Reinterpreting de Gaulle: Nationalist or Realist?

Abstract

In the 1960s, the integration progress of the European Community into a more economically and politically connected coalition stagnated for a long time. The majority of current literature attributes the continuing deadlock to Charles de Gaulle’s personal sentiment against the European Grand Design, but does not take France’s global status into consideration. This paper argues against this view and explains de Gaulle’s realist ideology underlying his international actions using the geopolitical perspective of the internal relations within the Western bloc during the Cold War Period. By intensively discussing France’s complex relations with the United States, Benelux, and Germany, the current paper aims to reinterpret de Gaulle in the field of foreign policy and will attempt to explain why the realist understanding of de Gaulle was more in line with the contemporary geopolitical conditions.