Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War, and German Unification (review)

Although the end of the Cold War is a relatively recent event, it has already produced a small library’s worth of literature, including an abundance of memoirs, histories, and theoretical tracts all reflecting prevailing assumptions. One of the most widespread of these concerns the leader of France, President François Mitterrand, who is usually held to have been viscerally opposed to German unification from beginning to end and to have undertaken all possible measures to sabotage it.

The great accomplishment of Frédéric Bozo’s terrific 2005 book Mitterrand, la fin de la guerre froide et l’unification allemande, newly and skillfully translated into English by Susan Emanuel as Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War, and German Unification, is to put this assumption to an empirical test and to find it wanting. Bozo gained access not only to official French sources in the national archives and French Foreign Ministry collections but also to papers held individually by key officials from the time. He also conducted numerous interviews. What he found challenges the view of Mitterrand as an implacable and ultimately defeated foe of unification.

As Bozo states, “[f ]irst and foremost . . . was Mitterrand’s grand European design—in other words, his ambition with regard to European construction, which was the alpha and omega of French policy during the upheavals of 1989–1991.” Bozo shows that although Mitterrand was shocked by the opening of the Berlin Wall, he realized that subsequent events could facilitate European integration. Mitterrand had a “determination at the end of 1989 to obtain from the chancellor [Helmut Kohl] a confirmation of his definitive agreement the following year to launch an economic and monetary union . . . a confirmation, it should be remembered, that the chancellor had very much seemed to shy away from in the preceding months” (p. xxv).

In achieving his goals, Mitterrand kept his cards close to his vest. Not for nothing was he nicknamed “the sphinx.” He had a tendency to agree with nearly all interlocutors in conversation, regardless of his personal views. This tendency has created a confusing picture of his actual thinking in the documentary record and has provided the holders of various views of Mitterrand with supporting evidence for their own particular interpretations. Numerous conversation partners emerged from their talks with the French president convinced that Mitterrand was on their side and was opposed to everyone else. Hence, the evidence shows Mitterrand listening sympathetically while the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev described Kohl as a Nazi, even though the French president had been working closely with Kohl himself. The British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was fully confident that Mitterrand was in complete agreement with her, a mistake that her foreign minister, Douglas Hurd, tried unsuccessfully to correct.

The evidence presented by Bozo confirms that Mitterrand liked to have many irons in the fire at any given time. But by judging the French president in the full context of his many negotiations—not just a few selected bilateral ones—and by his actions, Bozo shows that Mitterrand did eventually choose an iron. He decided to cooperate with Kohl and help the West German chancellor’s drive for rapid unification in return for Kohl’s strong support for advancing the causes of European integration. In Bozo’s words, Mitterrand became “resigned to engaging in arm-wrestling Kohl” (p. 122) in the interest of securing advantages for France and for Europe.

Bozo details the evolution of this policy through its various twists and turns. He also sets it in the context of longer-term French foreign policy, beginning his detailed narrative in 1981. In an interesting new epilogue to the English edition of 2009, he updates his thinking from the French original. Bozo argues that the outcome of 1990, while successful in many ways, also “marked the limits of the Mitterrandian project for the post-Cold War period at the level of the continent, a project . . . derived from the Gaullist grand design of a Europe...