5 - France

Summary

France offers a contrast to the ways in which finance and energy, and by extension economic life, was governed elsewhere in Europe. The French state, as keen as the Soviets to develop material exchanges beyond the hegemony of American stricture, sought to institutionalize these exchanges through a series of committees and working groups that would govern talks and practices. This was successful to a degree. But despite pressure from the Soviets to liberalize French trade and finance, the French state did not consider it urgent to get a hold of Soviet energy. Instituting working groups in the second half of the 1960s that would meet regularly to discuss trade and finance had been fruitful for the Soviets at the height of Bretton Woods and the technologies it purveyed, such as trade lists and long-term trade agreements. They were still, in many ways, the backbone of the economic relations the Soviet Union maintained with its Western neighbors. What they were not, however, was the future the Soviets envisaged. In Franco-Soviet relations, it was the Soviets that insistently pushed the temporal and material limits. And the French, reluctantly, followed.