53 Moravcsik Charles de Gaulle and Europe Charles de Gaulle and Europe The New Revisionism ✣ Andrew Moravcsik Most scholars of President Charles de Gaulle’s policy toward European integration now agree that it was motivated primarily by political- economic interests, not by de Gaulle’s geopolitical “grand vision” or by other political-military concerns. This “revisionist” view emphasizes the role of ma- jor producer groups, notably farmers, in demanding European trade policies and subsidies that would enhance their well-being. Existing documentary and contextual evidence overwhelmingly backs the revisionist interpretation. On this basic point, those who study major French decisions regarding the Euro- pean Economic Community (EEC)—to remain in the organization in 1958, to demand the establishment of a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), to press for the Fouchet Plan, to veto British membership in 1963 and 1967, and to provoke and then settle the “empty chair” crisis—have reached a re- markable level of consensus. Yet most scholars engaged in the study of de Gaulle’s foreign policy have not gotten the message. These “traditionalists” continue to interpret his EEC policy as motivated by the same mix of geopolitical and ideological factors that may well have inºuenced French military, nuclear, and alliance policies. This geopolitical orthodoxy, despite being superªcially attractive because of its parsimony, is sustainable only through dubious historiographical means: selective reading of primary sources, use of indirect rather than direct evi- dence, and citation of secondary works dealing primarily with French politi- cal-military policies. Younger revisionists have created further confusion in the ªeld by framing new economic interpretations primarily as criticisms of earlier, nearly identical, economic accounts. Such internecine divisions within the revisionist camp seem to rest on interdisciplinary misunderstandings that are more rhetorical than real. The editors of Globalizing de Gaulle deserve credit for producing a vol- Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 14, No. 1, Winter 2012, pp. 53–77 © 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology