Outline de Gaulle's vision of France's international role and discuss the ways in which his foreign policy sought to realise this vision

Résumé du document

The immediate cause of Charles de Gaulle's resumption of power (1958-1969) was the Algerian War, which had brought France to the brink of civil war and destroyed the Fourth Republic. By ending the war, de Gaulle had the chance to resurrect his proposal, first elaborated at Bayeux in 1946, of a republic under strong presidential leadership. The Fifth's Republic regime was designed to maximize executive dominance in foreign-policy-making. All key foreign-policy decisions of the Gaullist era, including Algeria, nuclear weapons development, withdrawal from NATO, important Common Market matters, and foreign interventions, took place with virtually no prior parliamentary debate and as a direct consequence of the General's vision. De Gaulle's conception of international relations and of France's global role heavily influenced France's foreign policy during and after his tenure in office. This study examines key parts of French global policy under the administration of President Charles de Gaulle. Within the framework of specific French strategic, economic, and diplomatic policy areas, it reviews some of the steps taken to revise international relations, from the point of view of France's bilateral relations with other states and international organizations.

Extraits

[...] These included foreign and defence policy, the currency, economic and financial policy plus control of strategic primary materials, control of justice . Special institutions were provided to run these Community sectors. The Community was endowed with a president, who was none other than the president of the French Republic and who had the role of head of the executive. The proposal, while clearly proclaiming the right to independence of the African states, equally obvious left France in effective political control. De Gaulle made it plain that the plan had to be taken- or left. [...]

[...] General de Gaulle announced the withdrawal of all French military units from the NATO- integrated command and requested the evacuation of all foreign bases on French territory or their control by the French authorities. On 1 April 1967 France had regained its full military sovereignty.[17] However, though France withdrew from the military organisation, she stayed firmly within the political alliance. While refusing to be a protectorate of the United States, she agreed to be their ally.[18] Thus she remained, outside NATO, the dependable ally but one possessed of full sovereignty- that she had sought to be within it in 1958. The end of French technical and economic subjection to the United States? [...]

[...] De Gaulle and France's empire Even after the loss of Indo-China, the French empire constituted a resource for the policy of grandeur since it made France a world power. But the resource risked becoming a handicap if new colonial conflicts of the sort that had occurred in Indo-China and were now taking place in Algeria were to arise to threaten national stability or place France in the dock of international opinion. De Gaulle understood that the desire of the colonised peoples for emancipation was henceforth an irreversible fact, and an attempt to oppose it would inevitably lead to an endless succession of colonial wars.[11] Yet it was obvious that for de Gaulle withdrawal must not signify abandonment. [...]

[...] On 20 October Eisenhower responded with a categorical rejection of this demand on the grounds that the United State's interests and responsibilities were of a different scale from those of France and thus could not be reduced to a tripartite arrangement. Eisenhower's reply could not but confirm de Gaulle's conviction that the United States refused to accept that its allies could be partners. The affirmation of national independence required in consequence that France regain it autonomy vis-à- vis NATO and its full sovereignty over its armed forces. In March 1959 her Mediterranean fleet withdrew from the integrated command structure, a move followed by the refusal to allow the United States to station atomic bombs in France. [...]

[...] Tensions over financial problems reached a climax in de Gaulle's press conference of 4 February 1965 during which he delivered a withering critique of the international monetary system and roundly condemned the privileges of the dollar and the benefits that the United States derived from it. convention according to which the dollar possesses a transcendental vale as an international currency no longer rests on its initial premise, namely that America possesses the bulk of the world's gold The fact that many states accept, as a principle, dollars as well as gold as payment for the deficits which the American balance of payments engenders leads the United State deliberately to acquire deficits abroad. [...]