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In his report to the president of the French Republic in November 2012 assessing France's return into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's) military command structure, Hubert Védrine, the former French Minister of Foreign Affairs, noted that France had no interest in leaving it again. His recommendations called for renewed action within the Alliance and the emergence of a European pillar. The timing should have been perfect, with France's draft White Paper on defence and security about to be published. However, at a time when budget cuts prevail, are these recommendations applicable and do they amount to more than just paying lip-service? This article focuses on a one-year period, from November 2012 to the latest debates around the Military Programming Law, reminiscent of Pierre Mendès-France's famous quote that governing is all about making choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper examines the anti-Vietnam War activism of a group of American expatriates in France, the Paris American Committee to Stopwar (PACS), from its formation in 1966 to its dissolution in 1968. Using oral history and archival research, the article uses PACS’ history to further recent studies focusing on the Vietnam War as a global event. Through an evaluation of how PACS dealt with Communism, networking, military deserters and the French government, the article demonstrates how being in France benefited and limited anti-war activism while also highlighting changes in French governmental attitudes post-May 1968. In so doing, the article showcases the significance of location in determining how anti-war protest plays out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of a study of American, British and Canadian records, this article examines the relationship of France to the negotiation of the North Atlantic Treaty from the perspective of the ‘ABC’ countries, particularly Canada. How did the perceived vulnerability of France influence the approach of the members of the ‘North Atlantic Triangle’ to the justification, timing and contents of the proposed pact? How did France's inclusion in Western Union and its exclusion from the preliminary talks in the Pentagon affect American, British and Canadian attitudes to the development of the draft alternatively known as the ‘Pentagon Paper’ or the ‘State Department Draft’? These questions are addressed, as well as the impact on the later ambassadorial talks of France's priority to immediate rearmament and its determination to include the departments of Algeria within the defensive perimeter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Finally, the article assesses the extent to which France and its requirements influenced the policies and actions of the Canadian government throughout the negotiation of the North Atlantic Treaty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an introduction to this special issue dealing with topics related to France's military and defense policies and their relationship with NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) including post-Cold War analysis of the shifts in France's position, the Iraq War, and France's role in the European Union's strategic defense culture.

Charles de Gaulle regarded NATO as a hated symbol of US hegemony. From 1958 to 1966, France incrementally reduced its military and political participation in the Western alliance. This article analyses how ‘NATO Paris’ – the NATO secretary-general, the 15 national ambassadors forming the North Atlantic Council (NAC) in Paris and NATO insiders in allied governments – coped with the Gaullist challenge and tried to find solutions to the French ‘malaise’ and to de Gaulle's obstructionism. By ‘working around the General’, these NATO players strengthened the cohesion of the ‘NATO 14’ (minus France) and prepared the ground for a multilateral revitalisation of the Western security alliance once de Gaulle finally withdrew France from all military commands and councils in March 1966. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2009, President Nicolas Sarkozy decided that France should return to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's (NATO) integrated military structure, which it had left in 1966. Sarkozy also restated the complete independence of the French arsenal, the policy of non-participation in NATO's nuclear mission: the nuclear exception. This article takes the view that this policy of nuclear exception is outdated and potentially damaging to French interests within NATO. This is so under two scenarios: (1) As long as American non-strategic nuclear weapons (NSNW) are on European soil, NATO's nuclear posture will evolve without official French input. (2) If these nuclear weapons were to be removed from Europe, France would stand as the predominant nuclear power among the European Union states. Since the consequences of removal would impact French interests directly, it seems unwise for Paris to opt out of this debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shortly after coming to power in 2007, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced his willingness to ‘normalise’ France's relationship with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). His aim was to reverse a central tenet of Gaullist foreign and security policy which, since General de Gaulle's 1966 decision to withdraw France from NATO's integrated military command, had relied on the country's ‘specific’ status in the Atlantic Alliance. While there had been unsuccessful attempts – under Presidents François Mitterrand in 1990–1991 and, most notably, Jacques Chirac in 1995–1997 – at such normalisation over the previous two decades, Sarkozy's move proved successful and, in 2009, France again became a fully integrated NATO member. Despite hints that he would ‘review’ this decision and perhaps reverse it or at least correct it, his successor, François Hollande, has decided to maintain the status quo. This article seeks to offer an explanation for Sarkozy's decision and to analyse why it was successfully carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines the extent to which policy-makers in the Lyndon Johnson administration relied upon the trope of anti-Americanism to discredit the strong criticism of the Vietnam War that French president Charles de Gaulle delivered in a speech in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in September 1966. It seeks to demonstrate that those in power suffered from what US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara later acknowledged was a ‘failure of imagination’ towards de Gaulle's suggestions about the war. Instead, the Johnson team wrongly attributed his critique to an anti-American agenda that they believed stemmed from his tight control over foreign policy, his purported disconnect from the wishes of the French people and his supposed bitterness over both France's experience in the Second World War and, especially, the end of the French empire in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article traces the images of America's three foremost European allies in US public opinion over the course of the Presidency of George W. Bush. Public country images are seen to consist of a valence and a salience dimension. Employing a mix of opinion polls and media content data, the article locates the country images under study within this two-dimensional space. It finds that US relations with Britain, Germany and France rest on rather different foundations in the American public: the British image displays both the most positive valence and the highest salience; the valence of the German image is the second most positive but its image is the least salient; the French image has the least positive valence, and its salience takes on a middle position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both the Ford and the Carter administrations regarded the rise of the Union of the Left in the 1970s with suspicion, albeit to a different extent. Ideology and events exacerbated the Ford administration's perception of danger and hostility towards an electoral alliance that was about to bring the Communists into the government of a NATO country. Comparatively, the Carter administration seemed less worried. Although it had no sympathy for the Communist Party, the Carter team viewed the rise of a French social democracy favourably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French Fourth Republic (1946–1958) has long been caricatured as a weak regime beholden to American influence. Yet, its negative image has been vastly overdrawn, all the more as it now stands in marked contrast to the depiction of a strong and independent Fifth Republic led by General Charles de Gaulle. Indeed, not only did the creation of NATO coincide with the very existence of the Fourth Republic, but France played an original and decisive role during the first years of the alliance, which is important if one wishes to understand its subsequent relations with NATO. This article will focus on the growing frustration of the Fourth Republic's political and military leadership with transatlantic institutions. How this frustration translated into tangible policy will be highlighted in order to illuminate subsequent relations between France and NATO. Indeed, hidden behind the Fourth Republic's apparently unwavering loyalty to the Atlantic alliance were national claims that actually preceded those of the Gaullist regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

What role, in the French view, was the United States to play in the defence of Europe? From the very outset, the feeling was that the NATO allies could not be totally dependent on the United States for their security. Even during the Fourth Republic, the French were interested in building a European counterweight to American power within the Western alliance, and during the Gaullist period the whole idea of an independent Europe seemed to play an even more prominent role in French policy. But an independent Europe would have to include a strong, and therefore nuclearised, West German state, something the French throughout the Cold War era could scarcely bring themselves to accept. That meant that there was no alternative to a continuing American military presence in Europe, and thus to a degree of political dependence upon the United States – a conclusion the French, with great difficulty, came to at the end of the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to traditional historiography, the French were genuinely committed to creating an integrated Europe in the early 1950s, modelled according to the principles proclaimed in the Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950. This article aligns itself instead with the thesis proposed by the British historian Alan Milward, according to which the aim of France's European integration project was, from its very start, to strengthen the nation-state and not to substitute a federal European structure for it.1 Moreover, the article argues that the French government worked hard to convince the United States that it was genuinely committed to a European political and economic reorganisation along federalist lines in order to obtain Washington's support for a project focused on solving the problems of French industry. For the French, federalism was a tool of policy rather than an end in its own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few years, much attention has been accorded to the evident spread of anti-American sentiment throughout large parts of the world. In particular, there has been a focus upon what some have termed 'friendly fire' anti-Americanism, associated with opposition to American policy within the transatlantic community, made up as it is of US allies and friends. Within that community, anti-American orientations have of late appeared especially pronounced in a part of North America once regarded as being decidedly pro-American, namely the Canadian province of Quebec. The apparent emergence of 'lite' anti-Americanism within Quebec society poses some interesting questions, none perhaps of more salience for transatlantic studies than the potential creation of a transnational epistemic community linking France and Quebec. This article seeks to determine whether, and to what extent, the recent change in Quebeckers' attitudes toward the United States might testify to the existence of a 'French connection'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the issue is presented that examines France's relationship with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during the Cold War.