Ukraine and The EU's Quest for a Common Foreign Policy: A Historical Overview
By Robert Cadenasso
14/03/2025
As the US support for Ukraine wanes, the EU is compelled to raise the level of harmonization on foreign policy and defense issues. Although significant effort has been invested in harmonizing internal policies and establishing a single market, achieving a common foreign policy has proven to be a persistent challenge. While technically an intergovernmental, not supranational, responsibility, today's Europe is more than ever required to stand united against Russian aggression. In its pursuit of further integration, Europe has experimented with a variety of approaches to coordinating foreign policy over the years. This article casts a retrospective eye on three of the largest efforts at consolidating European foreign policy: the Pleven Plan, the Fouchet Plan, and the Davignon Plan. All of these proposals sought to enhance political cooperation in Europe but all were faced with challenges that mirrored the diversity of interests among the European states. While debates are ongoing in contemporary times regarding a common European armed forces, there is a need to critically re-examine previous efforts to integrate foreign policy into the EU.
The Pleven Plan, proposed by French Prime Minister René Pleven in 1950, was one of the earliest efforts to harmonize foreign and defense policy in Europe following the atrocities of World War II. Against the background of the Cold War, Pleven's initiative was to create a European Defense Community, unifying the West German, French, Italian, and Benelux armed forces under a single, unified European command structure. The EDC was meant to form a defense union that could provide a united front against the Soviet Union, decreasing Europe’s reliance on NATO.
The Pleven Plan’s proposal of the pooling of military resources was radical for its time, especially when the memories of World War II were still fresh. The plan met a lot of resistance, particularly from France, where there was fierce opposition to bringing Germany's military forces into a European framework, especially without the British also joining. Ultimately, the EDC failed because France refused to ratify it, though all other countries did so and France had previously signed it. While unsuccessful, the Pleven Plan established the precedent for future European defense cooperation, anticipating initiatives like the European Security and Defense Policy and the development of the European External Action Service.
The Fouchet Plan, suggested by French diplomat Christian Fouchet, was a proposal in the early 1960s to establish a "Confederation of European States." It was to be a more integrated Europe at the political level with the goal of making European countries stronger on the international stage but still maintaining national sovereignty. The core goal was to consolidate the member states' foreign policies into a single, cohesive entity.
The Fouchet Plan predicted a "Europe of Nations" where foreign policy decisions would be made by a confederate framework of intergovernmental coordination. This was intended to prevent the alleged domination by such supranational bodies as the European Commission and the European Parliament that were accused of taking away national sovereignty. The proposal, however, proved controversial, particularly with smaller countries in Europe, who were worried about the potential domination by more dominant states like France and Germany. The Fouchet Plan was eventually abandoned by 1963, showing the tension between the requirement of tighter political integration and national sovereignty. This is a tension that still exists today.
Although the Fouchet Plan failed, it was significant in European foreign policy history. It was an effort to balance the federalizing tendencies of the EU with maintaining distinct national identities, a tension that continues to influence EU foreign policy discussions to this day.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Europe sought increased foreign policy coordination, it was the European Economic Community that stepped up with a more relaxed and pragmatic proposal: the Davignon Plan. The Davignon Plan, so named after Étienne Davignon, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market and Industrial Affairs, was not an official proposal for a common foreign policy, but rather an informal blueprint to increase cooperation and consultation between the foreign ministers of the EEC member states. The plan aimed to enhance European political cooperation without binding institutional provisions.
The Davignon Plan allowed member states to engage in regular consultations on foreign policy issues with a focus on coordination and information exchange rather than decision-making. The informal cooperation helped harmonize the European stance on principal issues of world importance, such as Soviet affairs, the Middle East, and the United States. It provided a model for European state cooperation without collapsing national sovereignty, and it helped to create a sense of European solidarity within the international community.
Although the Davignon Plan did not lead to the creation of a specific European foreign policy, it laid the ground for the eventual creation of the European Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The plan demonstrated that although European countries were not yet ready for a completely integrated foreign policy, they could achieve collective decision-making and coordinated action on certain issues of global concern. The success of the Davignon Plan proved that informal cooperation could be a viable way to promote European unity in foreign policy.
With more integration of the European Union in the works, a review of early efforts to harmonize foreign policy reveals a lot about how challenging that objective has been—and continues to be—for the EU. The Pleven Plan, Fouchet Plan, and Davignon Plan are early, ambitious efforts at creating a single European voice on the international stage. While the Davignon Plan was the only successful one out of the three, they all made major contributions to EU foreign policy development. The Pleven Plan forecast the difficulty of unifying defense forces under one European banner, the Fouchet Plan revealed the conflict between supranational hopes and national sovereignty, and the Davignon Plan demonstrated that informal coordination could still achieve much coordination.
Nowadays, most of these issues continue to exist, but there have also been countervailing trends. First, European militaries have worked towards harmonization over the last decades, and the issues of the Pleven Plan are therefore lessened. Second, the EU has still exercised supranational authority, so while there remains concern regarding national sovereignty, modern-day Russian aggression clearly outweighs those concerns. These plans act as blueprints for potential bottleneck areas in increased EU defense or foreign policy coordination. But these plans were originally proposed when transatlantic relations were relatively serene and certainly far less anarchic than they are today. The EU should no longer be reliant on US military support and that is a much stronger integration incentive than there was when these plans were first proposed.
Sources:
A European army: The pleven plan and its implications
The Fouchet Plan: De Gaulle’s Intergovernmental Design for Europe
The Fouchet Plans - Historical events in the European integration process (1945–2009)
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