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H-Diplo Roundtable Review
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Volume XI, No. 23 (2010)
26 April 2010
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Frédéric Bozo. Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War, and German
Unification. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. ISBN 978-1-84545-427-2
($110.00, hardback); 978-1-84545-787-7 ($45.00, paperback).

Fully-formatted PDF version available via:
http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XI-23.pdf

---------------------------------

Contents

Introduction by Marc Trachtenberg, University of California at Los Angeles
Review by Will Gray, Purdue University
Review by Robert Hutchings, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs
Review by Jacques Lévesque, Université du Québec à Montréal 18 Review by
Philip Zelikow, University of Virginia
Author's Response by Frédéric Bozo, Sorbonne (University of Paris III)

---------------------------------

Introduction by Marc Trachtenberg, University of California at Los Angeles

Frédéric Bozo, a professor at the Sorbonne and author of a number of
major works on French foreign policy and U.S.-European relations, is one
of France's leading specialists on the history of international
relations. His book Mitterrand, la fin de la guerre froide et
l'unification allemande: De Yalta à Maastricht, which was based on some
extraordinary source material that he was able to get access to in  Paris,
came out in 2005, and in the years that followed he presented  some of his
key findings to the English-speaking world in a series of  articles.1 A
few months ago an English translation of the whole book was  published,
and that, of course, is the volume we are concerned with here.

What basically was Professor Bozo trying to do in that book? His most
obvious goal was to assess the common argument that the government of
French president François Mitterrand in 1989 "sought to slow down, if  not
altogether block" the reunification of Germany. The conclusion he  reached
is quite clear. To be sure, Mitterrand and his associates would  have
preferred it if the "march toward German unity" had taken "a more
moderate turn and a slower rhythm." The French president's preference  was
"for a process of unification that would be controlled and stretched  over
time." But "at no moment," he writes, "did French diplomacy seek to  slow
down, let alone impede, German unification." That, he says, is the  "key
finding" that emerged from his study of the evidence. (xiii, xxi,  xxii,
xxvi; the sentence is italicized in the original text)

But the book does a good deal more than just develop that basic point.
Bozo's more fundamental goal is to help us understand what the
Mitterrand policy actually was-to help us understand the role that  France
played in that extraordinary period, when the Cold War was  liquidated and
a new international order came into being.

And what, he asks, "was the key objective of Mitterrand's diplomacy in
that period"? His answer is again very direct: "it was about setting the
process of German unification, and more generally the exit from the Cold
War, within a strong European and international framework" (xxii). And
why did the Mitterrand government approach the problem in that way? Bozo
cites three factors. First, there was the desire to avoid a "return to
1913"-that is, the wish to avoid "the danger of fragmentation and of
nationalism" (xxiii). Second, the French government was worried about  the
effect too hard a line-a line based too narrowly on Germany's  national
interests-might have on the political position of Soviet leader  Mikhail
Gorbachev: Mitterrand and his associates were concerned about  the
possibility of a "dangerous backlash" within the USSR (xxiv; also  41).
The third and most important factor had to do with "Mitterrand's  grand
European design" (xxv). Mitterrand's dreams for Europe, especially  for a
stronger European Community in the western part of the continent,  were
the "alpha and omega of French policy," the "central element" of
Mitterrand's vision, the "first objective" of French diplomacy during
this period (xxv, 22, 65). And the German question, from the start, lay
at the heart of that policy: it was important to "contain German power"
(99); it was only by "building Europe" that the German problem could be
managed (65-66) and a reunified Germany could be prevented from
"balancing between East and West" (99; also 22).

The reviewers all think that this book is very impressive. Robert
Hutchings calls it a "magisterial volume." Jacques Lévesque views it as  a
"remarkable piece of scholarly work." Will Gray thinks it's "superb"  and
Philip Zelikow considers it an "excellent, essential, addition to
historical scholarship on the end of the Cold War in Europe and the
construction of a new international system."

But on one key point at least two of the reviewers-Lévesque and
Hutchings-felt that Bozo had gone too far, and that has to do with the
book's core argument that Mitterrand sought neither to prevent nor even
to slow down the unification of Germany. They have no quarrel with the
basic point that the French president did not try to keep the two
Germanies from coming together. Mitterrand, it is quite clear from the
analysis in the book, was no Margaret Thatcher. But in their view he
certainly sought to slow the unification process down, and Zelikow also
thinks this was the case. Indeed, Bozo's own evidence and arguments,
Lévesque and Hutchings suggest, point toward the conclusion that the
Mitterrand government did seek to "slow down" the unification process.
And Hutchings points to some outside evidence-for example, the
transcript of a telephone conversation between Mitterrand and Gorbachev
that took place a few days after the Berlin Wall came down-that tends to
support that conclusion.2

What is to be made of the Mitterrand policy? This is a basic issue here,
both for Bozo and for the reviewers. France, Bozo thinks, played a
significant and fairly positive role in this story. "Would the end of  the
Cold War," he asks, "have constituted such a success for
international diplomacy without the European factor to which France, in
concert with the Federal Republic, contributed more than any other?  Would
the democratic and economic transition of Eastern Europe, the  return of
Germany to unity and full sovereignty, the disintegration of  the USSR,
and the recomposition of the European order all have happened  in an
orderly and stable manner without the major contribution of  European
construction and the Franco-German relationship? Almost twenty  years
after the fact, has not the enlarged European Union effectively  become
the main structuring element of the Old Continent?" (xxvi)

It's not hard to guess how he would answer those questions, and most of
the reviewers also give the Mitterrand government on balance fairly good
grades. By January 1990, Hutchings writes (reiterating a judgment he had
made in 2008), "Mitterrand had come to realize that unification was
coming" and therefore "sought to work with the Germans to gain certain
assurances about the European integration process, in the end securing
French interests rather well." And Zelikow thinks that Bozo's point that
"Mitterrand's pan-European vision may be even more relevant now than it
was twenty years ago" is a "powerful insight." Gray, on the other hand,
wonders whether the Mitterrand policy in the final analysis made much of
a difference. The united Germany, he writes, "was going to accept the
Oder-Neisse border no matter what." And Mitterrand, he says, "did little
to change [German chancellor Helmut] Kohl's thinking about Europe, since
the chancellor was already determined to pair German unification with a
redoubled commitment to European integration." And he thinks Mitterrand
was mistaken-indeed, foolish-to build his policy in large part on the
assumption that the U.S. government was "prepared to disengage from
Europe." How could any observer, he wonders, come to that conclusion,
given how hard the Americans were pressing for the inclusion of the
unified Germany in NATO?

As for Bozo's basic point about Mitterrand not wanting even to slow down
the unification process, at least one of the reviewers, Jacques
Lévesque, seems to feel that that line of argument might perhaps be a
touch too defensive-that in fact (and this too, as he points out, is
quite clear from Bozo's analysis) there were perfectly good reasons "for
Mitterrand to be deeply concerned by the pace of Kohl's rush to German
unification" and for wishing it to proceed at a more deliberate speed.  My
own view, for what it is worth, is that the reunification of Germany
would affect the whole international system and was therefore not just a
matter for the Germans themselves to deal with. It was perfectly
legitimate for other powers to be involved in this process, and their
involvement was in fact sanctioned by one of the core traditions in
international relations thought, the tradition built on the idea of the
balance of power. "Every nation has its rights, but Europe also has her
rights"-that basic principle was proclaimed in the early nineteenth
century, but the major powers in 1989, even Germany, also thought that
the interests of any particular country had to be balanced against
everyone's interest in the stability of the system as a whole, and it's
hard to see why anyone should fault them for approaching the problem in
that way.3

But what are we to make of the particular policy Mitterrand pursued in
1989? The French president thought that by "building Europe" German  power
could be contained, and that the creation of a single European  currency
would be a key means of accomplishing this (99, 120). But how,  one
wonders, was all this supposed to work? How exactly would European
structures, and especially the single currency, contain German power? If
the unified Germany basically accepted the new status quo, that Germany
would have no problem working with her neighbors, no matter what
European structures were in place. But if that Germany wanted to pursue
any sort of revisionist policy, it is hard to see how those European
structures would prevent her from doing so, especially since (as French
officials themselves admitted) Germany was already "predominant" in the
European Community (184). And why in particular was it assumed that a
single currency would play a key role in containing German power?  Europe,
after all, had a single currency in 1914. It was called "gold":  each
major national currency was simply a name for a certain amount of  gold.
But that did little to prevent the First World War from breaking out.

Mitterrand believed that "building Europe" was of fundamental importance
and that the German question could only be managed in that context. But
was that belief simply an article of faith, or did it rest on hard
analysis? In other words, was there a well thought out strategy at work
here, or was Mitterrand simply buying into the European mystique? I
wonder.

And there's one point in particular that makes me wonder about how
carefully this issue was thought through by Mitterrand and his
associates. The French president was thinking in terms of a European
Community that "would gradually assert itself as an international power"
(66); the goal was a more independent Europe, a Europe with a distinct
political personality of its own (14). As key French officials
understood, this meant a Europe that was capable of defending itself
(245). But in the nuclear age, wouldn't a common defense have to have a
nuclear component? And wouldn't Germany, already seen as the
"predominant" power in the European Community, have to share in the
control of that nuclear force? And yet, as Bozo shows, for Mitterrand  any
nuclear sharing with Germany was out of the question (13, 59, 245).  Were
the French therefore marching along a road whose endpoint-full  German
participation in the defense of Europe, even on the nuclear  level-they
could scarcely bring themselves to accept?

If a truly independent Europe could hardly be brought into being if its
most important member state was to be treated permanently as a
second-class citizen, then there was no real alternative to the NATO
system. A non-nuclear Germany went hand-in-hand with a continuing
American presence in Europe. But Mitterrand's dream was to see the  United
States move to the margins of the system: the strategy based on  "building
Europe" was seen as the alternative to a strategy based on  America
continuing to remain a major European power. And that dream was  linked to
the assumption that the end of the Cold War and the
unification of Germany would lead to the collapse of the NATO system.  The
French were convinced that a "unified and sovereign Germany would  not
accept for long the political and military constraints currently  weighing
on the FRG, whether integration in NATO or the foreign military  presence
on its soil" (193-194; also 129, 245). They were convinced of  this, even
though (as Zelikow points out and as Bozo notes on 206 n.  112) the
Germans were telling them that this was simply not so.

And this was not just abstract theorizing. Those beliefs led Mitterrand
to announce that France would be withdrawing her troops from Germany
(245, 281). The Americans, as Zelikow points out, "were startled. This
French move to quit Germany would undermine the case for US troops
staying." One has the impression that French thinking was a bit muddled,
but in the final analysis a more sober calculation prevailed. The
Mitterrand government, Bozo writes, "did not want to take the risk of
precipitating the evolution of a more autonomous Germany" (195) and in
the final analysis played a key role in making sure the NATO system
survived. On the question of whether the united Germany would remain in
NATO, Bozo says, "Mitterrand's diplomacy proved wholly in solidarity  with
his allies" and "paradoxically played an important role in
convincing Gorbachev not to oppose it" (209) The French president, in
fact, "seems to have been the first to convince Gorbachev of the
unavoidable character of a unified Germany in NATO" (275 n. 207).
Mitterrand, Bozo argues, in a meeting with the Soviet leader in May  1990,
had "well and truly convinced Gorbachev" of the futility of trying  to
prevent the new Germany from remaining in NATO. And the French  president
was able to have that effect on Gorbachev, Bozo suggests,  precisely
because France was the least NATO-minded of the western powers  (253-254).

So the important thing here was not Mitterrand's "vision" of a unifying
Europe and a diminishing American presence, but his support in practice
for the continuation of the NATO system. And it was in that latter area,
ironically, that he made what was perhaps his most important contribution.

Participants:

Frédéric Bozo is currently professor at the Sorbonne (University of  Paris
III, Department of European Studies). Bozo was educated at the  Ecole
normale supérieure, at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris  and at
Harvard University. He received his doctorate from the University  of
Paris X - Nanterre (1993) and his Habilitation from the Sorbonne -  Paris
III (1997). His focus is on French foreign and security policy,
transatlantic relations and Cold War history. His book publications
include: Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War, and German Unification
(Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009, first published in French by Odile Jacob,
2005); Two Strategies for Europe: De Gaulle, the United States and the
Atlantic Alliance (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, first published  in
French by Plon, 1996). He also co-edited Europe and the End of the  Cold
War: A Reappraisal (London: Routledge, 2008, with M.-P. Rey, N.  Piers
Ludlow & L. Nuti) and he published a book of interviews with  Stanley
Hoffmann, Gulliver Unbound: America's Imperial Temptation and  the War in
Iraq (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). Other books  published in
French include: La Politique étrangère de la France depuis  1945 (Paris :
La Découverte, 1997); and La France et l'OTAN. De la  guerre froide au
nouvel ordre européen (Paris : Masson, 1991). He has  published articles
in Cold War History, Contemporary European History,  Diplomatic History,
Politique étrangère, and Survival. He is currently  working on a book on
the 2002-3 transatlantic crisis over Iraq.

Will Gray is an associate professor of history at Purdue University in
West Lafayette, Indiana. His first book, Germany's Cold War, appeared
with UNC Press in 2003. Following that he served as one of five editors
of the Encyclopedia of the Cold War (London and New York: Routledge,
2008). Gray's current project, "Trading Power", concerns the
transformation of West German ambitions from military affairs to
economic leverage during the 1960s and 1970s. Gray studied at Princeton
and the Free University of Berlin and holds his doctorate from Yale
University.

Currently Diplomat in Residence at the Woodrow Wilson School at
Princeton University,

Robert Hutchings has been appointed Dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School
of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, effective March 2010.
During a public service leave from Princeton in 2003-05, Hutchings was
Chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council in Washington, D.C.
His combined academic and diplomatic career has included service as
Fellow and Director of International Studies at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, Director for European Affairs with  the
National Security Council, and Special Adviser to the Secretary of  State,
with the rank of ambassador. He has also served as deputy
director of Radio Free Europe and on the faculty of the University of
Virginia, and has written widely about U.S. foreign policy and European
politics. He is author of American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold  War,
among other books and articles on U.S. foreign policy and European
affairs. His current research on global strategy springs from a series  of
structured strategic dialogues with key leaders and scholars in  China,
Russia, India, Brazil, South Africa, and a dozen other countries  around
the world. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, he  received his
Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.

Jacques Lévesque is Professor of Political Science at the Université du
Québec à Montréal. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada. He
holds a Doctorat d'Études Politiques of the Fondation Nationale des
Sciences Politiques, Paris. His books include The USSR and the Cuban
Revolution (New York, Praeger/Holt Rinehart and Winston 1978); Italian
Communists versus the Soviet Union (Berkeley, IIS 1987); L'URSS et sa
politique internationale, de Lénine à Gorbatchev (Paris, Armand Colin
1988); L'URSS en Afghanistan 1979-1989 (Bruxelles, Complexe, 1990); and
The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe
(Berkeley, University of California Press 1997). He is currently working
on Russia's relations with the Muslim world.

Marc Trachtenberg got his Ph.D. in history from Berkeley in 1974, taught
history at the University of Pennsylvania for the next twenty-six years,
and has been a professor of political science at UCLA since 2000. He is
the author of a number of books and articles on twentieth century
international politics, most notably A Constructed Peace: The Making of
the European Settlement, 1945-1963, which came out in 1999. His book The
Craft of International History, a guide to historical method for both
historians and political scientists, was published in 2006.

Philip Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the
University of Virginia. Zelikow began his professional career as a trial
and appellate lawyer in Texas. After further graduate study he joined  the
Foreign Service of the United States and was posted overseas and in
Washington, including service on the NSC staff for President George H.W.
Bush. His Ph.D. is from Tufts University's Fletcher School. Since 1991  he
has taught and directed research programs at Harvard University and  at
the University of Virginia. In addition to his academic work he has
assisted various parts of the US government and has taken two public
service leaves for returns to full-time government service. He also
advises the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's program in global
development. In Fall 2009 he was a Fellow at the American Academy in
Berlin. Back now at Virginia, he is working on a history of U.S. foreign
policy begun by his late friend and collaborator, Ernest May.

Notes

1 Frédéric Bozo, "Mitterrand's France, the End of the Cold War, and
German Unification: A Reappraisal," Cold War History 7, no. 4 (2007);
Frédéric Bozo, "The Failure of a Grand Design: Mitterrand's European
Confederation, 1989-1991," Contemporary European History 17, no. 3
(2008); Fre´de´ric Bozo, "France, German Unification and European
Integration," in Fre´de´ric Bozo et al., eds., Europe and the End of the
Cold War: A Reappraisal (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Frédéric Bozo,
"'Winners' and 'Losers': France, the United States, and the End of the
Cold War," Diplomatic History 33, no. 5 (November 2009).

2 The record of the Mitterrand-Gorbachev telephone conversation of 14
November 1989 is available online in the National Security Archive's
Electronic Briefing Book 293, doc. 18
(http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB293/doc18.pdf). In that
conversation, Mitterrand laid out the French position: the "real
feelings" of the German people had to be taken into account, but the
issue of "changing borders" would have to wait for a while. It was
important, he said, not to take "any hasty actions" which could
destabilize the situation. "There is a certain equilibrium that exists  in
Europe," he said, "and we should not disturb it."

3 The quotation is from the London Protocol of February 1831 relating to
Belgian independence, and is cited in William Lingelbach, "The Doctrine
and Practice of Intervention in Europe," Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science 16 (July 1900), 7.

---------------------------------
Review by Will Gray, Purdue University

Anyone who lived through the final denouement of the Cold War, from 1989
to 1991, recognized that this was a unique historical moment. Crowds  took
to the streets in capitals across the communist world; regimes fell  on
what seemed like a monthly basis; and then there was the constant  parade
of summit meetings. In a more subtle way, perhaps, scholars of  the "long"
Cold War from 1945-1989 can still be dazzled by the sudden  acceleration
of events from 1989-91. For decades, Europe's foreign  ministries churned
out obscure and ultimately fruitless proposals on  arms control or German
unity or European monetary union. Then, in a  remarkable burst of
activity, breakthroughs came on multiple fronts: the  crumbling of the
Warsaw Pact, the unification of Germany, the collapse  of the Soviet
Union, the Maastricht Treaty.

Frédéric Bozo has chronicled this period in exhaustive detail with one
goal in mind: to assess the role of French diplomacy - and specifically
President François Mitterrand - in the shaping of events. As an
established figure in French Cold War history, Bozo enjoyed marvelous
access to Mitterrand's papers and to the files of the French foreign
ministry. Considering that the official publication of French diplomatic
papers has only just reached the first half of 1968, Bozo's unique  access
to the files from 1988-1991 provides a tremendous leap forward in  our
understanding of official French thinking.

The results are superb, precisely because Bozo does not overplay his
hand. At most, the volume comes across as mildly revisionist: whereas
earlier authors (and the German media) tended to portray Mitterrand as  an
obstacle to German unity, Bozo is able to show beyond a doubt that  the
French president deliberately eschewed a blocking role. Instead he  sought
to deflect German policy, ensuring that the course of unification  would
not have destabilizing consequences for Europe as a whole.
Mitterrand would have preferred a more gradual process but gave way to
the logic of events (specifically, the breakdown of state authority in
East Germany in early 1990). Compared with the openly Germanophobic
Margaret Thatcher, and even the nervous bureaucrats at the Quai d'Orsay,
Mitterrand comes across here as a loyal and constructive partner to
Helmut Kohl.

But in the end, did Mitterrand make a difference? Did the "settlement"  of
1989-91 bear his handwriting? Aside from an act of abstention - that  is,
declining to play the spoiler - what affirmative results can be seen  in
French diplomatic endeavors? Bozo devotes long passages to
arm-twisting over the Polish border: Kohl did not want to offer final
recognition of the Oder-Neisse border until after German unity had been
achieved. Not surprisingly, the transitional government in Warsaw found
this alarming; so too did French and British diplomats. Yet German
officials repeated time and time again that the hold-up was technical,
having to do with the legal status of the West German government
vis-à-vis the future unified Germany. Kohl acknowledged his short-term
political interest in avoiding a final settlement until after elections
could be held; but he also stressed in plain language that there was not
even a remote possibility of a shift in borders. Despite these
assurances, Mitterrand acted to draw Poland as a guest into the "2 + 4"
process, the formal negotiations between the two German states and the
four World War II victors that represented the official forum for  closing
out the German Question. Thus pressured, the East and West  German
parliaments passed statements affirming their intention to  conclude a
final border settlement with Poland. At best, this was a  pyrrhic victory
for Paris: it may have reassured Warsaw, but the display  of French
mistrust antagonized Bonn unnecessarily (though the damage was
temporary). United Germany was going to accept the Oder-Neisse border no
matter what. In this case, French diplomacy might be seen as
complicating the flow of events without fundamentally changing the outcome.

Similarly, Mitterrand did little to change Kohl's thinking about Europe,
since the chancellor was already determined to pair German unification
with a redoubled commitment to European integration. In many respects it
was France that gave way, accepting European monetary union on German
terms. Likewise, Paris now acknowledged the need to strengthen
"political" Europe through the creation of a European Union - another
longstanding German ambition. To be sure, Bozo persuasively highlights
Mitterrand's success in dictating the form of the European Union:
supranational elements such as the parliament and the European
Commission would take a back seat to inter-governmental agency. The
European Council, the circle of elected European leaders, would emerge  as
the biggest winner of the Maastricht Treaty of December 1991. Even  here,
though, it would seem less the content of Mitterrand's initiatives  than
his very person that proved decisive. Kohl perceived his warm  friendship
with Mitterrand as a distinctive and possibly unique
foundation for the future of Europe, and this too spoke for the
centrality of personal (inter-governmental) relationships over and above
Brussels-based institutions.

Overall, Bozo's book is the kind of focused monograph that emphasizes  how
events played out rather than pondering might-have-beens. This is  not a
criticism: it is extremely useful to see how Mitterrand, his  staff, and
the Quai d'Orsay responded to developments on a week-to-week  basis.
Consider, for example, Bozo's explication of French thinking  about the
place of united Germany within European institutions.
Conventional realpolitik suggested that adding 17 million East Germans  to
West Germany's population would transform the Federal Republic into a
European juggernaut. Scholars love to cite the bon mot about French
observers "loving" Germany so much that they "preferred two of them."  But
in January 1990, officials at the Elysée Palace reached the opposite
conclusion (pp. 184-85). If a reformed, post-communist GDR were to join
the European Community as an independent state, they realized, there
would henceforth be two sets of German commissioners in Brussels and two
German leaders on the European Council. What, then, if Austria also
proceeded to join? French diplomats began to focus, pragmatically, on
accommodating a single enlarged Germany within existing European
structures; they even extracted a promise from Foreign Minister
Hans-Dietrich Genscher that a united Germany would not seek more
commissioners or greater parliamentary representation than France
enjoyed. Episodes such as this provide insights into the nature of
political power within the EU, where sovereign government voices within
European councils count more heavily than traditional measures of
strength.

While insisting (plausibly enough) on the centrality of Mitterrand to  the
diplomacy of 1989-91, Bozo is careful to acknowledge that the French
president did not get everything he wanted. The United States did not
melt away from engagement in Europe, as virtually every French planner
anticipated; the CSCE did not emerge as the dominant forum for
addressing pan-European security needs; and the European Union failed to
develop a robust common foreign policy, as seen in the ineffective
European response to the butchery in Yugoslavia. As I read Bozo's
evidence, "Gaullist" assumptions predisposed French diplomacy to a high
degree of wishful thinking. How or why would any observer of the George
H. W. Bush administration conclude that the United States was prepared  to
disengage from Europe, in light of its promotion of "new tasks" for  NATO
and its firm insistence that united Germany remain within the  Atlantic
alliance? In facilitating such an outcome, Mitterrand would  appear to
have undermined his own priorities for European independence.

Bozo's answer is to appeal to the long run: in the past decade, he
insists, the EU has begun to develop more of an independent security
identity. But one is still left to ponder why Mitterrand did not press
alternatives to NATO more forcefully during the fluid opportunities
afforded by the waning of the Cold War. Bozo insists that France was not
"marginalized," and that an exclusive focus on German and American
leadership in 1989-90 is misplaced. Who could disagree that European
voices need to be taken into account? In the final analysis, though,
Bozo's book corrects the standard narrative mainly by taking note of
Mitterrand's surprisingly agreeable cooperation with goals articulated  by
Helmut Kohl and George H. W. Bush.

Practical-minded readers of this forum will have noticed that a
distillation of Bozo's central arguments is now available in the
November 2009 issue of Diplomatic History. Even so, scholars of the
period will find it worth their while to consume this book in its
entirety. Each chapter is well-conceived and compelling, and Susan
Emanuel's translation is smooth and highly readable. Berghahn Books is  to
be commended for making this work, first published in France in 2005,
available to the Anglophone scholarly community.

---------------------------------
Review by Robert Hutchings, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs

This magisterial volume is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on
German unification and takes its place among the essential studies of
this dramatic period. The author was afforded unique access to French
archives, both public and private, supplemented this documentary record
with several dozen interviews with key participants, and embedded this
diplomatic history within the broader sweep of French foreign policy at
the end of the Cold War. It is the first and so far the only
comprehensive account of French diplomacy during the period and is among
the very few studies that offers parallel assessments of German, Soviet,
American, and British diplomacy.

If the "first draft" of the history of this period was told chiefly from
the German and American perspectives, with only limited access to the
internal deliberations of other protagonists, Frédéric Bozo's account
belongs to the "second draft" that incorporates the new archival
material from German, Soviet, U.S., British, and French sources. It is
also explicitly revisionist, seeking to counter what the author
considers the German-American triumphalism of the earlier accounts.1
Therein lies its chief weakness.

Professor Bozo has chosen - needlessly and unwisely, in my view - to
burden this otherwise superb study with a central thesis that simply  does
not stand up. His central revisionist argument, rendered in
italics, is this: "At no moment did French diplomacy seek to slow down,
let alone impede, German unification." (xxii) Had the author been
satisfied with the claim that French diplomacy never sought to prevent
unification but only to manage the process in a way consistent with
French interests, he would have no argument from me. But the extravagant
claim he makes - that France never sought even to slow down the process  -
is untenable, as Bozo himself amply (if inadvertently) demonstrates  later
in his book.

Let me first underscore the many points on which we agree. First, all  the
main actors, not least the Germans themselves, were caught
unprepared by the speed of the process beginning in late summer 1989. I
have argued that American statesmen were better prepared than others,  but
we, too, scrambled, not always successfully, to keep up with the
ever-accelerating pace of events. German, French, and American leaders
all changed course in late December and early January - from favoring a
"gradual, step-by-step" approach to accepting that unification was  coming
very fast and adjusting accordingly. Second, none of Germany's  allies
embraced unification unconditionally. The day after Chancellor  Kohl's
dramatic "ten point" speech in late November 1989, Secretary of  State
James Baker laid out "four principles" that should guide the  process of
inter-German rapprochement, two of which contradicted Kohl  (NATO
membership and the inviolability of existing borders).2 Professor  Bozo is
thus correct in saying that Washington, like Paris, sought to  "manage"
the process. Third, both French and American diplomatic
approaches were guided by overarching (and often conflicting)
conceptions of the broader future of Europe - a "French path," as Bozo
puts it, versus an American conception of a "new Atlanticism." In this
respect Bozo demonstrates a clear parallelism between French and
American approaches: France insisted that unification take place within
the context of a more united Europe, while the United States wanted a
united Germany embedded within NATO. It is an important insight, which
frames U.S.-French rivalry before, during, and after this period.

My overall judgment about French diplomacy during the period of German
unification, which I continue to hold after reviewing an enormous volume
of formerly classified documents from the U.S., German, Soviet, and now
(thanks to this book) French archives, is this:

The totality of the evidence suggests that Mitterrand and especially
foreign ministry officials at the Quai d'Orsay were caught unprepared  and
reacted instinctively and clumsily to the prospect of German
unification, but that by January of 1990 Mitterrand had come to realize
that unification was coming and so would not jeopardize French-German
relations in a vain effort to stop it. He therefore sought to work with
the Germans to gain certain assurances about the European integration
process, in the end securing French interests rather well.3

Bozo goes farther, insisting that France did not mean to impede or even
slow down German unification. Yet American diplomats at the time,
including this reviewer, certainly believed that to have been the case.
So did all the other main protagonists. British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher reported that President Mitterrand was "even more concerned"
than she was and that the two of them had agreed to work together to
"check the German juggernaut" (as she indelicately put it).4 New
archival evidence from Moscow makes it clear that whatever French
intentions may have been, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev believed that
France and Britain were with him and acted, in the critical period
immediately following the fall of the Wall, on the basis of a perceived
anti-unification coalition.5 Chancellor Helmut Kohl feared such a
coalition and believed that France was trying to "play the Russian
card."6 According to Bozo's own account of Mitterrand's controversial
trip to the GDR in December 1989, "East German leaders would choose to
see [in Mitterrand's public statements and in the economic and cultural
agreements signed] a confirmation of France's support for GDR
sovereignty and of its confidence in the regime's durability." (p. 143;
emphasis added) Would Professor Bozo really have us believe that East
German, West German, Soviet, British, and American leaders all misread
French intentions, or that they willfully "chose" to misinterpret them?

Bozo's central thesis undergoes a transformation as it becomes
increasingly indefensible. The initial claim that "at no time" did  French
diplomacy seek to "slow down, much less impede" unification  mutates into
the less controversial one that France did not try to  "block" or "oppose"
it. For example, Bozo asks, "Did France during this  same period [i.e.
November-December 1989], as has been much alleged, try  to oppose German
unification?" (p. 134) But the allegation was that  France sought to slow
down and exercise control over the process via the  Four Power mechanism
and its hyperactive bilateral diplomacy with the  Soviet and British
leaders, who were, in Bozo's words, "equally
concerned... to moderate German evolution" (p. 136). Thus Bozo's answer
is that "French diplomacy was prone to use it [i.e. the Four Power
process] - not (as has been asserted) to block the process, but to  manage
it." (p. 138) Toward what end? Here is Bozo's summation of  Mitterrand's
position on German unification:

The process should unfold peacefully and democratically; it should
neither challenge guaranteed borders... nor upset European equilibriums;
and it should not overtake the evolution in the East, the Community
strengthening in the West, or the emergence of pan-European structures  at
the East-West level. German unity, in other words, could not occur
without the completion of necessary European transformations. (p. 136)

The French position, then, according to Bozo, was that unification  "could
not occur" without "necessary European transformations" that  would, even
in a conservative estimation, take many years if not decades  to complete.
This was exactly what we American diplomats feared at the  time - that
France would use the Four Power mechanism and its bilateral  diplomacy to
slow down and otherwise impede German unification in order  to control the
process according to France's preferred timetable. Bozo  has debunked his
own thesis - that "at no moment did French diplomacy  seek to slow down,
let alone impede, German unification." Clearly, in  this early period
immediately following the fall of the Wall, French  diplomacy did seek to
slow down and impede unification, and Bozo's own  account confirms this.
(Later on, as I have noted, French diplomacy  recovered and in the end
acquitted itself well.)

What accounts for French behavior in this early period? Bozo is right to
object to the characterization of French policy as opposed to German
unification per se. The explanation for French actions lies elsewhere.
Certainly the French were caught unprepared and instinctively sought to
gain some degree of control over what seemed to be a runaway unification
train. As Bozo shows persuasively, there was also a strategic calculus
that demanded fitting a soon-to-be-unified Germany into a "Mitterrandian
vision" of Europe's future.

There is another, so far unexplored, explanation - namely, that flawed
French analysis of the dynamic of change in Europe led to flawed French
policy. Whereas we in Washington saw in the Polish elections of June  1989
the beginning of the end of communist regimes everywhere in eastern
Europe, including the GDR,7 the "Mitterrandian vision" at this time was
of a set of "de-Sovietized" but still socialist regimes that could  endure
for many years to come. (p. 63) Whereas I in particular, as the  principal
East Europeanist on the National Security Council staff, saw  the election
of Tadeusz Mazowiecki as the breakthrough event,8 Bozo  attaches no such
significance to it. (pp. 84-5) As to the new GDR  leadership that replaced
Erich Honecker, whereas we at the NSC staff in  Washington saw Egon Krenz
and then Hans Modrow as transitional figures  with no chance of producing
a stable government, the French continued to  believe in the reformability
and viability of the GDR regime. (pp. 91-3,  115-16, 123, 142) "Modrow's
reform program... seemed to offer the regime  a real chance to maintain
itself, by the same token delaying the
prospect for unification," Bozo concludes, in what seems to have been
either wishful French thinking or the conscious goal of French policy.
(p. 123)

In sum, the "Mitterrandian vision" of Europe's future was flawed from  the
very beginning. It foresaw a prolonged period of rapprochement  between
the West and a reformed but still socialist east. This is why  Mitterrand
told Gorbachev in their Kiev meeting in December 1989, "We  should not
change the order of the processes.... Kohl's... ten points  have turned
everything around. He mixed all the factors together, he is  rushing."9
This perspective may have been consistent with the Cartesian  logic and
extreme Realism that are characteristic of French diplomacy,  but it was
essentially unrealistic, as events amply proved. By contrast,  we on the
American side embraced a rapid pace of German unification not  as a matter
of policy preference but as a product of our analysis of the  dynamic
unfolding before us.

Bozo tries to make the case that U.S. diplomats also believed in the
potential viability of the GDR regime in the period immediately
following the fall of the Wall. Citing Zelikow and Rice, he writes that
the "American ambassador in the GDR" also believed (along with the
French) that a reformed GDR could survive as a separate state. (p. 115)
But as Zelikow and Rice make clear on the page Bozo references, the
citation came from the political counselor, Jonathan Greenwald, who was
the number three in the U.S. embassy. Moreover, Bozo conveniently  chooses
to omit their key qualification: "Greenwald's views did not  reflect U.S.
government policy."10 We did not believe in the
sustainability of the GDR regime after that fall of the Wall for
anything more than a brief transition period.

There are other examples of the author's highly selective use of sources
in characterizing American policy. Early on, he cites Henry Kissinger's
suggestion that the United States and the Soviet Union reach an
agreement on the future of Eastern Europe as if it were "Washington's
thinking." (p. 40) But Kissinger's idea was thoroughly repudiated by the
U.S. administration, as I and many other American officials, including
Secretary of State James Baker, made clear.11 Bozo surely knows this,  but
he chose to omit the part of the record that did not suit his  argument.
Later, Bozo cites a Quai d'Orsay document as viewing the Malta  Summit as
a Soviet-American attempt to impose a superpower
"condominium." Someone in the Quai may well have reached such a
conclusion at the time, but, as Bozo knows very well, the entire
memorandum of conversation of that summit meeting has been published and
translated, thanks to the Gorbachev Foundation and National Security
Archive.12 Yet Bozo chooses not to cite the verbatim record of the Malta
summit. Was this because nothing that was actually said between the two
leaders could possibly be construed as supporting the connotation he
prefers to leave with the reader?

This questionable use of source material acquires particular importance
in that the book relies so heavily on interpretations of French sources
made available only to Bozo. It undermines the reader's confidence that
the French documentary record has been faithfully rendered.

Once Professor Bozo gets beyond this early period and his determination
to rehabilitate the image of French diplomacy, his scholarship becomes
more evenhanded. His analyses of the "European relaunch" and of the "new
European architecture" are important additions to the existing
literature, and his treatment of U.S.-French discussions about the
possibility of France's rejoining NATO's integrated command is by far  the
best and most detailed account of this "missed rendezvous." (pp.  331-43)
They contribute not only to our understanding of the period of  German
unification but also to the ongoing transformation of European  and
transatlantic security.

Notes

1 My own memoir is among those in the first wave of scholarship: Robert
L. Hutchings, American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War: An
Insider's Account of U.S. Policy in Europe, 1989-92 (Washington and
Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1997).
2 Hutchings, American Diplomacy, 100.

3 Robert Hutchings, "The United States, German unification and European
integration," in Europe and the End of the Cold War: A Reappraisal, ed.
Frédéric Bozo et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 125.

4 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (New York: Harper-Collins,
1993), pp. 796-7.
5 See, e.g., the transcript of the Mitterrand-Gorbachev telephone
conversation on November 14, 1989 (Gorbachev Foundation Archive, Notes  of
A.S. Chernyaev, trans. Svetlana Savranskaya for the National Security
Archive), as well as the transcript of the Mitterrand-Gorbachev meeting
in Kiev, December 6, 1989, cited below.

6 Werner Weidenfeld, Aussenpolitik für die deutsche Einheit (Stuttgart:
DVA, 1998), p. 158, as well as pp. 94-5 and 109-110; Horst Teltschik,  328
Tage (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1991), p. 47.
7 Hutchings, American Diplomacy, 9-10

8 Hutchings, American Diplomacy, 72-4.

9 Gorbachev Foundation Archive, Notes of A.S. Chernyaev, trans. Svetlana
Savranskaya for the National Security Archive.

10 Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe
Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1995), pp. 104 and 402 n8.

11 See, e.g., Hutchings, American Diplomacy, p. 37; James Baker, The
Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989-92 (New York:  G.P.
Putnam's Sons, 1995), p. 40; Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an  Empire:
The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet  Union
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 190-2.

12 Gorbachev Foundation, Fond 1, Opis 1, trans. Svetlana Savranskaya for
the National Security Archive:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB298/Document%2010.pdf.


---------------------------------
Review by Jacques Lévesque, Université du Québec à Montréal

Frédéric Bozo's book is a remarkable piece of scholarly work. It gives
much more than its title might suggest. Even though the French approach
and policies are its main topic, the book is also a multidimensional
study of the end of the Cold War. Besides the French, the American,
Soviet, German and European perspectives and goals are carefully kept
present all along the book and related to each other in a very
sophisticated and inter-informative manner. The book is therefore a
significant contribution to the abundant literature on German
unification and the end of the Cold War and its welcome translation to
English will certainly contribute to keep debates going on.

Bozo's study is the first widely and fully researched publication on
French policies during this fascinating historical period of time. In
this respect it fills a major gap and will remain the reference book for
many years to come. Bozo had access to an immense variety of unexploited
public and private archives. His analysis then goes well beyond
Mitterrand's inner circle. It presents the perceptions and prescriptions
of different state bureaucracies and other significant players. In spite
of the amount of work needed for that purpose, the author took the time
needed to investigate the behavior of other international actors,
sometimes even reaching out to their archival materials.

The central argument of the book is a frontal attack on the conventional
wisdom about France's policies on German unification, according to which
Mitterrand did all he could to slow down and obstruct German
unification. This is certainly an oversimplification that needed to be
questioned and even challenged. In doing so, however, Bozo overstates  his
case. He asks as "indeed a central question : did French diplomacy  then
try to slow if not halt these events...?" His immediate and
clear-cut answer is "By no means". (p. xxi) To halt or block German
unification is one thing. To try to slow it down is however something
else. There is no doubt that Mitterrand did very much of that, and for
good reasons. There is no need to rely extensively on Jacques Attali's
Verbatim to find this out. Though he maintains his all-encompassing
claim, Bozo sometimes seems to implicitly contradict it. He writes that
Mitterrand wanted to impose a European framework to the process of
unification. Mitterrand wanted this "à tout prix" (which literally means
at any price) which we find in the original French book. No translation
of "à tout prix" or any equivalent words appear in the English version.
(p. xxxviii) Bozo who fully masters the English language and probably
closely supervised his translator may have decided not to appear
conceding any inch of ground to the conventional wisdom... But willingly
or not, he actually does.

Indeed, and most fortunately, Bozo does not distort facts or evidence in
order to make his case. All the evidence (and even the demonstration) is
in the book to fully understand why Mitterrand would have preferred a
much slower process of German unification and did much to have it, but
never at the cost of jeopardizing the key special relationship between
France and Germany. Some "End of the Cold War" historians will probably
be irritated by Bozo's insistence on his "central" claim but will
definitely acknowledge the major contribution he made to their field of
on-going work. His "central" argument is not so central after all.

The main reason why Bozo keeps opposing the idea that Mitterrand wanted
to slow down the process of unification, is because conventional wisdom
has often characterized it as being out of touch with an unavoidable
historical trend, and as showing a preference for the international
status quo, supposedly deriving from the "free ride" that France was
taking during the Cold War. But there were many other and much sounder
reasons for Mitterrand to be deeply concerned by the pace of Kohl's rush
to German unification and for wishing to have it slowed down. They are
very well documented in Bozo's book. Let us consider a few of them in
order of increasing importance.

In the weeks that followed Kohl's November 28 speech to the Bundestag
that took the whole world by surprise by proposing an agenda for German
unification, a few days only after the sensational and entirely
unexpected opening of the Berlin Wall, Mitterrand was genuinely
concerned by a possible backlash in the USSR against Gorbachev and his
policies. This had nothing to do with keeping the status quo. One can  say
the exact contrary. Having accepted (or tolerated if one prefers) a
non-communist government in Poland in September and a decision in favor
of entirely free elections in Hungary, Gorbachev had gone a long way in
overcoming the status quo and the division of Europe. The continuation  of
such a process that was already going beyond all the best
expectations a year before, indeed needed to be preserved by a careful
handling of the German situation. In the summer of 1989 George Bush
senior had made an official visit to Poland and Hungary. With Lech  Walesa
he advocated restraint. In a private conversation with his  advisers, he
worried about a rapid change of regime (that actually took  place a few
weeks later) saying that "it would be more than the market  can bear"1 No
one has blamed Bush for going against the course of History.

Thatcher objected to Kohl's rush to unification for reasons
substantially different from Mitterrand's. Her objections were much
stronger and were basically of a geopolitical nature. She feared a
resurgence of Germany's power and its hegemony in Europe. For Thatcher,  a
united Germany was "historically a dangerous power."2 Mitterrand's  chief
concern was not about traditional balance of power considerations.  It had
to do with the shape of the European order to come. The
preservation of NATO was definitely not one of his preoccupations. It  was
the opposite for Bush who decisively supported Kohl's course of  action
after the latter gave him the strongest assurances that a united  Germany
would fully belong to NATO. For the future of the European order  as Bozo
demonstrates it, Mitterrand's main task by the end of 1989, was  to make
sure that the process of European integration would continue to  go on.
The postwar reconciliation between France and West Germany had  been built
and consolidated on the basis of the gradual European
economic integration, led by their partnership. This process of
integration was seen as the main ingredient of peace, not only between
France and West Germany but also among the countries of Western Europe  as
a whole. Therefore Mitterrand saw a decisive reinforcement of the
European Community as a most urgent task that should match if not  precede
the pace of German unification. He saw it as a guarantee that  the
European Community would be a main pillar and the driving force of a  new
European order to come. In this crucial respect his views and
apprehensions were again fundamentally different from Thatcher's. She  was
convinced that a reinforcement of the Community could only result in  a
stronger hegemony of a united Germany in Europe.

As Bozo convincingly demonstrates, Mitterrand successfully used all the
weight of French influence in West Germany, built on their long-standing
partnership, to convince a wavering Kohl to make the decisive steps for
the creation of the economic and monetary union, which together with an
agreement on an institutional transformation of a federative
orientation, paved the way to the Maastricht Treaty and the creation of
the European Union.

As it plainly comes out of the book, Mitterrand's vision of the future  of
Europe was not limited to that of the European Community and Western
Europe. Contrary to Bush whose chief concern for the future of Europe  was
nearly limited to NATO, Mitterrand advocated a pan-European
architecture meant to include Eastern Europe and the USSR. In this
respect, his perspective had much in common with Gorbachev's. It is
important to understand in what sense.

As we know, it is the inclusion of the united Germany in NATO that met
the staunchest and longest resistance of Gorbachev in the whole process
of German unification. His opposition was not primarily based on
military and geopolitical considerations. These of course were the main
concerns of the Soviet military and of conservative communist cadres.  But
it was different for Gorbachev and his "europhile" reformist
entourage3. They knew that the inclusion of East and West Germany in  NATO
would deprive the Warsaw Pact of its "raison d'être" and spell its  rapid
disintegration. The Warsaw Pact had been the USSR's anchor in  European
affairs. That is why Gorbachev and Shevardnadze kept insisting  that
"German unification had "to be organically linked and synchronized  with
the European process and the creation of an essentially new
security structure in Europe"4 where the USSR would have found its  place.
Reaching to Europe had been a chief if not a main goal of
Gorbachev's foreign policy. He demanded the institutionalization and the
transformation of the CSCE into a new international organization and
authority in matters of European security, economic and political
cooperation. With the accelerating pace of events, in order to buy time
for achieving such an ambitious and complex goal, Gorbachev proposed to
let Germany go unified while postponing a definitive settlement of its
international status. But he finally gave up to Kohl's opposition to  such
an approach.

As Bozo indicates, Mitterrand's outline for a post Cold War pan-European
confederative order had much to do with Willy Brandt's long term view of
his "Ostpolitik" and the positions of the German SPD, in 1989 and  before.
As for Gorbachev's vision of a new European order these had not  waited
for the fall of the Berlin Wall to begin taking shape. The three  of these
visions bore a social democratic imprint.

Finding a way to anchor Russia in Europe has been one of the major  missed
opportunities of the end of the Cold War. It has been deeply  resented
shortly after, by Yeltsin and the most Westernizers of his  initial
entourage. For that missed opportunity, French policies in 1989  are
certainly not at fault.

Notes

1 See M.R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels (Boston,
Little Brown, 1993), p. 87.

2 From the diary of her foreign policy advisor George R. Urban, The
Times, Sept. 26, 1996, quoted by Peter Alter, The German Question and
Europe (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 133.

3 I have extensively developed this point in: Jacques Lévesque, The
Enigma of 1989, The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe (Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1997), Chapter 13.
4 See ibid, p. 227.

---------------------------------
Review by Philip Zelikow, University of Virginia

Frederic Bozo's book is an excellent, essential, addition to historical
scholarship on the end of the Cold War in Europe and the construction of
a new international system. In scope and detail, it parallels the 1995
book I wrote with Condi Rice.1 That book was an international history of
the episode based on the US government's records, most of which were
still classified (though cited for future reference), some Soviet
records, interviews, and the already considerable published material
available in German, English, and Russian.

The 'winners' in 1989-1990 were more eager to open their records to some
review. I was a beneficiary of that; so were those working with records
of Chancellor Helmut Kohl (many of which have now been published). Many
Soviet and East German records have become available in other ways.
Regrettably, British records and records from Hans-Dietrich Genscher's
Foreign Ministry are only now starting to become more available

Some well placed people in Paris soon realized that their side was being
portrayed as a 'loser,' and a rather sore loser at that. (Though that  was
not my view, as Bozo acknowledges.) French archival custodians dealt  with
this problem constructively; opening the key papers to Professor  Bozo. He
appears to have handled this opportunity with great care and  skill.

The value is great. My co-authored book with Rice, for example, was
relatively weak in its handling of French policy. The French sources  were
then scant or turned out to be unreliable, like the published  diaries of
Jacques Attali (mentioned in a 1997 preface to the paperback  edition).
Thus Bozo's work is indispensable for the French dimension of  the story.

Bozo's work has much more value, though, than simply rounding out the
French dimension. It is a factual cross-check on many other accounts,
including mine, for all the diplomatic encounters in which France took
part. Bozo is judicious in weighing the evidence. For instance, in
December 1989 Mitterrand wished to go to East Germany, stepping into a
revolutionary situation. He had the wit to ask (and be seen to have
asked) Kohl if this was OK. Notice how thoughtfully Bozo handles the
resulting exchange: "Kohl, while advising caution, confirmed that
Mitterrand had no reason to give up the trip. Mitterrand evidently  wanted
to defuse the issue without going back on his decision, while  Kohl (who
deep inside himself no doubt scarcely approved of Mitterrand's
initiative) could not ask him to give it up. The misunderstanding,
unspoken, persisted." (p. 141)

Bozo is very much concerned to disprove the allegations, made by
Thatcher and others, that Mitterrand fully shared the British prime
minister's hostility to German unification. In this effort Bozo has some
success. Mitterrand wanted to slow things down, but not so much as
Thatcher. He was sympathetic to Gorbachev, yet not quite in agreement.  He
and Kohl understood each other, despite occasional friction. Some  around
Mitterrand, like Attali, were more anti-German, and these
sentiments had wide currency in the French political class. But amid the
storms, Bozo proves that Mitterrand held fast to two firm beliefs: in a
Franco-German partnership at the core of Europe; and in a pan-European
architecture for managing the continent's political economy and security
requirements. And Mitterrand also sought and attained good relations  with
the United States, specifically with President George H.W. Bush.  (The
relationship between the two foreign ministers was not so good.)

Mitterrand the man and Mitterrand the leader remain elusive. The details
accumulate from all the meetings. But the resulting image of Mitterrand
remains indistinct, as if painted by Seurat, in faint pastels, shrouded
in mist. Other nominal leaders of the French government, like Attali or
the foreign minister, Roland Dumas, or the defense minister, Jean-Pierre
Chevenement, seemed to add little to the quality of French statecraft.
The brightest lights in Bozo's book are an outstanding set of career
officials: men and women like Jacques Lanxade, Elisabeth Guigou,
Bertrand Dufourcq, and Caroline de Margerie.

As an illustration, zoom in on the moment when France is considering
whether to shift gears from the completion of European monetary union to
add another momentous idea, a project for political union, that could
change the European Community to a European Union. This is a story that
Bozo properly pulls into the foreground of the diplomatic narrative.

The Germans had pressed the idea. One of Mitterrand's advisers, Guigou,
had urged him to accept it. Mitterrand vacillated. In March 1990, as the
Germans pushed again to launch this idea as a Franco-German initiative,
Guigou pressed harder. Bozo shows the impressive set of arguments she  and
her colleagues arrayed to persuade their president, including the  way the
political project might ease acceptance of the monetary union  too. Bozo
shows how Mitterrand slowly gives way. (pp. 235-240) The  result was a
critical initiative, announced in Dublin in April 1990,  that would
eventually lead to the Maastricht Treaty and an EU (now  modified further
by the Lisbon reforms).

Bozo reveals to us the work of a very impressive, high quality career
service offering penetrating analysis of fast-moving events. This aspect
of his book is another strength, quite apart from what it reveals about
French policy, because the acute observations of the French officials
will enrich any historian's reflections on the unfolding German,
American, Soviet, or British plans. Often, though, France was observing
more than leading. For this result, Mitterrand was more responsible than
his bureaucrats. By this point, at the end of the 1980s, Mitterrand had  a
gift for finding a shrewd political stance on the issue at hand. But  such
positions seldom placed him on a commanding height (by contrast to  his
influence in the early 1980s).

The contrast with the Mitterrand of 1981-1983 was reinforced in the
summer of 1990. After NATO had reworked its strategy at a landmark July
1990 summit in London, Mitterrand chose the post-summit conference as an
occasion to announce that France would withdraw all its troops from
Germany. The Americans were startled. This French move to quit Germany
would undermine the case for US troops staying. True, French officials
had resented the heavy-handed way the Americans and other allies had
managed the summit, but Thatcher also felt steam-rolled and had not
started lobbing hand grenades. French officials acknowledged that the
NATO summit outcome was important and valuable. They were far from
concluding that it was in France's interest to help push the American
military out of Germany or Europe. Mitterrand professed to believe that
German public opinion would no longer tolerate the presence of any
foreign forces, but the German government was telling him that the
opposite was true. So it is hard to resist the sense that Mitterrand
liquidated nearly half a century of French participation in securing
Germany because of "irritation," a pique that was only nominally about
"European security being taken in hand by the Atlantic Alliance...." (p.
281)

The theme of Atlanticist versus pan-European security solutions is
important in this book, as it should be. After German unification was
attained, Bozo documents a major French proposal to create a
pan-European confederation. The proposal fell flat in 1991. After the
Balkan crises, NATO's role in European security ended up seeming
stronger than ever. Bozo dispassionately recounts all this. (And in 2010
France has again drawn closer to NATO.) But Bozo concludes his book with
a powerful insight. As the United States has become more and more
preoccupied by topics outside of Europe, Washington's will to remain a
European power has ebbed, even as the forms of Atlantic security remain.
Thus, Bozo contends, Mitterrand's pan-European vision may be even more
relevant now than it was twenty years ago.

Notes

1 Philip Zelikow & Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe
Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1995). The 1997 paperback edition has a new preface which discusses a  few
other sources that were published in the intervening years. To slow  down
the rush to theoretical generalization about the event, the preface  also
offered an appropriately complicated outline of the dependent and
independent variables in the case.

---------------------------------
Author's Response by Frédéric Bozo, Sorbonne (University of Paris III)

I am most grateful to the H-Diplo editors for having selected my book  for
a roundtable review and to the participants for having agreed to  read it
attentively and write such stimulating commentaries. For a  diplomatic
historian from a (non UK) European country, having one's book  translated
into English is a unique experience. One really gets a sense  of the
liveliness of debates in the English-speaking academic community  as
compared with the situation in individual European countries. I am  truly
heartened to see that the English version of my book elicits much
interest even from scholars whose main focus is not necessarily on  French
policy.

I was of course flattered to read the appreciative commentaries made by
the reviewers. Although it would be inappropriate to dwell too much on
the praise, I won't conceal the fact that I was pleased to see that my
book seems to have reached its main goal: to prompt a re-evaluation of
the role of France in these events. All four of the reviewers-granted to
various degrees and with some important nuances-indeed seem to agree  with
my central claim that the heretofore dominant narrative of François
Mitterrand's negative reactions to the events of 1989-1991 and
opposition to Germany's unification needs to be revised. (Ironically,
this is less the case in France-and in Germany-where some continue to
give credence to the "black legend" of Mitterrand's alleged opposition  to
German unification.1) In this, the reviewers' assessment of my book
matches an undergoing revision among international historians: in her
recent, widely acclaimed account of the events of 1989-1990, Professor
Mary Elise Sarotte writes that Mitterrand "was an uneasy but crucial
facilitator of German unity, not its foe," and she identifies him as one
of the few "key actors" that played a major role in shaping the events
that unfolded after the fall of the Berlin Wall.2

I was also pleased to read that beyond France's role in these events,  the
reviewers seem to believe that another value of the book is to  contribute
to a more general reconsideration of the narrative and  interpretation of
the end of the Cold War. Here again with nuances, all  of them somehow
acknowledge the usefulness of taking into account what  Professor Philip
Zelikow calls the "French dimension" in order to better  understand the
wider picture. They agree that the preceding narratives  and
interpretations were often too focused on the roles of the United  States
and the Soviet Union in these events, and that the various  European
actors, factors and processes need to be brought into the  picture, as my
book tries to do. Here again, the reviewers echo Sarotte,  who writes:
"[T]he United States and the Soviet Union were the two most  important
countries during the Cold War, but they were not the only  important
countries in the shaping of the post-Cold War European
order...the endgame was heavily European."3

Let me now turn, as the reader surely expects, to some of the objections
or questions raised in the roundtable. Among the wealth of useful
commentaries contained in the introduction and the reviews, in my view
three series of remarks are of particular importance.

The first has to do with the characterization of French policy faced  with
German unification. As Professor Trachtenberg notes , both
Professor Jacques Lévesque and Professor Robert Hutchings are uneasy  with
an important aspect of my thesis: although they do not refute the  key
point, i.e. that Mitterrand's France did not wish nor try to block  German
unification, they believe I go too far when I state that Paris  did not
even try to slow it down (Professor Zelikow also expresses mild
scepticism, writing that "Mitterrand wanted to slow things down, but not
so much as Thatcher.") Lévesque and Hutchings, however, make two very
different if not outright opposite uses of this criticism: while both
insist that Mitterrand did try to slow things down (he "did very much of
that," writes Lévesque; "French diplomacy did seek to slow down and
impede unification," writes Hutchings), the former thinks that this was
"for good reasons" while the latter clearly thinks this was a mistake
that taints the record of French policy in 1989-90, in contrast with  what
he believes was a far more supportive U.S. policy.

Professor Lévesque's criticism is constructive, and it gives me a chance
to clarify an important point. His concern is-rightly-to contextualize:
Lévesque reminds us that faced with the events of 1989-90, responsible
leaders had every reason to be apprehensive of these developments and of
a possible backlash, not least with regard to Gorbachev and perestroika,
which could have been severely damaged as a result of the sudden loss of
the Soviet "empire" in Eastern Europe and an excessively rapid German
unification (in fact the backlash did occur in August 1991 when
Gorbachev suffered an attempted but ultimately failed coup). The
backlash could also have taken the form of an outburst of nationalism in
Central and Eastern Europe after the thaw (it eventually took place in
Yugoslavia in 1991). Lévesque's comments, in other words, remind us that
the "rosy" scenario of a peaceful German unification was not written in
advance, and that there were many other possible outcomes, some of them
far less appealing. (Interested readers will find a more developed
exposition of his arguments in a chapter he contributed to a volume I
co-edited on Europe and the end of the Cold War.4)

Mitterrand was a responsible statesman, and he did share those concerns:
as I write in my book, the preservation of the Gorbachev experience was
his main preoccupation throughout the period, and he was wary of a
possible return of disruptive nationalism-a fear he frequently expressed
by talking about the need to avoid "a return to 1913." There is no doubt
that, for all these reasons, in the aftermath of the fall of the Wall he
did wish the process of German unification to be progressive and
channelled internationally. But he was not alone: it is fair to say that
all of the main international leaders to some extent shared these
apprehensions and, at least initially, preferred a gradual movement
towards German unification. In my view, this was also the case, to a
degree, of President George H. W. Bush: "Gorbachev said you are in too
much of a hurry", Bush told Chancellor Helmut Kohl after the Malta  summit
in early December 1989; he was evidently passing his own message,  telling
Kohl that "Gorbachev's chief problem is uncertainty" and that  "we need to
find a formulation which doesn't scare him, but moves  forward."5 The
preference for such a gradual movement generally
prevailed until it became obvious, by mid-January 1990, that unification
would be rapid as a result of the sudden and irremediable collapse of  the
GDR.6

But much as I agree (and I clearly say as much in the book) that
Mitterrand would have initially preferred a gradual realization of  German
unity (again, like other major players), I do not believe that he
actively tried to enforce such a scenario. No doubt, in the critical
several weeks from the fall of the Wall to the end of 1989, Mitterrand
wanted to gauge the attitudes of the other major international players:
hence his bilateral meetings with Gorbachev in Kiev (6 December), with
Prime minister Margaret Thatcher on the margins of the EC Strasbourg
summit (8 December), and with Bush in Saint-Martin (16 December).  Perhaps
his attitude would have been different had he sensed a
willingness among his partners, especially Bush-and not only, as was the
case, Thatcher and to a lesser extent Gorbachev -, to pull the brakes;  he
may in that case have gone for what Sarotte describes as a policy of
"restoration" (of the Four Powers' rights) with a view to delaying  German
unification-again, blocking it altogether was for him simply out  of the
question.7 But all of this is counterfactual.

My bottom line is thus as follows: while Mitterrand would have liked
things to move more slowly, he did not think this could be effectively
imposed on the (West) Germans, including a resorting to the Four Powers'
rights.8 He may have deplored it. But there is a big difference between
wishing things to go slower and actively trying to slow them down-as
Thatcher did9. The only way in which Mitterrand thought one could slow
things down was by advising Bonn to slow them down-as Bush did. He
certainly did much of that-true, to little avail.

I find Professor Hutchings' commentary more perplexing. Hutchings clings
to the idea that Mitterrand did try actively to impede German
unification. He adds that his "overall judgment" on French policy was  and
remains that Mitterrand initially "reacted clumsily" to the prospect  of
German unification, while also acknowledging that, by January 1990,  he
"sought to work with the Germans to gain certain assurances about the
European integration process, in the end securing French interests  rather
well." Fine. Had he only criticized my characterization of  Mitterrand's
policy, I would have had no argument with him: after all,  there's always
a measure of "spin" in the writing of a historical  narrative, and I
wouldn't have reacted to his willingness to keep his  own "spin" on this
whole affair.

But whereas Lévesque says that even though I may have somewhat
overstated my point in the preface, I "[do] not distort facts or
evidence in order to make my case," Hutchings seems suspicious of my
scholarship. He believes that my rendering of U.S. policy (which by the
way is not the main focus of my book) is biased and that I make a  "highly
selective use" of sources, e.g. when I deal with the December  1989
Bush-Gorbachev Malta summit, for which he says I chose to ignore  the
memorandum of conversation that has been published. But it seems
Hutchings has made a highly selective reading of my book, since I do use
that record (although I do not make direct quotes from it: again, this  is
a book on French, not on U.S. policy).10 The imputation, by the way,
strikes me as odd: why would I have deliberately left aside an important
document which turns out to confirm my impression of U.S. caution when
dealing with the German question in the critical month of December 1989,
an attitude that, once again, I believe was strikingly parallel, if not
similar, to the French attitude?11

By adding that I have "undermine[d] the reader's confidence that the
French documentary record has been faithfully rendered," Hutchings
further questions my intellectual honesty.12 I wonder why. Maybe my
offence was to redress his earlier, heavily prejudiced reading of French
policy. For his initial "overall judgment" was not along the relatively
benign lines he recalls in his review above: his 1997 book in fact
contains an almost thoroughly negative appraisal of French policy, which
is by and large described as one of sheer opposition to German
unification and willingness to coalesce with the UK and the USSR against
it.13

In the review essay which he wrote on several books that appeared on the
20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, Professor Zelikow,
discussing my own book (together with Sarotte's) gracefully wrote that
"[W]hen historical scholarship works as it should, historians build on
prior work to extend and improve it."14 I wonder whether professor
Hutchings agrees. Let me also add that this is not a zero-sum-game:
revaluating the record of French policy in 1989-90 does not diminish the
merits of U.S. policy, of which I am an admirer.

Sadly, this leaves me with little space to address the other two points
which I wanted to discuss here. The first point derives from Professor
Gray's insightful review. While he recognizes the "loyal and
constructive" role of the Mitterrand diplomacy, in particular as a  result
of the strong Mitterrand-Kohl partnership, he asks whether  Mitterrand in
the end really did "make a difference" and whether the  final settlement
of the German question did "bear his handwriting".  Although he
acknowledges that "European voices need to be taken into  account," Gray
thinks that in the end my book "corrects the standard  narrative mainly by
taking note of Mitterrand's surprisingly agreeable  cooperation with goals
articulated by Helmut Kohl and George H. W.  Bush." In the same vein,
Professor Zelikow thinks that Mitterrand, in  this period (unlike in the
early 1980's, when he held his famous
Bundestag speech), was "seldom on commanding heights" and that "France
was observing more than leading." These are perfectly legitimate
comments and they deserve an answer.

Professor Gray illustrates the point with two examples. The first is the
German-Polish border issue, which was indeed a major preoccupation for
Mitterrand (and became briefly a bone of contention between him and
Kohl). For Gray, Mitterrand's "arm-twisting" with the Germans on this
issue was of little use since Kohl was determined to have a united
Germany recognize the border anyway and only eschewed such a recognition
before the achievement of unity for legal or technical reasons. The
result, he concludes, was an unnecessary quarrel with Bonn.

But for Mitterrand, the preoccupation with the border issue (shared not
only in London, but to some extent in Washington as well) did not stem
from a fear that Bonn/Berlin would not recognize the Oder-Neisse line
after unification (he perfectly understood and accepted the legal point,
and he never doubted Kohl's personal assurances). Rather, it had to do
with the way this would eventually be done. Mitterrand wanted a strong
political commitment on the part of the FRG (and of the GDR) before
unification as well as a solid legal guarantee after unification (not
only through a German-Polish treaty, but within the two plus four
settlement) because he considered the border issue to be characteristic
of the need for an internationally negotiated settlement of the German
question as opposed to one that only rested on the good will of one man,
however respectable. In other words, it was for him a question of  method,
not of substance. By forcing Kohl to clarify his discourse in  spite of
his electoral-and in a sense demagogical-preoccupations (due to  the
political influence of the Vertriebene in the CDU-CSU alliance), he
wanted him to recognize that the international aspects of the
unification could not be dealt with unilaterally, but had to be dealt
with internationally. German unification, as he had said in July 1989,
could not be done "with forceps." Mitterrand's insistence on the
Oder-Neisse issue no doubt contributed to this a great deal.

Professor Gray's second example involves the question of Europe.
Professor Gray thinks that Mitterrand hardly achieved a major
breakthrough when the German chancellor agreed to renew his commitment  to
European construction against the backdrop of German unification,  since
Kohl had always said that the latter would have to be paired with  an
acceleration of the former. In other words, Gray says that because  Kohl
was a committed Europeanist anyway, this recommitment to pursue  European
construction was not to the credit of Mitterrand.

I partly agree with Professor Gray. Here he puts his finger on a
fundamental point: the "Junktim" between European integration and German
unification was an essential one, not an instrumental one. This is why  it
is wrong to portray what happened between France and Germany in  1989-90
as a quid pro quo, France accepting German unification because  Germany
accepted the continuation of European integration (in particular  EMU and
what became the Euro): this rendering is wrong because France  accepted
German unification as a matter of principle, and Germany of  course wanted
to continue European integration; unlike what is commonly  reported, there
was no actual "deal," not even at the Strasbourg summit  in December 1989,
simply because it had been agreed for decades that the  two processes had
to go hand in hand, a notion Kohl and Mitterrand had  discussed over and
over before the events of 1989.15 This in my view  does not diminish their
merits: it reminds us that the groundwork for  what happened then had been
prepared long before. But statesmanship was  nevertheless important in
1989-90 to make sure that the deal endured:  here, it seems to me,
Mitterrand and Kohl must be given credit for  successfully translating in
actual policy terms what remained until then  an abstract concept. Had
Kohl failed to understand the need to restate  Germany's European article
of faith at this critical juncture (as he did  as a result of Mitterrand's
insistence), things could have gone less  smoothly-and yes, France could
have played the "spoiler."

So my response to both Professors Gray and Zelikow would be this: it is
easy to underestimate Mitterrand's (and Kohl's) contribution to the
settlement of the German question if one underestimates the importance  of
the European dimension of this settlement. The Atlantic
dimension-having the Soviet Union agree to unified Germany's continued
membership in NATO-, no doubt, was more dramatic, and for this U.S.
policy deserves full credit (although France, as Gray and Trachtenberg
underline, was helpful). A German unification paired with German
neutrality would certainly have produced a less appealing result than  the
one actually reached in summer 1990 of a unified Germany that would
remain a full member of NATO. But consider also what would have been the
result of a German unification that would not have been accompanied by a
relaunch or even the continuation of European integration. So I continue
to believe that there was a remarkable parallelism in 1989-90 between
U.S. policy (and its Atlantic priority) and French policy (and its
European priority). Both were decisive contributions to the settlement  of
the German question.16

This leads me to the third and last point I wanted to pick up from the
stimulating comments contained in the roundtable discussion, one that  has
to do with foresight and hindsight. To what extent, twenty years  after
the facts, were the decisions made by France (and others)
visionary? Were these decisions, in other words, consistent with what
turned out to be the actual direction taken by history, and are they
still of any relevance to the present situation? Discussing all aspects
of this question would take us too far, so I will concentrate on what is
perhaps the most important of these aspects: the future of the U.S.
presence in Europe.

Here, I face the skepticism of two reviewers, who with regard to French
policy in 1989-90 are retrospectively puzzled with what they describe as
a combination, on the one hand, of the reemergence of the typically
"Gaullist" assumption that the United States would inevitably recede  from
the Old Continent after the Cold War and that a Europe-centered  system
had to emerge and replace the NATO system, and on the other hand  a
reluctance to more actively challenge the United States' domineering  role
in Europe and that very NATO system. Professor Trachtenberg writes  that
"the important thing here was not Mitterrand's 'vision' of a  unifying
Europe and a diminishing American presence, but his support in  practice
of the continuation of the NATO system." As for Professor Gray,  he
believes that "'Gaullist' assumptions predisposed French diplomacy to  a
high degree of wishful thinking" and he underlines that Mitterrand  "did
not press alternatives to NATO" very forcefully.

Both Trachtenberg and Gray seem to conclude that the reality of French
policy was in fact more conservative than revisionist. I believe it
really is a matter of seeing the glass half empty or half full. In the
overall context of 1990, Mitterrand's decisions do appear to be cautious
not to challenge the U.S. presence in Europe. The reasons for this
cautious approach were manifold: the understanding that the United  States
was itself determined to remain for the time being a European  power, the
fact that the Soviet Union would, for the foreseeable future,  remain a
potentially dangerous entity, and the need to consolidate the
Euro-Atlantic framework in which the new Germany would remain embedded
(there was little hope of developing an increasingly cohesive and
assertive Europe if NATO were to crumble).

But seen from 2010, it is hard not to recognize a certain visionary
quality to Mitterrand's belief-indeed inherited from de Gaulle-that, in
the long run, the kind of massive U.S. engagement in Europe that had
prevailed during and as a result of the Cold War would eventually give
way to a much more volatile presence. True, the Balkan wars were a
catalyst for the U.S. post Cold War European reengagement. But once  these
conflicts were settled in the late 1990s and 9/11 erupted, it  became
clear that the U.S. disinterest in Europe as an object (but not
necessarily as a potential partner in global security) could but
intensify. In that, the administration of George W. Bush proved not to  be
an aberration, as confirmed by the evident lack of interest of Barack
Obama's administration in a Europe that is essentially at peace. I find
it remarkable that, on this key point, the reviewer who seems to agree
the most with my analysis is Professor Zelikow, who twenty years ago was
busy (as well he should have been) challenging the "Gaullist"
assumptions of President Mitterrand together with his colleagues in the
George H.W. Bush administration.

Notes

1 See Frédéric Bozo: "Mitterrand et la chute du Mur: en finir avec la
légende", posted on the news website rue 89, 3 October 2009 :
http://www.rue89.com/2009/10/03/mitterrand-et-la-chute-du-mur-en-finir-avec-la-legende.



2 Mary Elise Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 3, 50.

3 Sarotte, 209.

4 See Jacques Lévesque, "In the Name of Europe's Future: Soviet, French
and British Qualms about Kohl's Rush to German Unification," in Frédéric
Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, N. Piers Ludlow and Leopoldo Nuti (eds), Europe
and the End of the Cold War: A Reappraisal, (London: Routledge, 2008),
95-106.

5 Memorandum of Conversation between Bush and Kohl, Brussels, 3 December
1989, George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, Bush Presidential records,
WHORM Subject Files.

6 I fully share Sarotte's analysis on this whole problematic of
"acceleration:" see 1989, chapter 3, esp. 99 ff. I also note that her
rendering of U.S. policy in late 1989-early 1990, which does not exclude
the concerns that also existed in Washington, differs from previous
accounts which have generally described Washington's support of German
unification as serene and unconditional from start: this is the case in
Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe
Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1995) and, even more so, in Robert L. Hutchings, American Diplomacy and
the End of the Cold War: An Insider's Account of U.S. Policy in Europe
1989-1992 (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997).

7 The key players here were no doubt Bush and Mitterrand. In my
judgment, the only situation in which the latter might have chosen a
policy of "restoration" (except for an unforeseen incident, such as some
violent move by Soviet troops in Berlin and the GDR) would have been if
the former had been in that same disposition. In turn I feel that Bush
would probably have seriously considered such a policy had
Mitterrand-whom he very much respected and whose key role in Europe he
appreciated-been more alarming and critical of Kohl's policy.

8 See my analysis of France's attitude regarding the meeting of the four
ambassadors in Berlin on 11 December 1989 (an attitude that on that day
turned out to be less lenient vis-à-vis Soviet obstructionist objectives
than that of U.S. diplomats!): Bozo, Mitterrand, 137-9. And of course,  on
20 January 1990, Mitterrand essentially rejected Thatcher's
willingness to reactivate the quadripartite mechanism in order to slow
things down, judging that this was a "judicial, legal" approach but one
that would be neither effective nor acceptable to the Germans: Bozo, 174.

9 This is the key difference between Mitterrand and Thatcher : see
Frédéric Bozo, "Thatcher's European Delusions, " Prospect, (on line
edition), www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/11/thatchers-european-delusions/

10 Bozo, 154 (footnote 85).

11 Sarotte's reading of Malta (77-78) and what was said there about
Germany is very similar to mine.

12 Hutchings also suggests that the evidence I used was made available  to
me only. But this is not the case: Professor Sarotte (like other  scholars
who have asked for them) has had access to the same boxes as  the ones I
used from the Mitterrand presidency in the French national  archives; as
for the French foreign ministry's archives, they are now  available to all
researchers: see
www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/ministere_817/archives-patrimoine_3512/chute-du-mur-berlin-ouverture-anticipee-archives-diplomatiques_19850/index.html



13 See e.g. Hutchings, 90, 93, 104-6, 112, 116; his general bottom line
on Mitterrand and the end of the Cold War is that the French president
tried "to retard history's course" (no less): see Hutchings, 17.

14 Philip D. Zelikow, "The Suicide of the East ? 1989 and the Fall of
Communism", Foreign Affairs, November-December 2009, 138. Zelikow writes
that "in scope and detail, [my book] parallels" the one he wrote with
Condoleezza Rice in 1995. I can confirm that Zelikow's and Rice's book
served as a template as I wrote mine.

15 On this, see Frédéric Bozo, "France, German Unification and European
Integration," in F. Bozo, M.-P. Rey, N. P. Ludlow and L. Nuti, Europe  and
the End of the Cold War: A Reappraisal (London: Routledge, 2008).

16 On this, see Frédéric Bozo, "'Winners' and 'Losers:' France, the
United States, and the End of the Cold War," Diplomatic History, 33, no.
5 (November 2009), 927-58.


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