ABSTRACT
France has been, and remains, one of the motors behind the post-war political and economic integration of western Europe. It was a French Government that proposed the Coal and Steel Community and the aborted European Defence Community in the late forties and early fifties. Interestingly the latter initiative failed to get off the ground because of a negative vote in the French National Assembly. France was also a key player in the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Rome establishing the Common Market and more recently a leading influence in shaping the Single European Act and the Treaty on European Union. Moreover, successive French governments have not only been key proponents and advocates of an ever closer union but they have also played at times a dominant role in shaping the particular style of decisionmaking in Europe's evolving institutional framework. For example, the so-called Luxembourg Compromise of 1966 more or less imposed the French preference for inter-governmental decision-making in the Community. The Council of Ministers and the European Council remain, in line with French preferences, the key decisional sites in the European Union. France more than any other member of the Union has been able to combine, some would say mask, the almost single-minded defence and furtherance of national interests with Jean Monnet's vision of the inevitable logic of ever closer union.
