France under President Mitterrand and German Unification
France was one of the four occupation powers in Germany after World War II, still one of the four members in the Allied Control Council in Berlin until 1990, and one of the “two plus four” powers which negotiated the international conditions of German re-unification in the same year. Therefore it is of special interest what the positions of the French government were concerning the reunification of Germany at the end of the 1980s. A strategic motive underlying the division of Germany was the desire to weaken it such that it might never again make war against its neighbors. Together France, Britain, and the United States merged the zones they occupied, creating the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in 1949. The remaining territory, falling to Soviet control, became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Until these territories were reunified, the Cold War dominated their international relations, reflected in their ideological and military orientations, embodied in NATO and the Warsaw Treaty respectively. Unlike the other members of the 2+4 process, France and the FRG, represented by President Charles de Gaulle and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, concluded a special Friendship Contract, the Élysée Treaty, in 1963. It was a remarkable caesura in the relationship between these former enemies. Both countries became the “motor” of the European unification process. This contract was remarkable not only because of the history of both countries, but because of the personal attitude of Charles de Gaulle. His foreign policy had the aim of leading France back to the circle of the leading nations in the world – in independency. The most important goal for “Gaullism” was very straightforward; it was to ensure the strength, vitality, permanence, and grandeur of the French nation. Now, after the Élysée Treaty, he thought that this aim could be fulfilled in the framework of Europe together with the FRG. However, the question is how President Mitterrand thought about this relationship between both nations in the process of unifying Europe, when Germany became united and therefore – perhaps – stronger. Another question was in our thoughts: Which experience would be dominant – Mitterrand’s generational experience as a soldier against Nazi-Germany or the experience with post-war
NATO after the Cold War, 1991–1995: Institutional Competition and the Collapse of the French Alternative
With the end of the Cold War, opportunities long foreclosed to Europe came back into view on the horizon. The prospect of Western Europe providing for its own security became a realistic proposition for the first time in fifty years. The French government developed a strategy for replacing US power with a more cohesive European Union security and defence identity which garnered substantial support from other European NATO countries, especially Germany, resulting in an intensive four-year competition over which institution would form the basis of Europe's security and defence capabilities. By the end of 1995, NATO had decisively won this contest, due to rapid reconfiguration of NATO's military structures and the test for both organisations of responding to Yugoslavia's collapse. In the final analysis, it was the military capability of NATO that defeated the French alternative security structure. This article tells the story of that evolution.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.