The Fouchet Plan: De Gaulle’s Intergovernmental Design for Europe

This paper explores the politics of the Fouchet Plan, the unsuccessful initiative by French President Charles de Gaulle in 1961-62 to create a new ‘union of states’ for foreign-policy and defence cooperation among the six founding members of the European Community. The paper traces the origins of de Gaulle’s proposal – which was designed not only to parallel the existing Community, but potentially to subsume it – and analyses the complex and fraught course of the subsequent negotiations, which divided the Six and ended in stalemate. The struggle between intergovernmental and supranational visions of Europe thrown up by the Fouchet Plan represented an early, acute example of the recurrent institutional and political problems involved in developing structures to share sovereignty in areas of power which are central to the claim of larger nations to remain independent states, and it pointed to the limits of integration likely to be confronted by simple replication of the classic ‘Community method’ in increasingly sensitive areas of policy. Although the dilemma of how to incorporate a significant intergovernmental dimension within the European institutional structure was eventually resolved in the Maastricht Treaty two decades later, the Fouchet dispute had important consequences in the years that followed, notably in hardening de Gaulle's attitude to British membership of the Community and in seriously constraining the dynamic of the integration process more widely.