America, Europe, Africa / L'Amérique, l'Europe, l'Afrique: 1945-1973 ed. by Eric Remacle and Pascaline Winand (review)

By the early twentieth century, Europe, which had dominated the world for four centuries through conquest and colonization, had proven ultimately unable to manage itself. Although the peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century and the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century had ushered in periods of peace after devastating years of struggles and upheavals, renewed strife and technological advances brought the European system down, initially with World War I and then with World War II.

By 1945, Germany was at "year zero"; France was afflicted with, in the words of Charles de Gaulle, "a secret grief that would remain forever in the nation's conscience"; and Britain, exhausted after more than four years of warfare, had lost its great-power status and was about to lose its empire. None of these three major powers of Western Europe was fully disposed to embrace the others and forge a new unity for the Old Continent.

The greatest accomplishment of the European Economic Community (now the European Union) was to break the cycle of French-German enmity through a hybrid arrangement of pooled economic functions (communitarianism) and a revival of something like the Concert of Europe through the European Council (intergovernmentalism).

But although the European Union in the aggregate has become an economic powerhouse, it has remained a military—and to a lesser extent political—dwarf. The history of the Western European Union (WEU) and its predecessor, the Western Union, is that of Europe's attempt to develop a common European foreign and defense policy without the resources or the collective will to carry it out, hampered as it was by France's ambition to become the dominant player in European defense, by Britain's distaste for continental arrangements and its attachment to its "special relationship" with the United States, and by Germany's pathological aversion to its past history of extreme militarism. But given Germany's "spiritual paralysis," in the words of the former U.S. ambassador in Berlin, John Kornblum, the fault ultimately has lain with the inability of France and Britain, despite moments of promise, such as the "spirit of St. Malo" in 1998, to come together on European defense, a condition that persists today. The WEU, discussed in an essay by Eric Remacle (pp. 187-234), one of the two editors of the book under review, effectively ceased to exist in 2010, and its functions were absorbed into the European Union.

Europe could have had an institutional base for its own defense had France not rejected the European Defense Community (EDC) in 1954. The EDC, an idea that was ahead of its time, would have communitarianized defense. For example, the EDC would have had, like the European Coal and Steel Community before it, a parliamentary assembly. As Gérard Bossuat points out in his essay, pro-European circles in the United States believed "the [EDC was] a project with enormous political, economic and cultural potential" (p. 115). The EDC, the brainchild of Jean Monnet, was supported in France by the Christian Democrats (known as the Mouvement Républicain Populaire because no party with the label "Christian" can make headway in Republican France) and a segment of the Socialist Party. The other segment of the Socialist Party joined with the Gaullists and the Communists in rejecting the EDC on nationalist grounds.

The title of the book reflects its syncretism: it is constructed around the imposing figure of the late Alfred Cahen. Some of the authors were his students, although this is not a Festschrift per se (too few people are involved). A Belgian diplomat and academic, Cahen was in the tradition of a grand commis d'état. In earlier times, when both he and I were second secretaries in then-Léopoldville, he as a diplomat and I as an intelligence officer, he once remarked to me, and to the honor of...