Imagining European Identity: French Elites and the American Challenge in the Pompidou-Nixon Era

Abstract

Charles de Gaulle has cast a long shadow over French political history and history writing. In exploring the French response to the United States' 1973 'Year of Europe' initiative, this article challenges the dominant scholarly paradigm, which emphasises continuity between the 19605 and the 1970s. Drawing on a wide range of French and US archives, it demonstrates that renewed concerns about US power spurred the French elites both to reappraise the value of collective European action in foreign policy and to foster a pioneering concept: a politically anchored as opposed to a geographically circumscribed 'European identity'.