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Mobilizing Forces

Lastly, by renewing France's ties with the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and loosening
its ties with the United States, Paris feels that it
can mobilize the forces of detente in Europe
east and west. Furthermore, De Gaulle is a
"political dramatist" who feels that the
example of a dynamic, self-confident, independent
France will galvanize national forces in
Eastern Europe and elsewhere sufficient to
emasculate the ideological imperialism of the
two superpowers. Romanian nationalism, however
fragile, and Czechoslovak national self-assertion,
if temporarily aborted, are seen as
reenactments of the French example and
symbols of the future.

Germany - politically divided, militarily
exposed, and morally suspect - could not help
but define its policy differently than that of
France. The immediate goals of Germany, as
Chancellor Adenauer saw them in 1949, were
to reestablish the international sovereignty of
an economically-recovered Germany and to
secure German security. Political integration in
a Western European grouping seemed to offer
the best instrument for political-economic recovery.
To organically tie Bonn to a European
Union at the same time that Germany recovered
its internal independence would lessen the
suspicions and fears of its neighbors and give
Germany - cut off from the east - a European
vocation. The basis for such a union had of
necessity to be Franco-German amity.