6 - Expectations of Dominance and Partnership Rhetoric: The Federal Republic of Germany in the Crossfire of American and French Policy, 1945-1990

Summary

Translated by Richard Sharp

Tension between the Federal Republic's transatlantic policy and its relations with its neighbor across the Rhine was a constant during the forty-one years between its founding and German unification. Against the background of the East-West conflict, the Federal Republic's foreign policy had to combine a constructive policy toward the Atlantic alliance centered on German-American relations and a constructive policy on European integration focused on Franco-German relations. Overarching American hegemony did, indeed, guarantee a comparatively stable and predictable framework for the Western alliance and defined the foreign policy options open to its individual members. But there was scarcely a time when that hegemony went unchallenged. Indeed, the dynamic between the American claim to dominance and the efforts of the Western European states to escape from that dominance - or at least to weaken it - resulted in continual conflict among the Western nations after 1945. The Federal Republic and France, like the other Western European states, had no choice but to enter into alliance with the United States and submit to American dominance. This relationship offered the West German state the opportunity to improve its status and reestablish itself internationally. France, a defeated victor, saw the German-American relationship as detrimental to its own political importance, an impression reinforced by the rapid revival of its neighbor to the east.3 French reservations about Germany’s revival and, in particular, German rearmament created problems for the Federal Republic’s U.S.-oriented policy of Western integration as well as for U.S. policy on Europe. Particularly after 1958, France attempted to use West Germany’s importance for its own interests, hoping to create a “Third Force Europe” under French leadership to counter the United States.