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a common market on economic grounds. He preferred a free trade area in which German industry would flourish. It was Konrad Adenauer who persuaded Erhard to acquiesce in the arrangements for a common market. Adenauer’s main aim was to achieve a reconciliation between West Germany and its west European neighbours; France was crucial to this. Adenauer, just as with the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Defence Community, was determined to continue his west-oriented policy of embedding the Federal Republic in Western Europe. Very similar reasoning
, lest it be able to carry out its ‘“Trojan Horse” mission of transforming the Common Market into an “Atlantic Community”’ (Gladwyn, 1969, pp. 32 and 63). 15 German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was firmly Western-oriented, keen on German membership of the Council of Europe, NATO, the European Coal and Steel Community and the EEC. See e.g. Ash (1993, Ch. 1). 16 Even the name the ‘Federal Republic of Germany’ indicated this, just as the name the ‘German Democratic Republic’ showed an admittance by that country that it was only German, not Germany. 17 The High Authority, a
House in March 1964 as leader of the Labour opposition, Wilson saw Johnson at six more bilateral summits in Washington: in December 1964, April 1965, December 1965, July 1966, June 1967 and February 1968, as well as (briefly) at the funeral of Konrad Adenauer in Bonn in January 1967 and at the memorial service for Harold Holt in Melbourne in December 1967. The Washington meetings would usually include an hour or two during which the
British troop commitment. In late April, Wilson and Johnson met briefly in Bonn at the funeral of the former West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, where the President allegedly told Wilson that if only he would ‘put troops into Vietnam’ then his ‘worries over sterling would be over’. Wilson responded that if he did so he would be ‘finished’. 87 Johnson also asked Wilson if he was ‘going crazy’ by planning to pull troops out
by de Gaulle and the German Chancellor at the time, Konrad Adenauer. The insistence reflected the unwillingness of the French establishment to recognise not only that France could no longer claim to lead Germany, and hence Europe, via the European Union, but that now Germany was assuming the role of primus inter pares (first among equals). Paris could do little about Germany’s gradually assuming the leading role in the European Union and working in favour of a federal EU structure in which Germany’s larger population would give it a correspondingly strong role