anticipating another anodyne meeting like all the previous ones

The European Economic Community (EEC), as the European Union was then known, comprised Germany, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium and Italy, the original six founding members and signatories of the Treaty of Rome, signed on 25 March 1957.

Adenauer and de Gaulle put their signature on the Elysée Treaty; a treaty that was presented to the world as the cornerstone of French-German rapprochement

Erhard had overseen Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle that had transformed Germany from 1949 to that day

[...] Eventually de Gaulle softened his opposition to the European Union, after repeated American pledges in the 1950s that France would remain Europe’s administrative center. But he would only embrace it so long as, in his own words to a visiting journalist, the European Union resembled 'a horse and carriage: Germany [being] the horse and France . . . the coachman.'

Alas, by 1963 it was clear that the horse was developing a mind of its own and the coachman was losing his grip. France’s accelerating trade deficit with Germany meant that Paris would be forced into a perpetual Sophie’s choice. Regularly go cap in hand to the IMF for permission to devalue the franc, admitting to permanent national weakness, or rely forever on the Bundesbank to print Deutsche Marks with which to buy francs, admitting to an unending dependency upon the old enemy. Either way, France’s aspirations for political and diplomatic domination of the European Union were unravelling.

De Gaulle never forgave the Americans for having denied France a place at the victors' table in the closing stages of the Second World War, especially at the Yalta meetings between Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin.

his Speech of Hope--a significant restatement of America's policy on Germany. Until then the Allies had been united in their commitment to convert 'Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character'.

France's government army was entering the French capital to commence a pitiless battle against the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune

It was not for humanitarian motives that Washington decided to spare Germany a return to a bucolic past.

The Bretton Woods system, already set out in 1944, posited the dollar as the sole linchpin holding together the edifice of global trade and finance.

In a global system of fixed exchange rates, shock absorbers take the form of strong regional currencies, issued by potent central banks, to act as secondary pillars in support of the system's main currency. There was need for at least one such currency in Europe and another in Asia. Of course strong regional currencies cannot be created; heavy industry powerhouses must underpin them. But here is the tricky part: industrial powerhouses produce more manufacturing goods than their domestic economies can absorb--think China today. To keep going, powerhouse economies need markets--surrounding states in permanent deficit with them so that they can remain in surplus.

So the first question was: which would the powerhouse economies in Europe and Asia be? In Europe the United Kingdom was an early candidate. Only, like most early front-runners, Britain went by the wayside. Its elites were determined to retain their grip on an empire that, in Washington's eyes, was both repugnant and unsustainable. Its returning soldiers, having shed their blood for king and country, were determined not to return to their prewar pitiful wages and abject living conditions. This was why Winston Churchill, the nation's wartime tower of strength, was swept away in a 1945 electoral landslide that ushered in a radical-sounding (especially to American ears) Labour government. A year later a fiscal crisis ended sterling's convertibility and further tarnished Britain's candidacy as the European pillar of America's global plan. [...]

[...]

Why not France? For three excellent reasons. First, Germany industry was far more advanced than France's. In 1945, despite the hammering it had received from the Allies in the final stages of the war, German factories produced more than twice as much as France's. Secondly, the defeated Germans, fearing a pastoral future, would breathe a sigh of relief if the United States were to patronize their economy, invest in it and generally take it under their wing. In contrast, General de Gaulle and the vast majority of the French would be incensed by any hint of similar intervention, let alone a takeover. Thirdly, just as in the case of Japan America had written the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany and even created the Bundesbank from scratch. The fact that American forces controlled West Germany's land, sea and airspace did not harm the notion either.

The second question now remained: who would provide the deficit hinterland for Germany's and Japan's powerhouse economies?

Greece's sordid 1946-9 civil war, which left every Greek family I know indelibly marked

The Truman Doctrine, announced by President Truman on 12 March 1947, focused on winning Greece for the West but, more importantly, constituted the president's unofficial declaration of the cold war.

a conference convened by Americans to reach the so-called London Debt Agreement [...] Nations and private creditors owed money by the German state and by German corporations were persuaded to write off more than 70per cent of the money they were due.

In 1950 the European Union was officially born in the form of a German-dominated coal and steel cartel, run of course by a cross-border French dominated administration located in Brussels. Its name? The European Coal and Steel Community.

French farmers [...] did not like the idea of untrammelled competition from imported milk, cheese, and wine

to co-opt French farmers, the so-called Common Agricultural Policy was established. Its purpose? To secure the farmers' consent to a European free trade zone by handing over to them a chunk of the cartel's monopoly profits.

No one can deny that, when it comes to semiology, the French are unbeatable.

de Gaulle was stuck in a morass of uncontrolled inflation and rising discontent

after France and a reunited Germany agreed by the Maastrict Treaty to create the euro. The French conservative daily Le Figaro had this to say on its front page: 'In the 1920s it was said that Germany would pay reparations. Now Germany is paying. The Maastrict Treat is a Versailles Treaty without war!'

[...] Germany's export-led economy could never afford its own genuinely free-floating currency. The reason is simple: if the Deutsche Mark's international value were to be determined freely by the money markets, Germany's surpluses would create demand for its money, which would push up its value until German goods became so expensive abroad that German surpluses would disappear. The ambition to remain a surplus nation could not be served by a free-floating Deutsche Mark.

While the mark was embedded in America's global plan, its value fixed within the Bretton Woods international monetary system, German leaders and officials could behave like the managers of Europe's gleaming factory. They could concentrate solely on making sturdy cars and impressive gadgets, letting America mind global capitalism--exactly as the United States had planned things in the late 1940s. Alas, once the United States jettisoned Bretton Woods, and Europe along with it, German leaders could no longer treat the global environment as they treated the weather--as a natural system impervious to their actions and beliefs. They had to concede that the international economic environment was no longer divinely ordered and independent of what they decided. They had, in other words, to do something to shape that international environment in ways consistent with Germany's continued economic success.