What role did German-French cooperation play in the European integration process?

THE ROLE THE GERMAN-FRENCH COOPERATION PLAYED IN THE EUROPEAN INTEGRATION PROCESS
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The Role the German-French cooperation played in the European integration process
Introduction
German’s strong commitment to Europe is strongly evident in the country’s foreign policy foundation. It is this dedication and the close ties with France that generally led to European Unifications. German and France contributed greatly to this process because their convincing reconciliation formed the basis of a future European community and this acted as motivating factors for other European member states to think of a European amalgamation.
Even though these two powerful states in Europe sacrificed a lot to make sure that this brain child of a European integration worked, this bilateral cooperation within the European community was looked at with criticism. Most believed that this cooperation was geared towards practicing hegemony on other small member states or rather geared towards their national interests. Henceforth, this essay is going to look at the role the German-French "engine" played in European integration and analyze their interest for this sacrifice and finally offer a verdict on whether this was a hegemonic strategy or not.
The Treaty of Maastricht and the start of European Integration
The Month of December 1991 might be considered an important moment for the history of the European Union for it saw the coming together of strong European heads of states who gave their approval to the Treaty of the European Union. This meeting was regarded a monumental direction in a unified Economic and political Europe. However, this meeting seemed to only have the agenda of achieving full monetary union and nothing more (Baun, 1996).
Also, at the beginning of the Maastricht treaty, many European countries objected to it as they perceived it to pose threats to their interested and survival within the International system for it perceived as a hegemonic strategy of stronger states to control the affairs of the smaller states within Europe. Nevertheless, despites such opposition and the economic stagnation that threatened to thwart this potential initiative, the treaty was enacted on 1st November 1993 and from then, it became known as the European Union (Baun, 1996). Though most scholars perceive the Maastricht Treaty as a strategy of German to mend itself after Cold War to unify, the treaty had an influence to the economic and institutional development of Europe.
The importance of the German-French cooperation became an outstanding feature in the first attempt to establish a monetary union, when German Chancellor at that time, Helmut Schmidt, and French President V. Giscard d’Estaing, presented a joint proposal on monetary cooperation to the European community summit in April 1978, thereby formalizing the establishment of the European Monetary System ( EMS) (Mutimer1989).
The resultant effect of the EMS was that it contributed to the positive political significances by promoting ventures of cooperation in both monetary and economic affairs amongst European Nation states.
Despite such historical move that determined to strengthen European Integration, there was accusation of Germany trying to dominate over other nation states through the EMS. This is specifically adduced to the declining growth of the economy in Europe during the 1980s and this was seen as the asymmetrical bias of the system. The EMS was dominated by the conservative monetary priorities of the German government together with its independent Central Bank. The rules of the EMS gave Germany power because it had the strongest economy in Europe and its currency was stable, therefore, she had the mandate of determining the monetary policies without consulting other European member states, and this went to the extent of not even considering the economic and political needs of the member countries (Mutimer,1989).
This bias in the EMS affected many small states and thus sacrifices had to be made to put Germany under pressure. This is where we see France political play to make sure that Germany could not continue to dominate. Of course, the French government had to seek this discourse because it experienced the wrath of this dominance. This was in 1983, where under German restriction, the Socialist government of Francois Mitterand was forced to shut down its economic expansion program to maintain membership to EMS. This means that for France to survive within this continental cooperation, it had to seek ways of taming Germany.
The first strong move towards this strategy was in January 1988 when the France government presented a proposal for the creation of a European central bank. This proposal met strong opposition from the Central bank of Germany seeing this move as undermining its sovereignty and monetary policy, however, for political survival, Germany, even though wary, agreed to allow a deep discussion of this with the European community (Mutimer,1989).
The progress of this came at the June 1988 European community summit in Hannover where National leaders decided to establish a commission under chairmanship of the commission president Jacques Delors to study the possibilities for monetary union and one year later in April 1989, the commission made public what is known as Delor Plan which led to a three stage process leading that advanced a full monetary and currency union. The first stage involved closer coordination of national monetary policies and control on trans-border capital movements that would be terminated. The second, the margin for fluctuation of the national currencies would be tightened and a European system of control banks would be established and finally, a single currency would be created and managed by European Central Bank (Hendriks et al, 2001).
The Delor Plan was endorsed by National leaders at the June 1989 Madrid Summit thereby setting the date for stage one of the plan on July 1990. However, by mid-1989, this plan met many concerns, particularly with the German threat. During the cold war era that was just ending, German was divided and was easy to contain but with unification many European nation states feared German would rise, become increasingly independent and nationalistic and thus turn away from the agenda of peaceful integration. This threat made many European leaders to believe that by strengthening and deepening of European community institutions, Germany would be permanently bonded to the integration thus eradicating any future ambition to a national discourse and independency from the integration. Whereas the general perc...