The origins of the confederation

As for other aspects of Mitterrand's foreign policy, it is impossible to understand the confederation project without taking into account the influence of the Gaullist legacy. Clearly, the project was in line with the vision of a ‘European Europe’ which General Charles de Gaulle had set forth a quarter of a century before the events of 1989. He had done so most famously in his press conference of 4 February 1965, held exactly (and not accidentally) twenty years after the Yalta conference. The Gaullist vision in essence featured three main, interrelated characteristics or anticipations. The central idea was that the east–west stalemate (‘Yalta’, in de Gaulle's parlance) could only be overcome by calling into question the very logic of ‘blocs’, which presupposed the USSR's progressive abandonment of coercion in the east and confrontation with the west (a scenario which, by the mid-1960s, was no longer ruled out in de Gaulle's eyes, at least in the medium term) and the gradual withdrawal of the United States from the continent (which he believed to be unavoidable in the long term as the Soviet threat receded). This evolution, in turn, would be encouraged by the strengthening of European construction in the west (which would lead to the emergence of a political western Europe more autonomous from the United States and therefore in a better position to intensify relations with the east and the USSR) and by the emancipation of eastern Europe (which would be freer to engage the west). Finally, these transformations would allow for the emergence of a ‘greater Europe’ (Grande Europe) ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’ – that is, an Old Continent now free of the divisions imposed by the cold war – and eventually lead to a pan-European settlement with a reunified Germany at its core.Footnote ⁴

In spite of the confirmation of the east–west status quo in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Gaullist long-term vision of east–west relations essentially remained at the core of French diplomacy. By the time of his election in 1981, Mitterrand, although a socialist and a long-time opponent of de Gaulle, had all but espoused it: ‘All that contributes to the exit from Yalta is good’, he declared in December 1981.Footnote ⁵ Still, with the ‘new cold war’ raging and east–west relations deteriorating in the early years of the decade (with the Euromissiles, Poland and Afghanistan in the background), the objective of overcoming ‘Yalta’ seemed distant, if not rhetorical. By 1985 however, Mikhail Gorbachev's coming to power – which Mitterrand quickly saw as the signal of important changes to come in Moscow – encouraged him to revive the Gaullist vision: ‘A western Europe becoming progressively more autonomous from the United States, the search for complementarities with eastern Europe, and the USSR's interest in closer relations with the European community’, he prophesied in 1986, ‘will progressively lead to the realisation’ by Europeans that they belonged ‘to the same continent’ and ‘the same civilisation’.Footnote ⁶ By the time of his election to a second term in 1988, those themes which would later nourish the confederation project had gained importance against the backdrop of the ‘new détente’: the relaunch of the European Community was gathering momentum under the joint leadership of Mitterrand and the West German federal chancellor Helmut Kohl (in the wake of the 1986 European Single Act, the Economic and Monetary Union had become the key to European integration); eastern Europe was beginning to enjoy more leeway (this had led Mitterrand, in the wake of his re-election, to intensify France's politique à l'Est); and, last but not least, Gorbachev was giving increasing signs of his willingness to break with old patterns of Soviet international behaviour (the 19th CPSU conference in June 1988 had marked a decisive moment in the consolidation of perestroika). Gorbachev's idea of a ‘European common home’ was a case in point. While it had initially been seen in the West as a device to promote traditional Soviet goals, for example collective security and US–Europe decoupling, Mitterrand was now tempted to take the concept more seriously and to respond by putting forth his own concept for a united ‘greater’ Europe.Footnote ⁷ While visiting Moscow on 25 November 1988, he confided to Gorbachev that there was a need for ‘more pragmatic, more concrete co-operation between European states based on the exploration of domains which, by nature, transcend east–west borders’, citing audiovisual, environmental and technological exchanges and suggesting that the Soviet Union associate itself with certain aspects of the ‘Eureka’ project, founded to deepen technological co-operation within the EC.Footnote ⁸ Clearly, Mitterrand was now looking for ways to respond to Gorbachev's ‘common home’ while giving substance to the Gaullist vision.

By that time one could also detect a more fundamental, and in a sense a more historically minded motivation behind what would become Mitterrand's confederation concept: his concern that the end of the Europe of ‘Yalta’ should not lead to a return to the upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. This is what, in the following months and years, Mitterrand would frequently call the ‘Europe of 1913’ (or of ‘1914’ or ‘1919’) or, even more tellingly, the Europe of ‘Sarajevo’. A politician born in 1916 who had witnessed the destruction of the continent in two world wars, Mitterrand, was, like many other leaders of his generation, in the words of one of his long time associates, prone to ‘think of the future in the light of the past’.Footnote ⁹ So while his eyes were fixed on the end of the cold war and the end of the communist freeze and while he saw in them great opportunities, for Mitterrand they also carried the risks (such as those of fragmentation, nationalism, and ethnic conflict) linked to the resurgence, after the thaw, of the tragic history of the first half of the twentieth century, first and foremost in post-communist central, eastern, and south-eastern Europe. Typically, he confided in the Italian premier, Ciriaco De Mita, in June 1988 that, although it was ‘in the logic of history’, the likely end of Soviet rule in eastern Europe also conveyed ‘a great risk’.Footnote ¹⁰ ‘One may wish the dismantlement of the [Soviet] Empire, which should indeed come about rather soon,’ he commented a few weeks later, ‘but one may also fear the consequences.’Footnote ¹¹ Clearly, Mitterrand believed that these potentially adverse consequences had to be dealt with preventively. Here also he was influenced by history and his own political experience, that of a young politician who had been involved in the reconstruction of Europe after 1945 and in west European integration from its beginnings (he had been impressed, in particular, by his participation in the May 1948 European Congress in The Hague). For him, therefore, meeting the challenges of post-cold war peace and prosperity involved somehow extending the benefits of west European construction and its ‘functionalist’ methods to the whole of the European continent, thanks to some sort of federative or confederative structure allowing for the creation of ‘de facto solidarities’ which would help to keep Europe at large at peace.

As seen from Paris, the events of the first semester of 1989 confirmed that the era of ‘Yalta’ was indeed drawing to an end, but the future was uncertain. ‘The organisation of Europe born after the Second World War is being replaced by a new one’, the political director at the Quai d'Orsay – the French foreign ministry – noted in February 1989, ‘but it is not clear in which direction we are going.’Footnote ¹² By summer 1989, French thinking with regard to the future of Europe at large was nevertheless shaped by a series of assumptions that would determine the country's policies in the following months and, in particular, the confederation project. With regard to eastern Europe Mitterrand was clearly betting on – and welcoming – the acceleration of democratic transition, as witnessed by his suggestion in May 1989 that countries like Hungary or Poland become associate members of the Council of Europe. Until autumn 1989 Mitterrand's fears regarding the return of instability in post-Soviet and post-communist Europe appeared to be rather distant, and most scenarios for the future of eastern Europe were quite rosy. In fact, the French president did not at that time anticipate a radical rupture taking place in eastern Europe. In terms of security, he believed that countries once under Soviet rule, while recovering their sovereignties, would remain somehow linked to the USSR, possibly within a revamped, ‘politicised’ Warsaw Pact, which would act as a stabiliser. In terms of economics, he anticipated that these countries would probably move towards some mix between socialism and capitalism. Eastern Europe would nevertheless grow closer to an increasingly integrated western Europe, thereby making it possible progressively to overcome the east–west (and Germany's) division, at least in concrete terms. Such was Mitterrand's vision of the overcoming of blocs by the time of the upheavals of the autumn 1989, a vision clearly in line with de Gaulle's but also with that of the former West German chancellor Willy Brandt, a close friend of Mitterrand.Footnote ¹³

So in what institutional framework would – or should – these pan-European evolutions take place as seen from Paris? The Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), which for nearly two decades had been France's preferred vehicle for east–west change, was of course seen as essential at this critical juncture. Yet there were limits. French diplomats were wary of a blurring of the role of the Atlantic alliance and, worse yet, of a nascent European strategic identity which an institutionalised CSCE might induce in accordance with what had been traditional Soviet objectives throughout the cold war – that is, transatlantic decoupling and the prevention of the emergence of a strategically autonomous western Europe. Paris was also sceptical that ‘basket two’ of the CSCE Final Act (which essentially covered economic, scientific, technological and environmental co-operation) could be an adequate venue for intensified east–west co-operation in practical matters, if only because the United States and Canada were participants, which made little sense if a truly ‘European’ Europe were to emerge (things were of course different in security terms, where the US presence was not disputed by the French, at least in the foreseeable future). As for Gorbachev's European ‘common home’, it was still seen as rather ill-defined; ‘the essential point’, Mitterrand gently told Gorbachev in July 1989, ‘is to agree on what we want to put in it’.Footnote ¹⁴ French diplomacy nevertheless considered Gorbachev's concept to be important, because it expressed the Soviet fear of being cut off from the rest of Europe, a fear which indeed had to be tackled – this would be a major consideration in the framing of the confederation project.Footnote ¹⁵ By 1989, French diplomacy was still in search of an organising architecture for the continent as a whole.

Yet in many ways France's vision of pan-European architecture beyond ‘Yalta’ was the result of its west European vision. By 1989 the pursuit of a European political structure had become, against the backdrop of the acceleration of change in the east, the foremost objective of French diplomacy, and its role was seen as pivotal for Europe at large. For the presidential office at the Elysée, ‘the Twelve were best placed’ to ‘implement a smooth re-establishment of bonds’ between the two Europes.Footnote ¹⁶ The Quai d'Orsay reasoned in similar terms. In order to encourage the progressive rapprochement between east and west and to serve as a ‘magnet’ able to hold the remnants of a crumbling Soviet empire together, the EC had to organise around itself a ‘second circle’ of countries – in essence, those belonging to the Council of Europe – with which co-operation with ex-communist countries of central and eastern Europe could be jointly organised in areas such as culture or technology (this concept, it should be noted, was close to the Europe of ‘concentric circles’ advocated at the same time by the president of the European commission, Jacques Delors). For French diplomacy, therefore, ‘the pursuit of European construction and the re-establishment of the unity of the continent [were] two approaches that do not contradict each other but rather complement and reinforce each other’. Yet there was more tension between these two ‘approaches’ than was recognised: whereas ‘the reinforcement of the Community’ and of its ‘cohesion’ was seen as ‘an absolute priority’, the prospects for further enlargement to candidate countries (typically Austria) were viewed with great reluctance; ‘one has to be very clear and very quickly: there will be no new membership in the ten or twenty years to come’, the Quai d'Orsay firmly believed.Footnote ¹⁷ Conflict between the ‘deepening’ and the ‘enlargement’ of European construction would quickly become a major motivation behind the launching of the confederation project.

Launching the project

In order to understand the assumptions and the motivations behind President Mitterrand's announcement of 31 December 1989, it is important to bear in mind what the context was at the time. By the end of the year, all the former Soviet satellites had undergone peaceful revolutions (except for the more bloody and chaotic Romanian situation, which was a reminder that the end of ‘Yalta’, as Mitterrand feared, could have its dark side). And all were on the road to full democratisation. Moreover, as a result of change in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), of the fall of the Berlin Wall and of Helmut Kohl's ‘Ten Point Plan’ of 28 November 1989, the German question was back on the international agenda, although unification per se remained a somewhat distant prospect (Helmut Kohl himself believed that the process would take at least several years before unity would be achieved). In this context of extreme fluidity, the organisation of the ‘Grande Europe’ was the central issue. For a brief moment in autumn 1989, foreign-policymakers in Paris regarded the CSCE, in spite of the reservations described above, as an attractive proposition and possibly as a first-choice institution when it came to structuring the post-Yalta pan-European order. Hence, when meeting Gorbachev in Kiev on 6 December, Mitterrand expressed his support for the Soviet leader's proposal of a summit meeting of the 35 in 1990, and concurred with him that the Helsinki process was an adequate framework for managing change in the east and the German question.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet the CSCE solution was in many ways overtaken by the acceleration of events in eastern and central Europe in the very final weeks of 1989. Predictably, the new situation was seen in Paris as first requiring the speeding-up of European construction and the intensification of European integration in the west. Under the French presidency of the EC, the Twelve had, in the autumn, adopted a package of initiatives, including the creation of a European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). The package was designed to increase the Community's outreach to eastern Europe's new democracies and thus make the EC the cornerstone of post-communist transition. But the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was met in some quarters by claims that the European Community, a cold war creation, would soon become irrelevant, also raised French concerns about ‘dilution’ of the project. ‘It is imperative to combine [the pursuit of] European construction with the opening to the east’, it was emphasised in the Quai d'Orsay, ‘but enlargement can only take place after a strengthening [of the EC]’; it was therefore necessary, French diplomats emphasised, to ‘control its opening [to the east] by offering alternatives to membership’.Footnote ¹⁹

Irrespective of wider, longer-term aims – fostering the emergence of a Gaullist ‘Grande Europe’ from the Atlantic to the Urals which the end of the cold war now made possible and indeed called for, offering a pan-European framework in which German unification might be embedded – this French conundrum (how to open up European construction to the east without taking the risk of diluting it?) was most probably the key motivation for Mitterrand's 31 December statement and his call for a European confederation. A few days after the announcement, the president's closest adviser on European affairs, Elisabeth Guigou, commented that the proposed confederation ‘offers a chance to avoid the dilution of the Community’ and ‘has the immense advantage of making visible the possibility of intermediate formulas between membership of the Community and the present status quo’. This, she added, was a much needed perspective for the new democracies of central and eastern Europe, ‘which will not be able, for one reason or another, to become members of a Community that cannot swell indefinitely’. As for the notion of a Europe freed of superpower dominance, which Mitterrand had referred to in his statement, the confederation was a good way to ‘keep the US at a distance’ in non-security issues while avoiding ‘irritating’ the Soviet Union, which had to be associated with these evolutions.Footnote ²⁰

Mitterrand's confederation proposal has been interpreted by some as yet another illustration of the French president's alleged strategy to slow down German unification or block it altogether, perhaps by imposing the loose concept of a confederation on German unification itself, thereby postponing or impeding a tighter form of unity between the two Germanys. Yet, irrespective of the fact that there is no evidence of such a strategy having effectively been contemplated in the first place, it is hard to see how this long-term project might have helped to stem German unification, which by then was a medium-term perspective (and would soon become a short-term one). Mitterrand knew that any idea of using the confederation as a device to impede or to slow down German unification would have been strongly repelled by the Germans. Hence Kohl told Mitterrand on 4 January 1990 – thus by and large approving Mitterrand's initiative – that the ‘concept of confederation’ was adequate as a perspective for central and eastern European countries, but that ‘it did not apply to the inter-German situation’.Footnote ²¹ It is clear, however, that Mitterrand's concept was not decoupled from his general concern that German unification should be managed in a way that was compatible with preserving European stability and the continent's overall balance, which the confederation was meant to help preserve. Mitterrand most probably saw the confederation as a multilateral framework in which a united Germany's increased influence and preponderance in central and eastern Europe would be contained or diluted. He said as much to Kohl, at least implicitly, when he explained in February 1990 that the confederation aimed in his view at preventing attempts by individual west European countries to ‘try to regroup’ individual eastern countries around themselves, which would be ‘a dangerous avenue’, a thinly veiled allusion to Germany's resurgent ambitions in Mitteleuropa (‘central Europe’).Footnote ²²

Mitterrand's proposal quickly elicited interest in foreign capitals, where, the president's strategic adviser reported, it was ‘unanimously understood and approved’. Yet Hubert Védrine, from 1988 to 1991 President Mitterrand's spokesman, also underlined that the confederation idea raised some important questions: why include a Soviet Union which was far from having completed its democratic transformation? Why exclude the United States, which was determined to remain a European power? What would be the competences of the confederation and its functioning? And what would be its articulation with existing institutions, starting with the EC and the CSCE?Footnote ²³ From the start, the president's aides were conscious of the potential pitfalls of the project. It would be dangerous, advised Guigou, to determine the structures of the European confederation too early on, and it would be wise to decide quickly on ‘what we must not do’, so as to make it easier to make ‘positive proposals on what can be done’.Footnote ²⁴ The Quai also was cautious: ‘although we need to be clear for ourselves on the concept in order to make sure that the coming international events will not impede the project’, the political director warned, ‘we have no interest in specifying too quickly what we mean by “confederation” if we do not want to take the risk of being attacked from everywhere’.Footnote ²⁵ Clearly, French diplomacy was conscious of its limited room for manoeuvre and of the need for a prudent approach.

Mitterrand was nevertheless determined to move ahead. In the early months of 1990 he took the opportunity of meetings with central and east European leaders in order to propagate the confederation idea. When visiting Hungary in January he noted that the Community cannot ‘expand indefinitely to all countries’, but that ‘the other European countries needed to establish an organic link with western Europe’.Footnote ²⁶ Then, in March, he secured the approval of the Czechoslovak president Václav Havel; pleading for a ‘synthesis’ between market capitalism and socialism in the new democracies, he underlined that these countries ‘cannot enter the EEC now because of its very strict rules and because others are already in line’, hence the need for the European confederation – to which Havel responded that ‘their reflections were quite close’.Footnote ²⁷ In the meantime Mitterrand had begun to canvass Kohl. Stressing the necessity for countries which had freed themselves from the tutelage of the USSR not to be ‘left alone’ when faced with a fast-integrating European community, he put forward the necessity for a truly European framework, albeit a ‘loose’ one, in which they would be treated as equals. Kohl responded that he was in full agreement and that there was indeed a need for an alternative to EC membership.Footnote ²⁸

By the beginning of spring 1990 Caroline de Margerie, Guigou's successor in the Elysée after she was appointed minister for European affairs, reported to Mitterrand that his concept ‘has been well received in central and eastern European countries’. The Elysée nevertheless realised that the coming months were not favourable to an effective launching of the confederation project; after the green light given by Moscow late January, German unification was now at the top of the diplomatic agenda and, starting in March, the ‘two plus four’ talks were drawing most of the international attention (the talks would last throughout the spring and most of the summer). In addition, the CSCE summit, proposed by Gorbachev in the autumn, was scheduled to take place in November. Although the confederation was distinct in terms of both objectives and membership, de Margerie noted in April that this meant that it could be effectively launched only after the Summit of the 35.Footnote ²⁹ The very busy international agenda of most of 1990 (not forgetting the Iraq crisis, which occupied centre stage from August 1990 onwards) thus postponed the actual launching of the project by more than six months, if not a full year. But with German unity almost achieved (the ‘Two Plus Four’ talks were concluded on 12 September 1990 in Moscow) Mitterrand took the opportunity of a visit to Prague on 13–14 September in order to suggest to Havel, who agreed, a meeting (or Assises) in the Czechoslovak capital in 1991 of individuals from all countries of Europe, politicians as well as representatives of civil societies, in order to launch the confederation. His model for this was clearly the May 1948 European congress in The Hague, in which he had taken part as a young politician. By the time of the Paris summit of the CSCE, Mitterrand was even more convinced of the need to set up a new ‘body where each country has the same fundamental rights’ and where participants ‘become used to working together’; it was a matter, the French president added ominously, of ‘conjuring up the risks of a dislocation of the Continent’.Footnote ³⁰

The project finally takes off

Launched on 31 December 1989, the confederation really took off only a year later, a postponement which, as will be seen, ultimately played a role in the failure of Mitterrand's grand design. By the end of 1990 the president had designated a former Elysée aide and diplomat, Jean Musitelli, as the person in charge of the project. Musitelli quickly set up a small team and started organising preliminary work on an inter-agency basis (other ministries than the Quai were indeed concerned, in particular those dealing with economic or other forms of co-operation with eastern Europe). Guigou, now minister for European affairs, was also involved.Footnote ³¹ At the same time Musitelli established a working relationship with the Czechoslovaks in order to prepare the Prague meeting. In late January 1991 he reported to Roland Dumas, the minister of foreign affairs, that his interlocutors were ‘quite open to our suggestions’ and were ‘evidently flattered to co-sponsor such a vast operation with France’; ‘the preparation of the meeting’, he concluded enthusiastically, ‘is being launched on the basis of a narrow Franco-Czechoslovak co-operation with which we can be pleased’.Footnote ³²

Musitelli's mission was not facilitated by the somewhat atypical, at times even Delphic, decision-making process of the Mitterrand presidency. Musitelli, in particular, received no specific instructions from the president. Almost a year after Mitterrand's original call he thus had to start from scratch. In the last few weeks of 1990 he therefore decided to begin work by forging a ‘doctrine’ of the confederation, which he derived from the public declarations of Mitterrand and Dumas on the subject, an exercise which in turn made it possible to ‘sketch out’ the main characteristics of the future body.Footnote ³³ These were as follows: the confederation, Musitelli thought, should be an ‘organisation endowed with a legal status’, involving no ‘transfer of sovereignty’ but aiming at the ‘co-ordination of national policies in certain areas’ and, to that effect, endowed with ‘light organisational structures’; it should be open to European countries that were ‘democratic and respectful of the rule of law’, although this criterion had to be applied loosely because the aim was ultimately to ‘support democratic evolutions throughout the continent’. This meant that, in principle, the Soviet Union should not be excluded. Finally, its competences should be both political (involving consultation and co-ordination between member states) and technical (different areas of co-operation would be identified, such as the environment, energy or transport), and there would be ‘variable geometries’, with some nations participating only in some of these.Footnote ³⁴ Work on the definition of the confederation made progress on this basis in the early weeks of 1991. By the end of January, a work plan for the next few months up to the Prague meeting and, most of all, a general concept of what the confederation could be in terms of objectives and organisation had been established. Regarding objectives, the aim was ‘to offer the Europeans a framework where they might get together and discuss, among equals, issues of common concern’ in order to ‘anchor’ central and eastern European countries to western Europe, to contribute to offset centrifugal forces within these countries and to create ‘a zone of European prosperity’. Regarding its organisation, the institutional set-up – in contrast with the European Community – had to be a ‘rather loose’ one, and if the confederation had to derive from an ‘ambitious’ political concept, it should ‘imperatively stem from concrete realisations’.Footnote ³⁵ The bottom line was that while the project aimed at organising the ‘Grande Europe’ by making it a ‘European Europe’ – an ambitious political objective indeed – it was, more concretely, also about ‘building bridges’ between the west and the east.Footnote ³⁶

While working on the ‘supply’ side, French diplomacy was also keen to have a clear view of the ‘demand’ side. In late December 1990 the Quai d'Orsay had sent a circular telegram, asking French embassies in all European countries to elicit reactions to the confederation project.Footnote ³⁷ The French, as a result, were informed early on about the issues that the project raised in European capitals, many of which they had anticipated a year earlier. Strikingly, the Czechoslovaks (who were, after all, meant to be co-sponsoring the project with the French) now did not conceal their own misgivings, echoing those of most other central and eastern European countries: although they had ‘no reservations regarding the relevance and the urgency of the confederation’, Musitelli reported on his return from Prague in late January, ‘they have doubts on its future relations with the United States, with the role of the USSR in it, and with its articulation with the European Community’.Footnote ³⁸ These three major issues would indeed constitute as many stumbling blocs in the months ahead.

In the early months of 1991, however, these issues were not seen in Paris as worrying, as the French government believed that it could address them with a series of pointed arguments. Regarding US non-participation in the confederation, the Quai was prone to emphasise that the project did meet key US objectives of anchoring central and eastern European countries to the west and avoiding a Balkanisation in the formerly Soviet-dominated part of Europe. It was, moreover, a legitimate design, as the EC was in essence trying to organise its ‘back yard’ just as the United States did; and it did not call into question the United States’ ‘fundamental’ contribution to European security, which would persist through NATO and the CSCE.Footnote ³⁹ As far as Soviet participation was concerned, the line was that it was necessary: the exclusion of the USSR would indeed provoke ‘strong resentment’, whereas its inclusion could diminish the risks of Soviet disintegration. The French also stressed the legitimacy of their policy towards the Soviet Union: while the USSR was not yet democratic, the best way to achieve this was to keep it firmly attached to Europe, and it would not jeopardise the European balance. Soviet participation would vary according to the issues at hand, and the US security presence in Europe would continue to equilibrate Soviet power anyway. As for the relationship between the confederation and the EC, the French denied that the former would serve as a ‘substitute’ or a ‘waiting room’ for the new democracies. Yet because of its ‘extremely strict’ rules and because it was undergoing a ‘profound overhaul’, the European Community could not ‘provide an immediate response’ to the needs of central and east European countries. By contrast, the confederation offered a ‘pragmatic pan-European response’ within a ‘flexible institutional framework’, a framework which would remain useful until their possible integration into the Community, which the EC had to prepare through ‘reinforced association’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Finally, it was argued, the confederation would be a rival to neither the Council of Europe nor the CSCE, as the latter's foremost mission was security, whereas the confederation would focus on project-based co-operation and ‘solidarity’.Footnote ⁴¹

By using these arguments the French were hoping to be able to assuage rising objections. By spring 1991 the project had indeed entered an operational phase. While preparing for the June Assises, French diplomacy was now keen to engage governments as such. This was the aim of the memorandum which Dumas, the foreign minister, sent to his European counterparts in April. This ten-page document, drafted by Musitelli and his aide Roland Galharague, was a summary of French thinking. The confederation, it was underlined, stemmed from a ‘historic necessity’: that of reuniting Europe thanks to ‘concrete projects’ which would make it possible to create ‘de facto solidarities’ (the expression was of course reminiscent of the Schuman declaration of 9 May 1950) and to ‘thwart centrifugal tendencies as well as the risk of inward-lookingness’. The confederation, the memorandum recognised, would need to ‘find its own role within the constellation of European organisations’. The European Community (which had to reinforce itself, and to which the confederation was not an ‘alternative’), the CSCE (whose role would ‘by no means become blurred’), the Council of Europe and the numerous entities such as Eureka or the EBRD, it was argued, had all to be seen as ‘natural partners of the future confederation’. With regard to its functioning, the memorandum stressed that it should combine ‘maximum efficiency’ with ‘minimal structures’. It might therefore operate on three levels, knowing that heads of state or government would be represented on each level through a ‘network’ of personal representatives, which would ensure the overall coherence of the whole enterprise: the level of ‘political consultation’ (heads of state or government would meet in alternation with CSCE summits, and foreign ministers would gather regularly in the meanwhile); the level of ‘operational decision’ (competent ministers of concerned countries would define concrete actions in accordance with political directives); and the level of ‘project management’ (which would be the task of existing bodies or entrusted to ad hoc ones). These specific projects would be promoted and monitored thanks to a ‘pragmatic method’, and they would mostly concern concrete domains such as energy, environment, transports, the circulation of people or culture. The memorandum ended on a note of optimism: ‘The spirit of the confederation exists even before being incarnated in political structures. It is only a matter of encouraging the movement.’Footnote ⁴² Things would soon prove much more difficult, however.

The difficult spring of the confederation

By the time the French had sent the memorandum, what had been issues of disagreement in central and eastern Europe were being transformed into growing reservations. The Czechoslovaks were now openly preoccupied; and the French embassy in Prague reported that Havel had become wary of rising objections to the project.Footnote ⁴³ Unease in Prague continued over the following weeks, with the Czechoslovaks insisting that politicians from the United States and Canada had to be invited to the Prague meeting – something the French were hardly keen to do – emphasising that it would be ‘difficult to accept that the USSR be part of the discussions while the United States would be excluded’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Havel brought up this question, in essence the membership issue, in a meeting at the Elysée with Mitterrand on March 23, 1991: ‘the Soviet presence [in the confederation project] bothers the Czechs’, Caroline de Margerie underlined before the meeting, and Havel was ‘very insistent’ on US participation in the Prague meeting.Footnote ⁴⁵ The conversation between the two presidents did reflect a less narrow understanding than had been the case six months earlier. While taking into account Havel's concerns, Mitterrand repeated his key argument in favour of the confederation: membership of the EC ‘will take time’, he stressed, so that there was need for an interim solution. Yet Havel did not conceal his reservations: the confederation must not give central and east European countries a ‘second rank’ status and it must not represent ‘a hindrance for existing institutions’, and he expressed his concerns regarding the future of the US presence in Europe. So Mitterrand made a gesture of goodwill, accepting US participation in the Prague meeting.Footnote ⁴⁶ Nevertheless, the Czechoslovak press noted after the meeting that Prague's attitude toward the confederation project was now ‘more guarded than a year ago’.Footnote ⁴⁷

The Czechoslovak attitude was in tune with the evolving perceptions in central and eastern Europe at large. By the time of the meeting between Havel and Mitterrand, Musitelli noted that ‘the picture of objections being raised and questions being asked’ was now quite clear. These objections and questions, he said, concerned the exclusion of the United States and the inclusion of the Soviet Union (which, paradoxically, was increasingly seen as a danger both as a result of its weight and of its possible collapse), the possibility that the confederation might be used as a brake on these countries’ membership of the EC and the risk of duplication with existing pan-European organisations.Footnote ⁴⁸ Speaking to French ambassadors in central and eastern Europe in March, Dumas recognised that reactions to the confederation project had moved from ‘probing questions’ to ‘suspicions’ and then to ‘apprehensions’ – hence the need for more explanations on the part of the French.Footnote ⁴⁹ The backdrop to this realisation, of course, was the recognition that French diplomacy had only limited influence on these countries in spite of the efforts made over three years to upgrade France's presence in central and eastern Europe.Footnote ⁵⁰ More fundamentally, it reflected the profound transformation at work in central and eastern Europe in politico-strategic as well as psychological terms more than a year after the revolutions of 1989. There was a paradox that Védrine highlighted. At a time when the Warsaw Pact was moribund (its military structure was dissolved in February and the Pact would be officially disbanded on 1 July 1991) and the USSR no longer appeared threatening, these countries nevertheless felt a ‘diffuse [sense of] insecurity’, which pushed some of them in the direction of Western institutions, first and foremost the Atlantic Alliance. And yet, he noted, ‘more than the need for protection against hypothetical threats’, this reflected above all ‘an impatient desire’ to be fully integrated in Europe and the West. This was quite clear for the Poles and the Czechoslovaks, who were now seeking a clearer relationship with NATO, whose headquarters Havel had visited in March; NATO, under US pressure, encouraged this, he said.Footnote ⁵¹ These tendencies, so well diagnosed by Védrine, did not contradict the confederation concept in French eyes, as the project was not in their view primarily about security in the politico-military sense. Yet Paris clearly underestimated the seriousness of this obstacle; indeed the growing demand on the part of countries of central and eastern Europe for access to western institutions against the backdrop of a perceived security vacuum could but make them more reticent towards schemes which might delay their return into the western fold. The confederation would clearly suffer from this rapid evolution of hearts and minds in central and eastern Europe.Footnote ⁵²

The lack of Franco-German co-operation was now proving to be another important weakness of the project. True, Kohl had endorsed the concept; the joint declaration adopted at the Franco-German Munich summit in September 1990 contained a statement of the willingness of Paris and Bonn to act in favour of the confederation. As French diplomats actually launched the project early 1991, Bonn again expressed its availability for co-operation on the subject; in spite of strong German insistence that the confederation should avoid ‘transatlantic exclusion’, Musitelli's presentation of the concept in Bonn on 5 March 1991 was received positively in the German foreign ministry, the Auswärtiges Amt, where the creation of a joint Franco-German working group was proposed.Footnote ⁵³

Yet this co-operation never took off, a fact which no doubt would contribute to the failure of the project some months later. The French indeed proved reluctant to associate the Germans narrowly with the launching of the confederation. Policymakers in Paris feared that the project, just like that of a ‘joint Ostpolitik’ some years before, which had never really taken off either, might be used as a French stamp on German ambitions in central and eastern Europe.Footnote ⁵⁴ As a result, the French noted in the following weeks that the Germans had become increasingly ‘tepid’ with regard to the confederation, expressing ‘probing questions’ and even ‘concerns’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The joint meeting of French and German ambassadors in central and eastern Europe, which took place in Weimar on 16–17 May, was a clear illustration. The Germans, their foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher first and foremost, did not conceal the country's lack of enthusiasm. The confederation, they felt, met with less and less satisfaction in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia (whose desire to become EC members as soon as possible was now openly supported by Bonn). In addition, the project increasingly displeased the United States, which of course unsettled Bonn. Last but not least, it rivalled the growing pan-European ambitions of Genscher's diplomacy, which clearly privileged the CSCE (whose ministers were to meet in Berlin only days after the Assises in Prague) and also the Atlantic Alliance, for Genscher and the US secretary of state, James Baker, had signed a joint declaration on 10 May emphasising an increased Alliance political role regarding central and eastern Europe.Footnote ⁵⁶ By the end of spring 1991, the French could but take note of a ‘serious divergence’ with the Germans on the confederation project, thus making a common approach difficult. In addition, the Elysée deplored German ‘demagoguery’ towards central and eastern European countries, which were encouraged by Bonn to believe in rapid EC membership while it gave the French a ‘malign role’ in that respect.Footnote ⁵⁷

Finally, the US factor now played a growing role in the difficulties met by the French. Because it was not included in the scheme, the United States inevitably saw the confederation as contrary to Washington's willingness to preserve its engagement in Europe after the cold war. Already, at the beginning of 1990, the French had expected a US campaign to dissuade the new eastern democracies from participating.Footnote ⁵⁸ This concern was largely confirmed a year later; admitting that the project ‘can but displease the United States’, the Quai d'Orsay noted that Washington ‘had expressed its displeasure by criticising the project in contacts with some central and eastern European countries’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Of course, the French objected that a European confederation with no US membership would not essentially call into question US participation in European security, since the proposed institution was not about security in the narrow sense. Yet this argument was not well received in Washington, where the project, in fact, was seen as aiming to exclude the United States from the old continent; the Americans underlined that the United States would not accept ‘being used by the Europeans for security and kept aloof in other domains’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Conversely, the French believed that the Americans were determined to oppose their concept of a ‘European’ Europe in the name of their own hegemonic vision; by spring 1991, against the backdrop of a growing debate on the future roles of NATO and the European Community in the security of the old continent, Washington's rejection of the confederation project was seen in Paris as part of an all-out offensive to reassert US leadership in Europe after the cold war. With Baker calling in Berlin on 18 June 1991 – only days after the Prague confederation meeting – for an ‘Atlantic community from Vancouver to Vladivostok’, the feeling in Paris was that Washington was pursuing ‘global Atlantic hegemony’ and showed itself ‘incapable of taking into account European facts’.Footnote ⁶¹ By the time of the launch of the confederation in Prague, only Moscow unequivocally supported a project which aimed, in particular, at preserving the USSR's anchoring in Europe at a time when Soviet leaders were desperately feeling the urgent need of external support for reforms.Footnote ⁶²

The Prague endgame

With the Prague meeting approaching, the French were more than ever conscious of these hurdles. Only days before the event, the Quai remarked, with typical understatement, that European reactions to the project were altogether ‘mixed’ and ‘in some cases marked by perplexity if not scepticism’; interest for the confederation project, it was noted, was higher at the ‘periphery’ (such as, for example, in the USSR or in the Balkans) than at the ‘centre’ (such as, for example, in Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia).Footnote ⁶³ With hardly any support in the west and rising doubts in the east, the project could even appear to be doomed in advance. Yet Mitterrand was more than ever convinced of its usefulness and was far from renouncing the idea, at least in the long term: ‘we must work fiercely’ to that effect, he told the Hungarian prime minister Joszef Antall in May, stressing the risks of disintegration and fragmentation as a result of the reawakening of nationalism in the east (the bloody events that had taken place in the Baltic states earlier in the year had been an illustration); ‘we live in an explosive Europe’, he added, thereby confirming the fundamental necessity of the confederation as a framework for pan-European peace and stability.Footnote ⁶⁴ Clearly, the Elysée continued to hope to see the project take off after the Prague meeting. To that effect, the presidential staff advanced suggestions of possible announcements which Mitterrand could possibly make in Prague, both towards European civil societies and towards governments. With regard to integrating civil society actors, Mitterrand thought that this might happen along the lines of the creation of a ‘pan-European movement’ (another reference to the 1948 European congress in The Hague), or the drafting of a ‘report on the state of Europe’. With regard to the government level Mitterrand envisaged inviting concerned ministers to discuss concrete projects or calling for a summit meeting in order to ‘trigger’ the process.Footnote ⁶⁵ As for the Quai d'Orsay, it had lower expectations about the results of the Prague meeting, but it did hope that the event would have ‘high political visibility’.Footnote ⁶⁶

Paradoxically it was Mitterrand himself who contributed most to the failure of the meeting. On the very day of its opening (12 June 1991), the French president gave a radio interview in which he made no effort to conceal what had been his deep thinking all along. While recognising that the new democracies of central and eastern Europe would in the long term become EC members, he emphasised that these countries were for the time being incapable of becoming EC members; he also emphasised the risks of an overly rapid enlargement of the European Community, which could lead to its transformation into a mere free-trade area. Hence Mitterrand saw the need for a European confederation in which they would be in a position ‘to discuss their interests with western countries’ – an ‘intermediary phase’ which, he candidly admitted, could last ‘tens and tens of years’. Mitterrand himself recognised later on that his statement at been ‘a bit blunt’, while insisting that its substance reflected the ‘realities’. It was, nevertheless, an awkward remark, and it did have a negative impact on the Prague meeting, as illustrated by Havel's speech on the same day.Footnote ⁶⁷ Although the Czechoslovak president described the confederation project as ‘reasonable, desirable and perhaps [sic!] probable’ and called for at least ‘embryonic’ institutions – a statement which the Quai d'Orsay optimistically described as ‘very close to our views’ – he essentially described the idea as ‘futuristic’ and stressed that it should by no means weaken transatlantic bonds or become a brake for central and eastern European countries’ EC membership. As for the debates which took place during the meeting, the Quai d'Orsay thought that their intensity reflected the interest of the participants in tackling problems on the pan-European level in the various domains (such as energy, communication, environment, migrations or culture), but also a lack of interest in an institutionalisation of the confederation project. The Germans and the Anglo-Saxons, the French observed, believed that existing institutions were sufficient, and the vast majority of participants were satisfied with the rather minimalist idea, advanced during the Prague meeting, that a light co-ordinating body might be set up as a follow-up to the Assises. For French diplomacy, the balance sheet of the meeting was therefore mixed; to be sure, there had been a ‘fruitful debate’ which had demonstrated the need for the European confederation, but there remained a lot to be done in order ‘to materialise the unanimous hope which had been expressed [in Prague] to integrate the continent in the long term, whatever the name given to this project’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Mitterrand's own conclusions, it turned out, were similar. In a rather mild concluding speech in Prague the French president gave a minimalist definition of the confederation project: ‘What I am interested in is the content [of the project] and I am open to the possibility that this content remains without a name’, he declared; and he went on to acknowledge that ‘if, after some time, the shortest possible, all democratic countries in Europe were able to join the EC, and if the members of the EC were able to accept this, then the problem would be solved’.Footnote ⁶⁹ This, clearly, amounted to an admission that the realisation of Mitterrand's grand design was, if not cancelled altogether, then at least postponed.

True, the failure of the confederation project was not immediately apparent to all. French diplomacy was eager, at first, to emphasise the positive results of the Prague meeting in spite of scepticism in the press: ‘We need to build on the momentum’, Musitelli asserted.Footnote ⁷⁰ But Mitterrand had no illusions: if the meeting had confirmed the functional need for a European confederation, the organisational difficulties had also been made clear. ‘A lot was achieved’ in Prague on matters of concrete co-operation, he told the Irish prime minister a few days later, but ‘when institutions are discussed, law professors take the floor . . . and then!’ He deplored this, recognising implicitly that the chances of the confederation emerging as an organisation, even a light and flexible one, were quite small. Early in July Musitelli recognised that while the Prague meeting had made it possible to ‘measure the impact of our ideas’, it had most of all thrown light on the obstacles, namely ‘the weakness of support’ for the confederation (which, he underlined, was mentioned only by the Soviet, Czechoslovak and Polish representatives during the Berlin CSCE meeting a few days after Prague), the ‘indifference’ if not the ‘hostility’ which lay behind the ‘muted reaction’ of most governments (only fifteen capitals, he reckoned, had responded to the French memorandum sent in April) and, most of all, the ‘mobilisation of opponents’ to the project. Not only did the United States call for a ‘Euro-Atlantic community’, he stressed, but Washington had put pressure on central and east European countries to ‘mute’ their support of the confederation and, in Berlin, most participants had supported strengthening the CSCE's second basket, which was ‘the best way to empty the confederation of its substance’. Musitelli concluded that there was a need for a quick follow-up if France wanted to ‘capitalise’ on the results of Prague, as no ‘framework’ or ‘work plan’ had been adopted. He proposed to launch quickly some ‘practical actions’ in order both to reach out to civil society and to encourage the emergence of concrete projects on the level of intergovernmental work, while ‘circumventing political obstacles’. But this, he stressed, meant refraining from giving the confederation an ‘institutional visibility’ which would ‘immediately trigger unsolvable diplomatic problems’; at most, he thought, one could set up a ‘co-ordination’, for example by organising a ‘caucus of delegates’ which could meet in Paris in the autumn in order to review the ‘follow-up’ to Prague, which would make it possible to ‘occupy the ground’ until the end of the year.Footnote ⁷¹ This was, also, an admission that the project had in effect all but failed.

Even this modest proposal led to minimal results, if any. Emphasising concrete aspects in order to give ‘visibility’ to the project while ‘leaving aside matters of principle’, as Musitelli advocated, soon proved a dead end, for ‘many projects answering to the logic of the confederation’ were already under way, and it was difficult to put a confederation ‘label’ on them retrospectively.Footnote ⁷² More seriously, prospects for an institutionalisation of the confederation, even in an embryonic form, were indeed quite dim, as illustrated by the Czechoslovak attitude. While the Czechoslovaks had declared in favour of setting up a light structure in Prague (a ‘centre’ or a ‘small’ secretariat) tasked with monitoring the follow-up to the June meeting – this was in effect proposed by Havel in a 30 June letter to Mitterrand – they soon back-pedalled. Although they justified this in terms of financial constraints, they were now clearly willing to take a back seat: as the French ambassador in Prague noted, the Czechoslovaks were more than ever hesitant to engage in a project which the Americans disliked and which split the Europeans.Footnote ⁷³ ‘The Americans lead a campaign against the Confederation’, a fatalistic Mitterrand told the Romanian prime minister Petre Roman in July, ‘and the Czechs cannot oppose this.’Footnote ⁷⁴ The French president responded to Havel's letter on 19 August, emphasising his wish to not leave the ideas and propositions which had been debated in Prague a ‘dead letter’ and offering to gather informally the ‘delegates’ to the confederation which governments would have appointed – but he was under no illusions. The attempted putsch in Moscow on the same day dealt a final blow to the project. As Musitelli later recalled, the atmosphere changed suddenly and ‘everything came to a stop. Absolute priority was then given to Maastricht, and the confederation was lost in the sand.’Footnote ⁷⁵ The French, as a result, were beginning to acknowledge the need to ‘recognise that each country of central and eastern Europe had the right to adhere to the EC when time comes’. This was, at least implicitly, a recognition that the very concept of the confederation was obsolete – or, at least, that it now boiled down to the management of the transition of the new democracies towards EC membership, a membership that it was initially about postponing for as long a period as possible.Footnote ⁷⁶

By autumn 1991 it had become apparent that the confederation was stillborn. In many ways, this diplomatic failure was to be expected. The initiators of the project had been aware of its intrinsic difficulties early on. Although French diplomats had, at the expense of the project's original ambition, proved skilful in taking these difficulties into account, they continued to loom throughout the preparation for the Prague meeting. Rather than the result of ‘errors’ (Mitterrand's interview on 12 June 1990 was certainly one of them), the failure of the project was the result of the non-realisation of the very assumptions that had initially lain behind it. First, with regard to the evolution of European security: far from the quiet transition towards democracy and prosperity in the east which could be hoped for in the immediate aftermath of the ‘velvet’ revolutions of autumn 1989, the context by mid-1991 was marked by the rise of instability and the risks of Balkanisation which the confederation was supposed to prevent, as illustrated most dramatically by the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia in summer that year. In other words, the Europe of ‘Sarajevo’, which Mitterrand had feared might succeed that of ‘Yalta’, had, indeed, literally – and sadly – become a reality. In that context, the confederation appeared as a frail project, one that could hardly meet the challenges of a definitely unstable post-cold war Europe – the confederation, in a way, came either too late or too early. Second, with regard to the role of the superpowers in Europe: instead of a US withdrawal, a powerful re-engagement was under way, with the United States essentially determined to remain a ‘European’ power and the ultimate guarantor of the Old Continent's stability beyond the cold war; and instead of the Soviet Union's stabilisation and its durable anchoring to Europe thanks in particular to the confederation, the USSR increasingly appeared as a potential nuisance in the aftermath of the August 1991 attempted coup and against the backdrop of the accelerating process of disintegration which led to its break-up in December. Finally, the changing preferences of the countries of central and eastern Europe also played a negative role: far from the search for a ‘third way’ in ideological, economic or geopolitical terms after the revolutions of 1989, they were irresistibly attracted by Western institutions – the EC and the Atlantic Alliance first and foremost. And, encouraged, somewhat demagogically by some Western countries, they manifested their desire for a quick integration into the EC, rather than for an indefinite waiting status in a fragile and ill-defined European confederation. This evolution, typically incarnated by Havel's trajectory in a few months from pan-Europeanism to pro-Western policies, was fundamentally detrimental to Mitterrand's project. By the end of 1991, these realities had become inescapable, thereby dooming the confederation. True, its contents (augmenting concrete east–west co-operation in order to overcome Europe's divide and structure the continent after the cold war) were hardly controversial. But the institutional form, a new pan-European institution, no longer seemed necessary by then, or it was rejected outright. In that sense, the failure of the confederation project reflected the at least partial, and temporary, failure of the vision of European architecture which Mitterrand, after de Gaulle, had tried to promote.