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This paper discusses French views of transatlantic and European defence from the late 1940s to France's ‘return’ to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 2009. It argues that, while until the early 1950s the French Government viewed transatlantic and West European security cooperation as mutually reinforcing enterprises, by the end of that decade French decision-makers had developed conflicting perceptions of transatlantic and European defence. During the 1960s, the dominating political discourse in the Fifth Republic portrayed relations between Atlantic and European solidarity as a ‘zero-sum’ game: What was good for the Alliance was bad for Europe and vice versa. President Charles de Gaulle advocated the creation of a European ‘Third Force’, although links with NATO were never outright severed. During the 1970s and early 1980s, a ‘zero-sum’ attitude to Atlantic and European defence consolidated although as the Cold War came to a close, Mitterrand started a selective but steady re-engagement with the Alliance. By the late 1990s, during the presidency of Jacques Chirac, France was once again ade factofull member of NATO, although full reintegration was completed only in April 2009. This paper suggests that France's return to ‘NATO’ marked no dramatic U-turn in French security policy; rather it was the result of a gradual and steady evolution, which was triggered by the crisis of the East–West structure of international politics during the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

No event better defined Charles de Gaulle's complicated relationship with his Western allies than his 1966 decision to withdraw France from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Predictably, the story of this unilateral move has been very well documented; but how de Gaulle's policy towards NATO interacted with other key elements of his grand strategy, namely his attempts to build a Western political union or to promote East–West détente, has not received the same attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]