ABSTRACT
In 1981, France and the outside world wished to know how the newly elected president would handle relations with the Soviet Union. Charles de Gaulle had defined French foreign policy in the 1960s. His security policies had come to be generally accepted. When Francois Mitterrand took office in 1981 his views on foreign policy and those of his party had undergone a number of changes from their pacifist and antinuclear positions of a decade earlier. Throughout his political career, Francois Mitterrand's most persistent and consistent belief was that France had to pursue its engagement in a larger European unity. Inability to achieve a common position with West Germany on the Strategic Defensive Initiative was frustrating to Paris because French policy increasingly saw French-German cooperation as a bulwark against what it perceived as US encroachments on sovereignty. In June 1989 the Chinese government had ended a crisis with reform-bent students encamped in Tiananmen Square by opening fire on them.
