupy most Eurocrats. In view of this institutional schism, explicit connections between European integration and Cold War politics have flourished mainly in the minds of statesmen. Accordingly, this volume is primarily concerned with revealing the connections between Cold War and European politics in the strategic thought of the period’s political leaders: de Gaulle, Willy Brandt, Georges Pompidou, and Harold Wilson.

As the source of an alternative European idée—that of a security order driven by geopolitics rather than economic integration, of an order that would include the Soviet Union and relegate the United States to the periphery—de Gaulle towers over this volume. The central figure in chapters by Georges Soutou and Garret Martin, de Gaulle is omnipresent as the active agent against whom others reacted. No matter how quixotic de Gaulle’s European concept might now appear, Ludlow and his contributors show just how decisively it shaped the European politics of the late 1960s. De Gaulle’s intellectual and political insurgency forced other leaders—Wilson, and Brandt, Lyndon Johnson—to unite in defense of the institutional status quo, that of an integrating Europe lodged within the Cold War Atlantic alliance.

Ultimately de Gaulle was defeated, but his revolt was not without enduring consequences. Among other things, it prompted Atlanticists on both sides of the ocean to engage the East, precipitating the détente strategy confirmed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the 1967 “Harmel Report.” European integration helped to determine this “Cold War” outcome, as readers of the volume will discover. Wilson, the subject of an excellent chapter by Helen Parr, collaborated with Washington and Bonn to sustain Western Europe in an Atlanticist embrace and launched Britain’s 1967 bid for European Economic Community membership in pursuit of this goal. Chancellor Brandt, as Andreas Wilkens explains, shared de Gaulle’s vision of détente and yearned for a relaxation of Cold War tensions to ease Germany’s unnatural division. That he sided with the Anglo-Americans, sealing the fate of de Gaulle’s insurgency, owed not only to the Anglo-Americans’ embrace of détente but to Brandt’s commitment to an integrative Europe, to a future that remained anathema to de Gaulle’s idée de l’Europe.

By demonstrating how the histories of integration and détente were linked...