France, Germany, and the Western Alliance
Philip H. GordonThe thirtieth anniversary of the 1963 Elysée Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between France and Germany gave leaders in the two countries the opportunity to celebrate the most successful example of bilateral reconciliation the world has ever known. “Hereditary enemies” that had fought three catastrophic wars between 1870 and 1945, France and Germany began in the early 1950s to accept one another as partners, codified that partnership under Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer in the 1963 treaty, and for the next thirty years went on to build a relationship so intimate that it became customary to refer to it in marital—rather than martial—terms. The triumph of the reconciliation was that France and Germany not only overcame their hostile past and agreed on a “peaceful coexistence” but that the two countries actually formed a strategic partnership seen, correctly, as no less than an “alliance within the alliance.”