France and Germany in the New Europe

FRANCE AND GERMANY. IN THE NEW EUROPE David P. Calleo H-ow durable is the Franco-German partnership? After three decades, it is clearly more than an episodic converging ofdistinct national interests. Conventional wisdom now finds it almost unthinkable that France and Germanywouldeveragaingotowarwitheachother. Perhapsourhistorical experience is too short for such blind confidence, but a network of institutional structures does frame the bilateral relationship in a cooperative mode. Ministers and heads of government do meet regularly, along with numerous joint commissions of civil servants and private experts. There are voluminous organized cultural and academic exchanges. Today, there is even a joint army corps in the making. Beyond these bilateral ties is a common Franco-German project, the European Community, which puts the Franco-German relationship into a dense network of cooperative arrangements that enmeshes all Western Europe. Franco-German partnership has always been the Community's foundation and generally its driving force. So long as that joint project endures, some reasonable degree of Franco-German partnership is also likely to endure. In its more than three decades, the EC has certainly been a great success. No one denies that it profoundly conditions relationships among its member states. Nevertheless, it has not superseded those states, as manyhoped itmight. The EC is less areplacementforthe traditional nation David P. Calleo is Chairman of the Department of European Studies at SAIS. This essay will appear in France-Germany, 1983-1993: The Struggle to Cooperate, Patrick McCarthy, editor (St. Martin's Press, forthcoming). 25 26 SAISREVIEW state than an imaginative extension of it. The role of the Community's "supranational" Commission, often highly significant, has essentially been as amicus curiae to the Council of Ministers, where the member states are the decisive actors. The states remain, moreover, the chiefinterpreters and administrators of Community decisions within their own borders. In many respects, the Community has given traditional states a new lease on life. Cooperating and bargaining within the EC, Europe's states have generally been able to exert more influence over their external environments than otherwise would have been possible. National governments, moreover, have oftenusedthe EC tobolstertheirdomesticauthority. Participating in the European Monetary System (EMS), for example, allowed the French government to impose a policy of rigueur on its own economy. Through the EMS, the French socialist government was able, in effect, to borrow the German Bundesbank. The European Community has thus developed into a very complicated and quite novel confederal structure for governing the European continental system. But it has remained a confederacy of national states rather than a federation in the making. As a confederacy, it has been highly efficacious, precisely because it has permitted Europe's nation states to retain their self-determination and, with it, theirhigh degree ofadministrative efficiency and democraticparticipation . Atthe same time, the EC has made itpossible forstatesto surpass their traditional limitations—their lack of economic scale and their tendency to self-defeating quarrels with each other. The advantages of such a confederacy are reasons for its vulnerability. The EC depends on maintaininga consensus amongthe partners, severalofwhomaremajorpowers. Historically, a working consensus within the EC has been highly dependant on Franco-German cooperation. The two governments usually have held the initiative in developing and imposing new directions for the whole Community. When they have agreed on basic policies, the Community has moved forward. When they have not, it has stagnated. This is not to say that other states have had no weight in shaping the Community's policies. Leadership in the EC is naturally a complexprocess. The Commission often takes initiatives. Smaller countries protect their interests and sometimesdecisivelyaffectpolicies, oftenbyborrowingsupportfromimportant interests within France or Germany. Neverthelessthe Franco-German axis has been the vital relationship at the Community's center. Thus, while the Community greatly encourages and facilitates close Franco-German cooperation, italsodependsonit. Withinthe Community,moreover,France has not ceased being France, nor Germany ceased being Germany. Each has its own distinctive national interests, and also its independent capacity to pursue those interests, within and outside the Community. In the end, therefore, Franco-German partnership, and the European Community it has fostered, depends not only on institutions and public opinion, but also upon a basic geopolitical and economic climate—one that FRANCE AND GERMANY IN...