French Foreign Policy since 1945: An Introduction by Frédéric Bozo (review)

There has been since the 1940s, Frédéric Bozo argues, a certain consistency in France. English-reading audiences (or, as Charles de Gaulle might put it, les Anglo-Saxons) can now read an updated edition of Bozo's history of French foreign policy since 1945. The book, translated from the French second edition, published in 2012, and incorporating a new epilogue, is subtitled "an introduction." At under 200 pages of text, this subtitle makes sense. An interested reader might pursue more-detailed accounts of many of the events and policies Bozo describes. But this book is also far more than an introduction; it is an analysis, an argument, and an erudite summation by an esteemed historian of French foreign policy.

Bozo's overarching argument is clearly articulated in both the introduction and the conclusion: Despite changes in leadership and changes in the world, French foreign policy has been marked by continuity. Certain themes have recurred in French foreign policy since 1945: an ambitious, perhaps pretentious, effort to secure a certain rank, or standing, for France in the world of states; the pursuit of a European project, the overall goal of which is consistent even if the means change; and an effort to build a balanced world order in which France (not just superpowers or a hyperpower) has a role. But in this consistency Bozo identifies competition and contradictions: the pursuit of French national prestige complicates efforts to build a common European structure, be it transnational or international. The fact that France is, "by nature, a Western power" sat uncomfortably, especially during the Cold War, with French claims to universalist ideas (p. 11).

The contradictions in French postwar policy should not surprise anyone familiar with the paradox of its return to greatness after defeat by the Nazis. British, Soviet, and U.S. leaders reinstated France as a great power after the war, even though France did not participate in any of the Big Three conferences that shaped the peace. France, like all other powers, could not return to the status quo ante. It was not just the experience of war but the threat posed by the Soviet Union that necessitated change. Bozo identifies a fundamental transformation in French policy in the late 1940s, a reorientation in three interconnected parts: French acknowledgment, no matter how begrudging, that West German power would be revived; that France should move toward, and indeed champion, European unification; and that France should work to secure a U.S. commitment to West European defense. Each new avenue of policy would have its future frustrations for France, but none more than adherence to the North Atlantic Treaty that "formalized the country's dependence" on the United States (p. 18).

This transformation sets the overarching bounds within which French leaders crated individual policies to adapt to changes in France, in Europe, and abroad. Bozo's examination of the Fourth Republic highlights the tensions and connections between the French search for security in Europe—with the "national psychodrama" of the European Defense Community—and efforts to maintain French power in Indochina and Algeria (p. 29). Bozo's discussion of the Suez crisis offers an example of the detail and analysis he brings to his short text. In five pages, he explains how Suez fits within the larger Algerian problem, France's concern about rank, a possible connection between the Protocol of Sèvres and the development of an Israeli nuclear program, and the role of the Anglo-French failure in Egypt to both European construction and the search for French strategic independence. This is no simple chronology of events.

Bozo, whom scholars and students alike have long relied on to explain the enigmatic de Gaulle, places le Grand Charles at the center of a larger narrative of postwar French foreign policy while also noting that he played a singular role in shaping that policy. De Gaulle, rightly, earns three chapters in which...