France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 by William I. Hitchcock

and carefully guiding a limited German economic recovery. Indeed, the Monnet Plan signaled the emergence of a new style of French diplomacy, one that avoided direct confrontation in favor of consensual, technocratic, and apolitical agreements, while pursuing the national interest at the expense of traditional rivals. The Monnet Plan reflected the concern in certain government circles that French interests would be difficult to defend in a new and challenging world environment in which economic power weighed more heavily than traditional great-power status. Economic security had emerged as the top priority, and this would be the nation's leading concern throughout the postwar decade.
In short, the Monnet Plan expressed the arrival in French policy circles of a "planning consensus": a flexible, subtle governing strategy that could skirt political obstacles and advance economic recovery both at home and in Europe as a whole. The general failure of the political settlement of 1946 to provide stable governing institutions for France had not inhibited the development of new ideas about economic organization and national strategy. Because it focused on increasing productivity rather than reforming "structures," the Monnet Plan provided a place on the political spectrum toward which the parties could converge, despite ongoing disagreements in the political arena.
The Monnet Plan had implications beyond the borders of France as well. In the coming years, French policymakers saw the utility of using the cooperative and consensual language of planning to frame France's own national interest in the emerging European settlement. As this study will demonstrate, France's European policy of the late 1940s and 1950s was intimately linked to the administrative style that had been worked out in the course of domestic reconstruction. In the diplomatic confrontation over the future of Germany and Europe, France from early 1948 worked to shift the terms of the debate away from the traditional language of Franco-German conflict and toward more palatable concepts of rational planning and integration of economies. Technocrats at the Quai d'Orsay, the Ministry of Finance, and the Planning

 

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Commissariat hoped this new language of politics that had given an above-party flavor to state-sponsored economic policy within France might have the same persuasive effect on foreign governments. This strategy promised a dramatic departure from de Gaulle's diplomatic style, which prided itself on its single-minded pursuit of French grandeur . Indeed, the transfer of the planning consensus to foreign policy proved a difficult and uneasy affair, accomplished only after years of resistance. Before the utility of such ideas could be demonstrated to foreign policy officials, the same transformation in mental attitudes that we have charted in the economic sphere would have to take hold in the Foreign Ministry as well.

 

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Chapter 2 
The Limits of Independence, 19441947
As the war in Europe drew to a close, French policymakers knew that their country, still economically and politically frail, would be as reliant on its wartime allies in the period of reconstruction as it had been during the war itself. Surprisingly, however, economic weakness in no way diminished the zeal with which French planners promoted their country's political and economic interests, especially with regard to Germany. On the contrary, they viewed domestic recovery as largely dependent upon the achievement of a favorable postwar settlement in Germany, one that allowed France a preponderant role in determining the economic and political future of that defeated nation. Across a broad spectrum, French foreign policy officials and postwar planners believed that France had a unique opportunity to ensure that German resources would be used to initiate French and western European recovery. They also anticipated that France could use its position as a victorious power to compensate for